#s

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation. ↗

— Alasdair Gray

#progress #work #progress

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#utopia #progress

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American... ↗

— W.E.B. Du Bois

#dubois #identity #pragmatism #progress #progress

Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It's amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. A song you didn't even pay attention to at the time, a place that you didn't even know had a particular smell. ↗

— Emily Giffin

#attention

I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings. ↗

— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

#attention #blame #feelings #follow #i

Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance. ↗

— Hendrik Willem Van Loon

#hendrick-van-loon #ignorance #society #willful-ignorance #education

The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself. ↗

— A.W. Tozer

#education #reading #education

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had." [Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999] ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#creativity #originality #point-of-view #uniqueness #writing

I should have run away from you and started college and gone on without you. But I would always have regretted it if I didn't give this a shot. - Tiffany ↗

— Jennifer Echols

#jennifer-echols #college

I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will eat away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#happiness #love