#on

So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains, and we never even know we have the key." (Already Gone) ↗

— The Eagles

#self-determination #life

It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#life #persecution #life

Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village". ↗

— David James Duncan

#clinton #community #corporations #environment #spirituality

The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin and it was as if Juliek's soul had become the bow. He was playing his life...He played that which he would never play again. ↗

— Elie Wiesel

#life

The world's a headmaster who works on your faults. I don't mean in a mystical or Jesus way. More how you'll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch out for that step! Everything that's wrong with us, if we're too selfish or too Yessir, Nosir, Three bags full sir or too anything, that's a hidden step. Either you suffer the consequences of not noticing your fault forever or, one day, you do notice it, and fix it. Joke is, once you get it into your brain about that hidden step and think, Hey, life isn't such a shithouse after all again, then BUMP! Down you go, a whole new flight of hidden steps. There are always more. ↗

— David Mitchell

#inspirational #philosophical #thoughtful #inspirational

Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting. ↗

— P. G. Wodehouse

#gave #hardly #her #life #made

With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair. ↗

— Roman Payne

#choices #decisions #despair #hope #hope-and-despair

Yet rather than calling the earliest religions, which embraced such an open acceptance of all human sexuality, 'fertility cults,' we might consider the religions of today as strange in that they seem to associate shame and even sin with the very process of conceiving new human life. Perhaps centuries from now scholars and historians will be classifying them as 'sterility cults. ↗

— Merlin Stone

#goddess #pagan #religion #religions #sexuality

شكراً لتجربة الحياة القاسية، المعلم الأساسي لكل الانضباطات ↗

— José Saramago

#life

When I corrected her, I told her that in fact she was not so wrong; that Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat-wearing Muslims. ↗

— Yann Martel

#life