#magi

Now was the time to get everything back on track, to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life before I got all distracted by a soul mate with a bod for sin. ↗

— Madelyn Alt

#life

When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong. This is not to say the world is perfect. Nor that all progress is always good. Even widespread societal gains inevitably produce losses for some people. That’s why the economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to capitalism as “creative destruction.” But humankind has a great capacity for finding technological solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and this will likely be the case for global warming. It isn’t that the problem isn’t potentially large. It’s just that human ingenuity—when given proper incentives—is bound to be larger. Even more encouraging, technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined. Indeed, in the final chapter of this book we’ll meet a band of renegade engineers who have developed not one but three global-warming fixes, any of which could be bought for less than the annual sales tally of all the Thoroughbred horses at Keeneland auction house in Kentucky. ↗

— Steven D. Levitt

#incentives #imagination

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. ↗

— William Butler Yeats

#best #best part #end #exposition #lean

The enchanted day is only enchanted if we ourselves believe that anything is possible. ↗

— Mark O'Brien

#happiness #life #luck-peace #magic #passion

Mornings at Blackwater" For years, every morning, I drank from Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt, the feet of ducks. And always it assuaged me from the dry bowl of the very far past. What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen. So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life. ↗

— Mary Oliver

#imagination

The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#reality #science #science

That didn't happen, of course. Things never happened like I imagined them. ↗

— John Green

#imagination

I'll call you," he repeated. "If you call me, I won't pick up the phone." "You will wait by the phone for my call, and when it rings, you will pick it up and you will speak to me in a civil manner. If you don't know how, ask someone. ↗

— Ilona Andrews

#ilona-andrews #kate #magic-bleeds #civilization

That's the thing about magic; you've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you. ↗

— Charles de Lint

#magic #belief

Personally, I'm a lazy kind of guy, and leaving the door open on the mystical saves me work. I don't have to stress my brain trying to explain the unexplainable. It's magic. End of discussion. ↗

— Janet Evanovich

#supernatural #supernatural