#los

Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#philosophy #materialism

I don’t like keeping her in the dark,” Jace said. “We’ll tell her in a week. What difference does a week make?” Jace gave him a look. “Two weeks ago you were dead.” “Well, I wasn’t suggesting two weeks,” said Sebastian. “That would be insane. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#jace-herondale #sebastian-morgenstern #insanity

And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprintit’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania ↗

— Philip Roth

#memory-loss #biography

In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be a possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it. ↗

— Chögyam Trungpa

#confusion #discovery #enlightenment #philosophy #self-discovery

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#christianity #culture #culture-critique #heroes #jesus-shock

In my heart's most secret place, I pity them as angels do. ↗

— Sara Teasdale

#philosophy #pessimism

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor. "Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee-- Respite--respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore! Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!" Quothe the Raven, "Nevermore. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#loss #heartache

It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#christianity #crazy #god #jesus-shock #philosophy

Most theists are deists most of the time, in practice if not in theory. They practice the absence of God instead of the presence of God. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#catholicism #christianity #deism #deist #god

Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#christianity #god #jesus-shock #ontological-oxymoron #ontology