#iv

Do you think we enjoy hearing about your brand-new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days. ↗

— Douglas Coupland

#generation-x #generational-divide #age

The fact is that in order to do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand shivering on the bank thinking of the cold and the danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can. ↗

— Sydney Smith

#courage #determination #initiative #age

Maybe belief is the biggest lie. In ages past, the earliest philosophers tried to explain the stars in the sky and the world around them. One of them conceived of the notion that the universe was mounted on giant crystal spheres controlled by a giant machine, which explained the movements of the heavens. He was laughed at and told that such a machine would be so huge and noisy that everyone would hear it. He simply replied that we are born with that noise all around us, and that we are so used to hearing it that we cannot hear it at all. ↗

— Dan Abnett

#age

In the age of technology there is constant access to vast amounts of information. The basket overflows; people get overwhelmed; the eye of the storm is not so much what goes on in the world, it is the confusion of how to think, feel, digest, and react to what goes on. ↗

— Criss Jami

#confusion #disorientation #excess #excessive #eye

The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it. ↗

— Paul Graham

#creativity #taste #work #age

Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face - the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man - all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us - we have died - what is there to be afraid of? It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed. ↗

— Christopher Isherwood

#dying #face #living #mirror #age

Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter? ↗

— Julian Barnes

#ageing #colour #excitement #perspective #youth

Even in the darkest clouds There are specks of joy Out of the darkness Comes light Just as day Always follows night ↗

— Karen Hackel

#living #new-age #suffering #age

At every level in our inventory, nothing seems special about our Earth, our Sun, our Galaxy, our Local Group. Evidently, mediocrity reigns throughout. Such is our niche in the Universe. ↗

— Eric Chaisson

#earth #galaxy #sun #universe #age

In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there. ↗

— Gary Snyder

#history #human #primitive #stone-age #age