#nit

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition. ↗

— Henry James

#recognition #surprise #imagination

But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#life #life-and-living #life-lessons #opportunity #unexpected

You will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it... Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. ↗

— C. S. Lewis

#theology #art

A great ring of pure & endless light Dazzles the darkness in my heart And breaks apart the dusky clouds of night. The end of all is hinted in the start. When we are born we bear the seeds of blight; Around us life & death are torn apart, Yet a great ring of pure and endless light Dazzles the darkness in my heart. It lights the world to my delight. Infinity is present in each part. A loving smile contains all art. The motes of starlight spark & dart. A grain of sand holds power & might. Infinity is present in each part, And a great ring of pure and endless light Dazzles the darkness in my heart. ↗

— Madeleine L'Engle

#darkness #dazzlement #eternal #eternity #god

I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#insanity #sanity #short-story #imagination

If you were ever dumped after knitting a guy a sweater, consider the possibility that the problem was with the sweater, not you. The recipient probably took one look at the thing, imagined a lifetime of having to pretend to like (and wear) this sweater and others of its like, and saw no choice but to flee into the night ↗

— Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

#sweater #yarn #imagination

Humans are most imaginative when they need a means of self-destruction. If the world existed in an overflowing amount of happiness; a utopian state, then the suicide rate would dwarf any extinction level threat. Humans cannot be trusted with their own survival. Their minds have been trained to be blindly and unconsciously subjugated. In a time related to Heaven-on-Earth, the smallest amount of worry, will drive a human into the arms of death. This is how weak and fragile the human mind and will is. It's funny, because the best friend of humanity, is none other than Chaos itself. ↗

— Lionel Suggs

#perception #weakness #death

All the technology of our production was still pre-War. They were sort of '38, '39 and the War had been stable and so we were infinitely behind whatever had been going on in the United States for instance. ↗

— Gianni Agnelli

#behind #going #had #infinitely #instance

Among leaders who have made the greatest impact through ages, I would consider Muhammad before Jesus Christ. ↗

— James Gavin

#atheist #christ #christian #fair #gavin

Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check their faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#paradise #reading #imagination