#sent

...as long as you are motivated by the approval of others, you cannot know with confidence whether the decisions you are making in your life are what's right for you... pg 102 ↗

— John Kuypers

#inspirational-quotes #present-moment #self-improvement #inspirational

Our past is the forge upon which we are hardened and tempered, to prepare us for the present. We are like a fine blade that must be hammered into shape before it can be ready to make its finest cuts. ↗

— Larry Atchley Jr.

#experience #life #past #preparation #present

People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#freethought #love

It stands to reason that anyone who learns to live well will die well. The skills are the same: being present in the moment, and humble, and brave, and keeping a sense of humor. (361) ↗

— Victoria Moran

#dying #humility #humor #living #mindfulness

I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#honesty #morality #sentiments #imagination

But love like that doesn't just disappear, does it? No matter how powerful the hate, there is always a little love left, underneath. Yes. Horrible, isn't it? ↗

— N.K. Jemisin

#love #resentment #love

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#past #present #illusion

Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#conditioning #dissent #santa #anarchy

You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better. ↗

— Andrew Solomon

#cognition #depression #future #issues #judgment

What else exhausts like sustained deception? ↗

— Leif Enger

#deception