#ss

Laughter is more than just a pleasurable activity...When people laugh together, they tend to talk and touch more and to make eye contact more frequently. ↗

— Gretchen Rubin

#happiness #laughter #pleasure #relationships #fun

Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny each other's existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal. ↗

— Ingmar Bergman

#loneliness #death

Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to throw away. Death stands at your elbow. Be good for something while you live and it is in your power. ↗

— Marcus Aurelius

#death #goodness #help #inspirational #death

Teasing's part of the fun that comes before kissing ↗

— Lois Lowry

#tease #fun

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn? ↗

— Jane Austen

#sports

The wound is the place where the Light enters you. ↗

— Rumi

#healing #scars #suffering #broken

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human. ↗

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

#broken

If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#goodness #laughter #laugh

Don't nourish your fears more than you nourish your hopes. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#fears #happiness #hopes #inspirational #life

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#growing-up #narrow-mindedness #open-mindedness #wonder #kids