#path

None of us can choose where we shall love... ↗

— Susan Kay

#love #opera #passion #phantom #sympathy

I'm cursed with empathy. I'm also by nature way too opinionated. ↗

— John Shirley

#cursed #empathy #i #nature #opinionated

If you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path. ↗

— Mary Webb

#kind #must #often #path #stop

To have the National Rifle Association rule the United States of America is pathetic. ↗

— Harvey Weinstein

#association #national #pathetic #rifle #rule

I'll continue on the path I've been taking, feet on the ground, describing people's lives, describing people's emotions, writing from the standpoint of the ordinary people. ↗

— Mo Yan

#continue #describing #emotions #feet #ground

All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped? ↗

— Milan Kundera

#fiction #on-fiction #art

Our dreams are the forgotten path to Heaven. ↗

— Harold Klemp

#heaven #path #spiritual-dreaming #art

The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason. I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears. ↗

— Erich Fromm

#conflict #empathy #erich-fromm #humility #love

Among [Applewhite's] other teachings was the classic cult specialty of developing disdain for anyone outside of the Heaven's Gate commune. Applewhite flattered his would-be alien flock that they were an elite elect far superior to the non-initiated humans whom he considered to be deluded zombies.[...]Applewhite effectively fed his paranoid persecution complex to his followers to ensure blind loyalty to the group and himself while fostering alienation from the mundane world. This paradoxical superior/fearful attitude towards “Them” (i.e., anyone who is not one of “Us”) is one of the simplest means of hooking even the most skeptical curiosity seeker into the solipsistic netherworld of a [mentally unbalanced] leader's insecure and threatened worldview. ↗

— Zeena Schreck

#mass-suicides #psychopathology #religious-science-fiction #sects #sociology

Giulio was against our meeting. He didn't want me getting mixed up in things that, in his opinion, were no concern of mine. For decades the respectable people here did nothing but repeat that the Mafia was no concern of theirs but only involved the people involved in it. But I used to teach my pupils that the see-nothing, know-nothing attitude is the most mortal of sins. So now that its my turn to tell what I saw, I'm supposed to take a step back? ↗

— Andrea Camilleri

#attitude