#provoking

The temptation of the age is to look good without being good. ↗

— Brennan Manning

#thought-provoking #age

The human heart: its expansions and contractions its electrics and hydraulics the warm tides that move and fill it. For years Art had studied it from a safe distance from many perspectives...he listened in fascination and revulsion, in envy and pity. He dispensed canned wisdom, a little scripture. He sent them on their way with a prayer. ↗

— Jennifer Haigh

#thought-provoking #art

How can the removal of beauty from a world so lacking in beauty be anything but tragic? ↗

— William Goldman

#beauty

Your mind can be either your prison or your palace. What you make it is yours to decide ↗

— Bernard Kelvin Clive

#mind #thought-provoking #dreams

There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#violence #war #violence

What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad or at least unimportant in comparison to other things? … Little children were trained not to do “just what they liked’ but … but what? … Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities. When you are trained to despise “just what you like” then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others — a good slave. When you learn not to do “just what you like” then the System loves you. ↗

— Robert M. Pirsig

#art

‎"Tell me, sir, what is a butterfly?" "It's what you are meant to become. It flies with beautiful wings and joins the earth to heaven. It drinks only nectar from the flowers and carries the seeds of love from one flower to another. Without butterflies, the world would soon have few flowers. ↗

— Trina Paulus

#thought-provoking #beauty

Before you bombed my boy Osama I always thought an explosion was such a quick thing but now I know better. The flash is over very fast but the fire catches hold inside you and the noise never stops…I live in an inferno where you could shiver with cold Osama. This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop. ↗

— Chris Cleave

#life

We live by our labors from one harvest to the next, there is no certain telling whether we shall be able to feed ourselves and our children, and if bad times are prolonged we know we must see the weak surrender their lives and this fact, too, is within our experience. In our lives there is no margin for misfortune. ↗

— Kamala Markandaya

#experience

It gets you thinking about all the parts in a story we never see" --he cleared his throat-- "the parts around the edges. You bring someone like that boy so alive before us and there he is set loose in our world so that we can't stop thinking of him. But then the report is over, the boy disappears. He was just a boy in a story and we never know the ending, we never get to close the book. It makes you wonder what happens to the people in them after the story stops--all the stories you've reported for instance. Where are they all now? ↗

— Sarah Blake

#thought-provoking