#sm

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly. ↗

— T.S. Eliot

#christianity #culture #environment #industry #nature

If we are to discuss the idea of God and be restricted to rational arguments, then it is probably useful to know what we are talking about when we say “God.” This turns out not to be easy. The Romans called the Christians atheists. Why? Well, the Christians had a god of sorts, but it wasn’t a real god. They didn’t believe in the divinity of apotheosized emperors or Olympian gods. They had a peculiar, different kind of god. So it was very easy to call people who believed in a different kind of god atheists. And that general sense that an atheist is anybody who doesn’t believe exactly as I do prevails in our own time. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#experience

Although I have always rejected this fear of the other, and the racism that it inevitably fuels, I have learned from experience that it is a deeply rooted need in the human psyche. at the slightest provocation we will put distance between ourselves and those we cannot or do not want to understand ↗

— Susan Nathan

#racism #experience

Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom—we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you’re a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can’t go anywhere if you can’t step out onto a road… …(T)here is no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn. There is no Dean Moriarty, Sal, or even a Fuckhead. It sounds like a doctoral crisis, but it’s not. As a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, my survival depended upon other people’s ability to envision a possible future for me. Without a Melvillean or Kerouacian framework, or at least some kind of narrative to spell out a potential beyond death, none of my resourcefulness or curiosity was recognizable, and therefore I was unrecognizable. ↗

— Vanessa Veselka

#the-road #death

We believe that the creation of a woman was the crowning and final and most glorified moment of human creation. That we start with light & dark and land & sea and we move through fish & fowl & beasts of the field and we get to Adam and it's still not good enough. And only when Eve was created -- this is our theology [...] -- that is our theology, that the crowning creation and the glory of the human experience came with the creation of Eve." - see http://youtu.be/eF-JfX85A5s?t=11m53s ↗

— Jeffrey R. Holland

#creation #feminism #lds #mormon #religion

I’d stumbled upon the inner sanctuary of a woman who loved the world. Loved the faces of people she saw. Loved the way a hand looked when it was relaxed. Loved the way a woman looked when she touched her own face. The way a man looked when he opened himself to her. Loved the way wind changed a tree or a field or a child’s hair. The beauty of a neck meeting a shoulder. The softness of a smile that wasn’t forced. ↗

— Laura Anderson Kurk

#artist #college-application #creativity #dating #glass-girl

As the twelfth-century Tibetian yogi Milarepa said when he heard of his student Gampopa's peak experiences, 'They are neither good nor bad. Keep meditating.' ↗

— Pema Chödrön

#detachment #experience

The difference between a self-induced orgasm and an orgasm given by a man is like comparing a rainy day and a rain storm. Rain was a sure thing, you knew exactly what you were going to get: a clean and crisp, both sweet and refreshing experience. But rainstorms were unpredictable, they were riddled with surprises, messy and wet; they were something you had no control over. ↗

— Madeline Sheehan

#orgasm #sex #experience

Camus and Henry waved to me from that muddy truck. They both wanted me to get over myself. So, this was me, getting over myself. And it was about time. ↗

— Laura Anderson Kurk

#dating #existentialism #glass-girl #henry-whitmire #humanitarian

Polarities of the 'authentic' vs. the 'inauthentic' are easily discernible in recreational modes. The criteria of authenticity are not necessarily objective but rather have to do with the rules by which the self allows or disallows its own experience. ↗

— Walker Percy

#existentialism #experience #genuineness #the-self #experience