#sufficiency

In my small way, I preserved and catalogued, and dipped into the vast ocean of learning that awaited, knowing all the time that the life of one man was insufficient for even the smallest part of the wonders that lay within. It is cruel that we are granted the desire to know, but denied the time to do so properly. We all die frustrated; it is the greatest lesson we have to learn. ↗

— Iain Pears

#insufficiency #knowledge #learning #life-lessons #wonder

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything. ↗

— P.D. James

#love #protection #responsibility #self-sufficiency #solitude

I had come to worry about those women who were full-time mothers and homemakers by choice. Did other, more career-minded women have the right to devalue them . . . ? Maybe it was time to slow down and look at the role restrictions imposed not only on women but the men around them, to search for the balance that could promote self-sufficiency . . . ↗

— Lin Pardey

#women-s-liberation #women-s-strength #womens-rights #men

I have an income nearly sufficient for my wants (no one's income is ever quite sufficient, you know). ↗

— Anthony Hope

#money #sufficiency #money

You cannot want more for people than they want for themselves. ↗

— Johnnie Dent Jr.

#independence #self-sufficiency #goal-setting

The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums. Granting the frailty, and no doubt the impermanence, of modern technology as a human contrivance, the man who can keep a fire in a stove or on a hearth is not only more durable, but wiser, closer to the meaning of fire, than the man who can only work a thermostat. ↗

— Wendell Berry

#simplicity #art

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#concept #continually #exile #loneliness #me

And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me. ↗

— Alison Bechdel

#could #family #me #need #partly

Our forbears worked hard this difficult land, and their reward was the freedom and independence of self-sufficiency. ↗

— James H. Douglas

#freedom #hard #independence #land #our

Marriage is a fine institution, but I'm not ready for an institution. ↗

— Mae West

#double-entendre #empowerment #freedom #independence #institutions