#is

Sometimes when you get older—and I'm not talking about you, I'm talking generally, because everyone ages differently—things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they're a part of your history, and if someone challenges you on them and says they're not true—why, then you get offended. ↗

— Sara Gruen

#belief #challenge #history #life #offended

When I was your age I knew how to listen to television and learn a few things. ↗

— Lewis Nordan

#television #age

We were fond together because of the sweep of open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace. ↗

— T.E. Lawrence

#age

I'm getting old, thought Eileen Calder. Old and worn out and cynical. And being cynical is a lot worse than being old or worn out. ↗

— Charles Sheffield

#burnout #cynicism #age

Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down. ↗

— John Kenneth Galbraith

#pessimism #age

It should surprise no one that modern soldiers return home just as conflicted and detached as previous generations. The difference is that in the age of vapid American decadence, their simpler fundamental values are largely irrelevant to we civilians. ↗

— Tiffany Madison

#combat #values-in-life #war #warriors #age

Dare we care at all about current fashions if that means reducing our ability to help hungry neighbors? How many more luxuries should we buy for ourselves and our children when others are dying for lack of bread? ↗

— Ron Sider

#christianity #compassion #fashion #hunger #luxury

For a brazen Libertine, an adulterer, a sodomite, an atheist, a fornicator, rakehell, heretic, godless playmaker and debaucher of innocents, you’re a sorry state of affairs. ↗

— Elizabeth Bear

#kit-marlowe #age

Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came toseemtrue. Thisexercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#insight #intelligence #philosophy #tolerance #wisdom

Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written. ↗

— Dan Simmons

#leadership #politics #zeitgeist #age