#ring

He was swimming in a sea of other people’s expectations. Men had drowned in seas like that. ↗

— Robert Jordan

#expectations #jordan #lan #new-spring #overwhelmed

People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been--for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#happiness #happy #joy #pain #relief

Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims. ↗

— Julian Assange

#nuturing #victim #victimhood #victims #men

As Auden is believed to have said, no poem saved a single Jew from the gas chambers. Never mind. Write the poems anyway. Play the music in spite of that. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#art

There are two kinds of men who never amount to much those who cannot do what they are told and those who can do nothing else. ↗

— Cyrus Curtis

#men

God comes right out and tells us why he gives us more money than we need. It's not so we can find more ways to spend it. It's not so we can indulge ourselves and spoil our children. It's not so we can insulate ourselves from needing God's provision. It's so we can give and give generously (2 Corinthians 8:14; 9:11) ↗

— Randy Alcorn

#excess #generosity #giving #less #money

The nature of compassion isn't coming to terms with your own suffering and applying it to others: It's knowing that other folks around you suffer and, no matter what happens to you, no matter how lucky or unlucky you are, they keep suffering. And if you can do something about that, then you do it, and you do it without whining or waving your own fuckin' cross for the world to see. You do it because it's the right thing to do. ↗

— John Connolly

#suffer #suffering #nature

To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security. ↗

— Walter M. Miller Jr.

#perversion #security #suffering #nature

I’ve always been a sort of self-imposed outsider, not a geeky outsider or a snobby outsider but, I just have a natural desire to live on the fringe. I’m not like a weirdo with a trench-coat but I just prefer to be alone or minimally surrounded by people. ↗

— Sara Quin

#living-on-the-fringe #outsider #sara-quin #solitude #surrounded-by-people

Always it’s Spring)and everyone’s in love and flowers pick themselves. ↗

— E.E. Cummings

#love #nature #spring #love