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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #oura
So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days, you can hear their chorus rushing past: IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon’tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglass-I’veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgiveme…. There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bunch of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string. The practice of attaching cups to the ends of string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world’s first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America. When the world grew bigger, and there wasn’t enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented. Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence. ↗
Cosette, do you hear? he has come to that! he asks my forgiveness! And do you know what he has done for me, Cosette? He has saved my life. He has done more--he has given you to me. And after having saved me, and after having given you to me, Cosette, what has he done with himself? He has sacrificed himself. Behold the man. And he says to me the ingrate, to me the forgetful, to me the pitiless, to me the guilty one: Thanks! Cosette, my whole life passed at the feet of this man would be too little. That barricade, that sewer, that furnace, that cesspool,--all that he traversed for me, for thee, Cosette! He carried me away through all the deaths which he put aside before me, and accepted for himself. Every courage, every virtue, every heroism, every sanctity he possesses! Cosette, that man is an angel! ↗
Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. ↗
That growing seed of self-doubt that you’re just not good enough and everyone else is making a mockery of your anguish by celebrating without you (or so it seems)… An oh so familiar feeling. Neighborhood games, cliques, exercise, travel, writers’ groups, bridal showers, parties, gatherings and many others that has everyone wrapped up in each other’s “sense of belonging”. But you forget that you are, and have been in groups with as few members as two, which inadvertently and even deliberately excluded some and crushed egos like yours. It’s a self perpetuating thought that stings like hundreds of paper cuts when you feel like an outsider. You’re going to be fine—you know how this goes, the conflicted emotions that come with being left out to dry and somehow, albeit excruciatingly slow at first, you manage to navigate your way back to that place where you are happy to see others enjoying themselves and even wish them well and quite sincerely. And once again, you rediscover the sheer pleasure of your own company. When you can move on from being dumped—yes, dumped—and come to terms with how everything happens for a reason and that there are no magic formulas to relationships except being your truest self and letting chips fall where they may. And that there is no such thing as ‘novelty of beginnings’ because if you let it be—yourself and others— the universe will spin just as it should and not faster than you think, whenever you’re drowning in deep trepidation and isolation. That the waning is just as intense as the waxing. The path towards darkness isn’t as short and fast as you might think. It’s when you allow fear to guide your actions that you begin the nose-dive degradation into helplessness. But just because you are here right now doesn’t mean you don’t know or can’t return to the light of healing. And just because it cannot be seen, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Believe this—remind yourself (yet again)—this place is familiar territory. And it will repeat itself in dizzying succession because you’re human and you have emotions—raw and unprocessed. You will try everything, you will fall in love over and over again. It will never be perfect. And yet you have and will survive each and every single time—smarting, scathed, shattered, maybe not wiser—but you’ve had your practice and damn me if you say you didn’t so enjoy it while it lasted. It’s alright, faith isn’t supposed to make sense (most times). It’s meant to carry you through the darkest hours when you feel stripped off, of what little strength and courage you have left. It creeps up on you and carries you forward, a step at a time until, you can believe, again. Forgive yourself, then others and move right on. Take everything the same: triumph or defeat, winning or losing, in the company of, and in your sublime aloneness, fame or shame, sadness or gladness they’re all identical just cloaked differently. And temporary. And it’s all going to pass. As if you didn’t know that too, yet. Journey on and hold that heart of yours sacred. When it breaks, it feels like it’s never going to mend but it always does, scars included. Kindness is a gift we take delight in giving others. It’s now time to unwrap it for yourself. ↗
Cultivate an optimistic mind, use your imagination, always consider alternatives, and dare to believe that you can make possible what others think is impossible. ↗
#optimism #positive-attitude #positive-thinking #success #attitude
When discouraged some people will give up, give in or give out far too early. They blame their problems on difficult situations, unreasonable people or their own inabilities. When discouraged other people will push back that first impulse to quit, push down their initial fear, push through feelings of helplessness and push ahead. They’re less likely to find something to blame and more likely to find a way through. ↗
