#or

Life is short. The world is big. It awaits your exploration. If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up way too much space. ↗

— Paul Beaver

#world #nature

Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all. ↗

— Wilkie Collins

#nature

...foreign policy is a matter of costs and benefits, not theology. ↗

— Fareed Zakaria

#international-relations #national-policy #theology

You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat. ↗

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

#theories #nature

The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb. ↗

— Marge Piercy

#piercy #rebellion #nature

This does not, however, entirely satisfy me. Error is not a pure negative; it is a privation, i.e., the absence of some knowledge that I ought to possess; and on considering the nature of God, it does not seem possible that He should have given me any faculty which is not perfect of its kind, that is to say which is anywise wanting in the perfection proper to it. ↗

— René Descartes

#falsehood #philosophy #truth #nature

We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language. ↗

— Chuck Palanhiuk

#language #words #nature

Pharnyx: “Why won’t you believe me?” Skye: “Because not only would that be contrary to my nature, it would be too simple.” Pharnyx: “What’s wrong with ‘simple?” Skye: “It’s too boring and easy.” Pharnyx: “No it’s not. Simple makes things…simple.” Skye: “And that’s why I don’t believe you.” ↗

— Shanna Starle (Phantom Regiment)

#nature

The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity. ↗

— John Fowles

#nature #nature-of-man #nature

Arguably the mos intriguing characteristic assessed by the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ), a widely used test developed by the University of Minnesota's eminent psychologist Auke Tellegen, is "absorption," which describes a particular style of focusing. If you get a high score in this trait, you're naturally inclined toward what he calls a "respondent" or "experiential" way of focusing. ↗

— Winifred Gallagher

#attention #experiential #focus #nature