#mm

We must remember that there is a great difference between a myth and a miracle. A myth is the idealization of a fact. A miracle is the counterfeit of a fact. There is the same difference between a myth and a miracle that there is between fiction and falsehood -- between poetry and perjury. Miracles belong to the far past and the far future. The little line of sand, called the present, between the seas, belongs to common sense to the natural. ↗

— Robert G. Ingersoll

#ingersoll #poetry #present #reason #robert

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him. ↗

— Will Durant

#commanding-nature #eternal-recurrence #history #history-repeating-itself #science

I have no particular love for the idealised 'worker' as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on. ↗

— George Orwell

#communist #police #worker #love

Where there is not community, trust, respect, ethical behavior are difficult for the young to learn and for the old to maintain. ↗

— Robert K. Greenleaf

#elderly #ethics #respect #trust #youth

The function of the well-intentioned individual, acting in isolation, is to formulate or disseminate theoretical truths. The function of the well-intentioned individuals in association is to live in accordance with those truths, to demonstrate what happens when theory is translated into practice, to create small-scale working models of the better form of society to which the speculative idealist looks forward. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#ends-and-means #social-living #nature

In this chthonian world the only thing of importance is orthography and punctuation. It doesn't matter what the nature of the calamity is, only whether it is spelled right. ↗

— Henry Miller

#spelling #nature

Summer has weeks left, but once the calendar displays the word “September,” you’d think it was Latin for “evacuate.” I pity them for missing the best weather and the most energized time of year…It’s an extremely impressive display of life at the apogee of summer, the year’s productivity mounded and piled past the angle of repose. It is a world lush with the living, a world that-despite the problems- still has what it takes to really produce. ↗

— Carl Safina

#nature #summer #life

A solitary figure stood gazing outward, at the edge of the crenellations ringing the circumference of the great tower soaring up from the top of the massive, mountain-citadel. Shrouded with a regal, proud air, The Unifier, the Lord of far more than Avanor, regarded the heart of His worldly dominion with an invigorating feeling of growing mastery. Yes there was a deep concern weighing upon His mind, of a nature that rarely manifested to His pervasive senses. ↗

— Stephen Zimmer

#stephen-zimmer #nature

The key question, it seemed to him, was that of whether man was to obey Nature, or attempt to command her. ↗

— Paul Bowles

#nature #nature

Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light. ↗

— Mark Helprin

#nature-as-church #numinous #our-place-in-the-universe #revelation #spirituality