#lis

9. The Moon Cannot Be Stolen Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of the mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing in it to steal. Ryokan returned and caught him. "You may have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler, "and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift." Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor fellow," he mused, "I wish I could give him this beautiful moon. ↗

— Nyogen Senzaki

#zen-flesh-zen-bones #beauty

If you are a beautiful lair, you are the most wanted person in the world. ↗

— Rajesh

#socialism #beauty

You're a beautiful boy, Clay, but that's about it. ↗

— Bret Easton Ellis

#bret-easton-ellis #life #transgressive #beauty

You look beautiful and tragic, just the way a heroine should on the eve of battle. Like Joan of Arc in her silver armor. ↗

— Melissa de la Cruz

#gates-of-paradise #melissa-de-la-cruz #oliver-hazard-perry #tragic #warrior

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them. ↗

— Barbara Kingsolver

#materialism #business

The rock and roll business is pretty absurd, but the world of serious music is much worse. ↗

— Frank Zappa

#capitalism #music #business

Poets have to be sensitive to their audience, but it does not mean that they censor themselves. I realise my audience is diverse. Some will read with empathy and curiosity while others will take offense. ↗

— John Barton

#censor #curiosity #diverse #does #empathy

He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anaresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work -- his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy -- and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#inequity #iniquity #initiative #profit #business

Somebody must trespass on the taboos of modern nationalism, in the interests of human reason. Business can't. Diplomacy won't. It has to be people like us. ↗

— Robert Byron

#nationalism #reason #taboos #business

A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise. But it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that a pickpocket is a champion of private property. The point about Capitalism and Commercialism, as conducted of late, is that they have really preached the extension of business rather than the preservation of belongings; and have at best tried to disguise the pickpocket with some of the virtues of the pirate. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#capitalism #commerce #goods #property #theft