#rug

Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness- natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#courage

When the rich wage war it's the poor who die. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#war #poor

There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living within your means. ↗

— Calvin Coolidge

#dignity

Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?" "I've felt it all my life," she said. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#atlas-shrugged #inspirational #mediocrity #objectivism #second-handers

... it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#nightmare #struggle #choice

The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the "correct miscalculation," for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers. ↗

— Yoko Ogawa

#delight #guesses #math #struggle #math

The fact that war is the word we use for almost everything—on terrorism, drugs, even poverty—has certainly helped to desensitize us to its invocation; if we wage wars on everything, how bad can they be? ↗

— Glenn Greenwald

#iraq-war #poverty #terrorism #united-states #war

People are strange . . . ↗

— Jim Morrison

#strangeness #weirdness #strange

LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it. ↗

— Timothy Leary

#politicians #psychedelics #squares #straights #behavior

Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you'll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common. ↗

— David Sedaris

#drugs #entertaining #friends #socializing #socialism