#ss

There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors. ↗

— Miriam Toews

#life

The existence of insignificant people has very important consequences in the world. It can be shown to affect the price of bread and the rate of wages, to call forth many evil tempers from the selfish and many heroisms from the sympathetic, and, in other ways, to play no small part in the tragedy of life. ↗

— George Eliot

#people #life

The common man wants nothing of life but health, longevity, amusement, comfort -- "happiness." He who does not despise this should turn his eyes from world history, for it contains nothing of the sort. The best that history has created is great suffering. ↗

— Oswald Spengler

#history #struggle #suffering #life

Od onog ondašnjeg čovjeka ja sam se, i to upravo zbog onog doživljaja, potpuno odvojio, promatram ga sa strane, sasvim mirno i hladno, i mogu ga opisati kao prijatelja o kojem znam mnogo i sve ono što je bitno, ali ja uopće više nisam taj čovjek. Mogao bih pričati o njemu, prekoravati ga ili ga osuđivati a da uopće ne osjetim da je on jednom bio sastavni dio mene. ↗

— Stefan Zweig

#man #past #self-awareness #life

...I realize that lessons are meant to be learned, honored even, or else you can spend your life running so far from them that you erect a false existence around the very thing you should be embracing. ↗

— Allison Winn Scotch

#life

Failure is the sourness that makes success All the more sweeter. ↗

— Joshua Wisenbaker

#life #success #life

God desires that we be like living signs of the kingdom, to provide visual aids of what life will look like one day when the kingdom is here fully. We will not bring the Kingdom or build the kingdom, but our privilege is to live out previews of “coming attractions,” revealing what this Kingdom will look like. ↗

— Tim Dearborn

#life

She needed to recover. His father had died in January; it was only the end of May. They needed to stick to the routine they'd established during the intervening months. in that way, their life would return to its original shape, like a spring stretched in bad times but contracting eventually into happiness. That the world could come permanently unsprung had never occurred to him. (223) ↗

— David Wroblewski

#happiness #recovery #life

The individualism of current economic theory is manifest in the purely self-interested behavior it generally assumes. It has no real place for fairness, malevolence, and benevolence, nor for the preservation of human life or any other moral concern. ↗

— Herman E. Daly

#morality #selfishness #life

On the planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years, she read, and on Gethen there has never been a war." She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly. "There has never been a war." In her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know only how to deny. Born in the dark shadow of power misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight. Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the shadow, a doubled unbelief. So as the cloud-shadows swept over the marshes and the page of the book open on her lap, she sighed and closed her eyes. thinking, "I am a liar." Then she opened her eyes and read more about the other worlds, the far realities. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#reality #war #forgiveness