#paradise

I don't like Paradise, As they probably don't have obsessions there. ↗

— Alda Merini

#heaven #materialism #paradise #possessions #afterlife

The sun tells the best joke of a day full of them, setting so spectacularly that you can almost smell the tropical paradise lazing somewhere over this rim of endless, gray socialist towers. Miles of square windows explode orange, red, and purple, like a million TV sets broadcasting the apocalypse. Clouds unspool. The sky drains of birds. ↗

— Tod Wodicka

#birds #clouds #prague #sunset #tropical-paradise

she ran away in her sleep and dreamed of paradise ↗

— Unknownnown

#sleep #dreams

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in. [Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour, March 9, 1998] ↗

— Toni Morrison

#exclusion #inspiration #paradises #utopias #wishes

We'll find paradise together, whatever form that might take. ↗

— Lisa Mantchev

#paradise #love

We are all the product of things we've never seen and people we never met. In fact, if just one little detail had been changed in their lives, we may not even exist! ↗

— Melanie Johnston

#genealogy #the-last-lord-of-paradise #change

How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it. ↗

— Charles Eisenstein

#life #paradise #sacred-economics #social-change #social-vision

A precursor to the Social Darwinists, Hobbes argued from th premise that the primordial human condition was a war fought by each against each, so brutal and incesssant that it was impossible to develop industry or even agriculture or the arts while that condition persisted. It's this description that culmintes in his famous epithet "And the life of man, solitary, poor, brutish, and short." It was a fiction to which he brought to bear another fiction, that of the social contract by which men agree to submit to rules and a presiding authority, surrendering their right to ravage each other for the sake of their own safety. The contract was not a bond of affection or identification, bot a culture or religion binding togetehr a civilization, only a convenience. Men, in his view, as in that of many other European writers of the period, are stark, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategy and not by nature... ↗

— Rebecca Solnit

#paradise-built-in-hell #social #art

I went to the Paradise Restaurant on 49th Street and Broadway which was where they were playing, and I sat in. ↗

— Ray Conniff

#i #paradise #playing #restaurant #sat

Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair...Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#sacrifice #this-side-of-paradise #freedom