#sence

Every person needs to take one day away.  A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future.  Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.  Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.  Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. ↗

— Maya Angelou

#break #peace #rest #vacation #work

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. ↗

— Lao Tzu

#life #life

Would that thy love, beloved, had less trust in me, that it might be more anxious! ↗

— Héloïse d'Argenteuil

#desire #fear #jealousy #longing #love

We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#ambition #democracy #egalitarianism #equality #essence

We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. ↗

— John Robert Seeley

#conquered #fit #half #mind #peopled

The very essence of rationalism is that it assumes that the reason is the highest faculty in man and the lord of all the rest. ↗

— Lyman Abbott

#essence #faculty #highest #lord #man

Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence? ↗

— Audrey Niffenegger

#audrey-niffenegger #love #the-time-traveler-s-wife #love

You are my angel and my damnation; in your presence I reach divine ecstasy and in your absence I descent to hell. ↗

— Isabel Allende

#angel #damnation #ecstasy #love #love

I am about tribal feminine power. As a leader, I may stumble but my essence lives to the future-- of my people, of my literature, of my art. And when a tribesman turn against its leader, that tribe will become two. It may faulter my course, but it will not stifle my ending. I rule only among my believers. ↗

— Kristie LeVangie

#belief #essence #faith #family #feminine

It's hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he's okay. It's hard to be the one who stays. I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way. I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence? Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow? ↗

— Audrey Niffenegger

#love