#m

This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence. ↗

— Muriel Barbery

#life

One as deformed and horrible as myself, could not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects... with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being... ↗

— Mary Shelley

#life #loneliness #love #relationships #romance

«I realize there are a lot of things I haven't shared with you.» «That's because you don't trust me, father.» «I didn't trust you, Damian, do you really think you'd be standing here--my life's most safeguarded secrets accessible?» «Sometimes I think your secrets have secrets» ↗

— Peter J. Tomasi

#bruce-wayne #damian-wayne #robin #life

But I knew the way the people in the town thought about things. They always had some time left over from their life to bother about other people and what they did. They thought they had to get together to help other people out, like the time they got together about the woman who let a colored man borrow her car and told her the best place for her was up north with all the other nigger lovers, and the time they got the veterans with overseas wives out. If you were different from anybody in town, you had to get out. That's why everybody was so much alike. The way they talked, what they did, what they liked, what they hated. If somebody got to hate something and he was the right person, everybody had to hate it too, or people began to hate the ones who didn't hate it. They used to tell us in school to think for yourself, but you couldn't do that in the town. You had to think what your father thought all his life, and that was what everybody thought. ↗

— John Kennedy Toole

#hypocrisy #small-town-life #life

The author's projected intellectual climate nearly 500 years in the future proclaims itself too pragmatic to consider living well as important as material satisfaction. This reminds us, ironically, that choosing NOT to consider life's deeper questions is in itself a choice with profound and lasting consequences. ↗

— Bryan M. Litfin

#philosophy #pragmatism #life

A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief. ↗

— Upton Sinclair

#nature

And fragile is thy tenure of this world Still haunted by the monstrous ghost of God. ("To Science") ↗

— George Sterling

#god #religion #science #religion

All objects in the universe are unique. No two things that happen by chance ever happen in exactly the same way. No two things are ever constructed or manufactured in exactly the same way. No two things wear in exactly the same way. No two things ever break in exactly the same way. ↗

— Joe Nickell

#forensics #science #science

In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics. ↗

— Immanuel Kant

#science #science

After all, what else is scientific enquiry of any sort other than a controlled version of banging one's head against the universe until something gives? ↗

— Tom Holt

#science #science