#rod

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling. Every summit seems an exaggeration. Climbing wearies. The steepnesses take away one's breath; we slip on the slopes, we are hurt by the sharp points which are its beauty; the foaming torrents betray the precipices, clouds hide the mountain tops; mounting is full of terror, as well as a fall. Hence, there is more dismay than admiration. People have a strange feeling of aversion to anything grand. They see abysses, they do not see sublimity; they see the monster, they do not see the prodigy. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#prodigy #beauty

Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it. ↗

— Theodore Roosevelt

#competence #job-doing #productivity #business

A beverage of leisure is a serious business,” Shane Bowermaster was known to declare. “There can be no product of pleasure without the inverse on the end of the producer. ↗

— Jeff Phillips

#brewing #business #creating #distilling #folktales

Declining overseas admissions costs us not only much needed revenues for colleges and universities, but much more importantly, we lose the best opportunity we have to introduce foreign students to all that America has to offer the world. ↗

— Richard Lugar

#best #colleges #costs #declining #foreign

Time Progression: Wasting >>Spending >> Managing >> Investing ↗

— Elizabeth Grace Saunders

#organization #productivity #time-investment #time-management #work-life-balance

The conclusion of Dowell's narrative offers not a resolution, so much as a plangent confirmation of complexities. While Ford would certainly have agreed with Dowell that it is a novelist's business to make a reader 'see things clearly', his interest in clarity had little to do with simplicity. There is no 'getting to the bottom of things', no triumphant answers to the epistemological muddle offered in this beautiful, bleak story - only a finer appreciation of that confusion. We may remove the scales from our eyes, Ford suggests, but only the better to appreciate the glass through which we see darkly. ↗

— Zoë Heller

#beauty

Plus, according to my mother, memories change like people do, especially if there's enough alcohol involved-Aphrodite ↗

— P.C. Cast

#humor #change

The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- "A Clockwork Orange Resucked" intro to first full American version 1986 ↗

— Anthony Burgess

#american #intro #introduction #irony #philosophical

that was bad; i shouldn't have done that to prevent you from entering a catatonic state i am going to maintain a calm facial expression with crinkly eyes and an overall friendly demeanor i believe in a human being that is not upset i believe if you are working i should not be insane or upset--why am i ever insane or upset and not working? i vacuumed the entire house this morning i cleaned the kitchen and the computer room and i made you a meat helmet with computer paper the opportunity for change exists in each moment, all moments are alone and separate from other moments, and there are a limited number of moments and the idea of change is a delusion of positive or negative thinking your hands are covering your face and your body moves like a statue when i try to manipulate an appendage if i could just get you to cry tears of joy one more time ↗

— Tao Lin

#impermanence #indifferent-universe #meat-helmet #productivity #sadness

Though he walked and breathed, and about him living leaves and flowers were stirred by the same cool wind as fanned his face, Frodo felt he was in a timeless land that did not fade or change or fall into forgetfulness. When he had gone and passed again into the outer world, still Frodo the wanderer from the Shire would walk there, upon the grass among elanor and niphredil in fair Lothlorien ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#j-r-r-tolkien #the-fellowship-of-the-ring #the-lord-of-the-rings #change