#tell

Education is no substitute for intelligence. ↗

— Frank Herbert

#intelligence #wisdom #education

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#on-fiction #storytelling #truth #truth-telling #job

If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I’ll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming ‘Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese? ↗

— Stephen King

#commencement #intellect #steven-king #college

MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps All REALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time ↗

— Lisa Cron

#on-writing #storytelling #wired-for-story #writing #writing-myths

I believe in prophetic speech . . . still. I believe in Cassandra, I believe in Electra and in the charming Antigone. . . . For me, they’re more alive than the [Institute for] Intellectual Cooperation and its choice group of old men. ↗

— Gabriella Mistral

#intellectual #men

As with our earlier worship of saints and facts, there is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting. The message of the competition/efficiency/marketplace Trinity seems to be that we should drop the idea of ourselves developed over two and a half millennia. We are no longer beings distinguished by our ability to think and to act consciously in order to affect our circumstances. Instead we should passively submit ourselves and our whole civilization -- our public structures, social forms and cultural creativity -- to the abstract forces of unregulated commerce. It may be that most citizens have difficulty with the argument and would prefer to continue working on the idea of dignified human intelligence. If they must drop something, they would probably prefer to drop the economists. ↗

— John Ralston Saul

#intelligence

Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth. ↗

— Evelyn Underhill

#intellectualism #mysticism #art

I rise today to discuss the National Intelligence Reform bill. I commend my colleagues in both Houses for their hard work in coming to an agreement. As with any conference, each voice is heard, but none can dominate and compromise must be achieved. ↗

— Ted Stevens

#agreement #any #bill #both #colleagues

Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality. ↗

— Robert McKee

#art #awareness #chaos #confusion #emotion

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you. ↗

— Diane Setterfield

#storytelling #nature