#sign

For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion. ↗

— James Baldwin

#life #personality #pride #virtue #world

What give all that is tragic, whatever its form, the characteristic of the sublime, is the first inkling of the knowledge that the world and life can give no satisfaction, and are not worth our investment in them. The tragic spirit consists in this. Accordingly it leads to resignation. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#satisfaction #sublime #tragedy #life

Could a literary life be referred to with the iambic pentameter of, say, harnessing wind power, transplanting hearts or saving the whales. Or did it necessitate the sombre and monotonous dirge of software, priority banking or turbine building. ↗

— Anita Nair

#monotony #professions #significance #writing #life

Truth flows from universal law, not personal views. ↗

— John Agno

#boomer-retirement #leadership-books #leadership-tips #life-signature #stress-management

Sense and Sensibility signs litter Devon -- arrows with S & S on. Whenever Ang [Lee] sees a B & B sign he thinks it's for another movie. ↗

— Emma Thompson

#filming #movies #signs #movies

As much as I don't care about those things, I think it's human nature to not want to feel totally insignificant. ↗

— Megan McCafferty

#humans #jessica-darling #significance #nature

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#decisions #ideas #life #significance #thinking

While railing against the manufactured prerequisites of womanhood or manhood, we need to avoid manufacturing our own prerequisites. The non-operative journey and the objection to it illustrate just one area in which we need to open our thinking to other journeys while expecting that others respect our own. - Mercedes Allen ↗

— Kate Bornstein

#gender-reassignment-surgery #grs #transgender #transition #respect

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox... ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#cycles #despair #emotion #fear #free-will

I’ll name my town “Unwelcome,” and the sign will say, “Welcome to Unwelcome.”
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#sign #town #unwelcome #welcome #gratitude