#ren

It often occurs that pride and selfishness are muddled with strength and independence. They are neither equal nor similar; in fact, they are polar opposites. A coward may be so cowardly that he masks his weakness with some false personification of power. He is afraid to love and to be loved because love tends to strip bare all emotional barricades. Without love, strength and independence are prone to losing every bit of their worth; they become nothing more than a fearful, intimidated, empty tent lost somewhere in the desert of self. ↗

— Criss Jami

#barricade #coward #cowardice #desert #ego

Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; - the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine! ↗

— Charles Dickens

#death

And friends of mine that had photography class in high school would develop the film and make prints and I'd take them back to the track and give 'em away or try and sell them. Much to my parents' dismay, I majored in photography in college. ↗

— John Sexton

#back #class #college #develop #dismay

Right time, right place, right people equals success. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people equals most of the real human history. ↗

— Idries Shah

#history #possibility #timing #equality

No: I shall not marry Samuel Fawthrop Wynne." "I ask why? I must have a reason. In all respects he is more than worthy of you." She stood on the hearth; she was pale as the white marble slab and cornice behind her; her eyes flashed large, dilated, unsmiling. "And I ask in what sense that young man is worthy of me? ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#courtship #dignity #empowerment #equality #feminism

If there's one thing you should understand better than the humans, it's that females should never be ruled out by virtue of strength. Some of us have ways to equalize the equation. ↗

— Dee Tenorio

#equality

The circumstance of the mind is equivalent to the circumstance of your reality and a pure sign of the justification of the universe. Positive energy equals a positive well being and the manifestation of positive things thereof. Do you have the wherewithal to be positive? Do you hold the key to your destiny or the barrier to your dismay? Insightful are those with an open ear and an open heart to these principles. Are you on the right track? Whether you say yes or no to this question, your reality is a direct reflection. ↗

— Will Barnes

#inspirational #personal-development #spiritual #equality

Children. For all of the times that you miss out on things you'd like to do because of them, there are an equal number of excuses they offer to get out of things you'd like to miss. ↗

— Bridget Asher

#equality

One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, / And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten / million years, / I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait. ↗

— Walt Whitman

#self #self-awareness #equality

We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative connotations of words like alien or outlandish. And yet the monuments and cultures of each of our civilizations merely represent different ways of being human. An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#culture #different #equality #happiness #humanity