#sm

It is impossible to exercise free will as long as we are operating from within the system. Free will requires consciousness, and our pervasive and deep-seated patterns of thought are unconscious; they are outside of our awareness and therefore outside of our control. While we remain in the system, we see the world through the eyes of carnism. And as long as we look through eyes other than our own, we will be living in accordance to a truth that is not of our own choosing. We must step outside the system to find our lost empathy and make choices that reflect what we truly feel and believe, rather than what we've been taught to feel and believe. ↗

— Melanie Joy

#free-will #truth #love

He thought of his wife, of his son, of his youth. He thought of life. He thought of death and then he thought of life again. ↗

— Teodor Flonta

#life #love #secret-police #transylvania #vampires

Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#disease #fatal #first #i #invariably

The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state. ↗

— Adam Michnik

#human-rights #politics #totalitarianism #freedom

…the designation of wife in India, of the Hindu wife, is higher and grander than that of Empress. She is called Devi ↗

— Virchand Raghavji Gandhi

#hindu #hinduism #india #indian-quote #wife

Through the blur, I wondered if I was alone or if other parents felt the same way I did - that everything involving our children was painful in some way. The emotions, whether they were joy, sorrow, love or pride, were so deep and sharp that in the end they left you raw, exposed and yes, in pain. The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body and yet, each child represented just that - a parent's heart bared, beating forever outside its chest. ↗

— Debra Ginsberg

#children #motherhood #mothers #parenthood #parenting

Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies -- the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious. ↗

— Iain Pears

#doctrine #education #freedom #freedom-of-religion #freedom-of-thought

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#existentialism #feminism #philosophy #freedom

It's hard to know whether to laugh or to cry at the human predicament. Here we are with so much wisdom and tenderness, and—without even knowing it—we cover it over to protect ourselves from insecurity. Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of a butterfly, we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego. ↗

— Pema Chödrön

#confusion #humanity #experience

Sorrow spares no one, and scars respect no person. ↗

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

#respect #sad #scars #sorrow #respect