#origin

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult - at least I have found it so - than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind...We behold the face of nature bright with gladness...We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects and seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#life

When your efforts run in the face of conventional wisdom and accepted mastery, persistence can look like madness. If you succeed in the end, this extreme originality reformulates into a new level of mastery, sometimes even genius; if you fail in the end, you remain a madman in the eyes of others, and maybe even yourself. When you are in the midst of the journey…there’s really no way of knowing which one you are.” (p.129) ↗

— Hilary Austen

#conventional-wisdom #effort #extreme-originality #genius #journey

A winner is not someone who wins. It's someone who tries and isn't afraid to lose. ↗

— Nusrat Sultana

#characters #confidence #hope #inspirational #life

The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality. Phlogiston did not even exist, and yet its existence was firmly believed and the theory adhered to rigidly for nearly one hundred years throughout the eighteenth century. ... As experimentation continued the properties of phlogiston became more bizarre and contradictory. But instead of questioning the existence of this mysterious substance it was made to serve more comprehensive purposes. ... For the skeptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers. To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence! ↗

— Michael Denton

#coincidence #consensus #darwinism #evolution #macro-evolution

In Truth, none seem to have any Title to assert Human Nature to be necessarily and universally evil, but those whose own Minds afford them one Instance of this natural Depravity. ↗

— Henry Fielding

#nature

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#originality #nothing

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss. ↗

— Michael Chabon

#cliche #novels #originality #writing #influence

Creative people are often found either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities. ↗

— Criss Jami

#creative #creativity #disagreeable #envy #intimidating

Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge. ↗

— Dante Alighieri

#consider #follow #knowledge #live #made

I find that the very things that I get criticized for, which is usually being different and just doing my own thing and just being original, is the very thing that's making me successful. ↗

— Shania Twain

#being different #criticized #different #doing #find