#red

there's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst. ↗

— Stephen King

#preparedness #king

Each place is the right place--the place where I now am can be a sacred space. (3) ↗

— Ravi Ravindra

#sacred-space #space #yoga

[T]he period between four and six in the morning is called the Brahmamuhurta, the Brahmic time, or divine period, and is a very sacred time to meditate. (140) ↗

— Swami Satchidananda

#meditation #morning #sacred #yoga

There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in self-hatred. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#guilt #impotence #iraq-war #leftism #pathology

I am tired of hiding, tired of misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as though I have something to hide. ↗

— Kay Redfield Jamison

#tiredness #energy

I believe compassion to be one of the few things we can practice that will bring immediate and long-term happiness to our lives. I’m not talking about the short-term gratification of pleasures like sex, drugs or gambling (though I’m not knocking them), but something that will bring true and lasting happiness. The kind that sticks. ↗

— Dalai Lama XIV

#happiness #harm-reduction #talking

Boredom: the desire for desires. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#desire #desires

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#boredom #life #life

He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive. ↗

— Jack London

#survival-of-the-fittest #london

You'd find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair." — Anne Shirley ↗

— L.M. Montgomery

#l-m-montgomery