#ox

There are people who are generic. They make generic responses and they expect generic answers. They live inside a box and they think people who don't fit into their box are weird. But I'll tell you what, generic people are the weird people. They are like genetically-manipulated plants growing inside a laboratory, like indistinguishable faces, like droids. Like ignorance. ↗

— C. JoyBell C.

#differences #droids #fitting-in #generic #generic-people

And this is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days. ↗

— Howard Thurman

#paradoxes #age

Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king." "Yes." "Unorthodox. ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#tom-stoppard #unorthodox #age

When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly. ↗

— Jen Knox

#jen-knox #musical-chairs #philosophy #psychology #reading

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#life #paradox #art

Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful moment we remember that we forget. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#philosophy-of-life #theology #art

There is a curious paradox that no one can explain. Who understands the secret of the reaping of the grain? Who understands why Spring is born out of Winter’s laboring pain, or why we must all die a bit before we grow again? I do not know the answer; I merely know it’s true. I hurt them for that reason, and myself a little bit too. ↗

— Tom Jones

#paradox #the-fantasticks #music

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. ↗

— Steven Pressfield

#toxic #art

She is reading Zen, Krishnamurti, and Jung, asking herself questions she has never had the courage to explore. Suddenly, the shackles which have bound her are beginning to snap, as personal revelation replaces orthodoxy. ↗

— Terry Tempest Williams

#courage

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing! ↗

— Charles Lamb

#art