#tent

He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh. ↗

— Hunter S. Thompson

#existential #fate #luck #faith

Consciousness, which is the "reflective" element of Norman's conceptual brain, handles the "higher" functions at the metaphorical tip of the very top of that complicated organ. Because consciousness pays a lot of attention to your thoughts, you tend to identify it with cognition. However, if you try to figure out exactly how you run your business or care for your family, you soon realize that you can't grasp that process just by thinking about it. As Norman puts it, "Consciousness also has a qualitative, sensory feel. If I say, 'I'm afraid,' it's not just my mind talking. My stomach also knots up. ↗

— Winifred Gallagher

#awareness #cognition #consciousness #focus #business

Search for contentment in each person you meet. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#contentment #inspirational #kindness #motivational #inspirational

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#freedom #responsibility #sartre #freedom

A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel. ↗

— Jose Marti

#around #being #child #content #does

Contentment free us from the suffering of expecting life to be different, and it helps our mind to be free from the past, and the illusion of the nonexistent future. ↗

— Martin Suarez

#clinging #contentment #freedom #freedom

Most humans, in varying degrees, are already dead. In one way or another they have lost their dreams, their ambitions, their desire for a better life. They have surrendered their fight for self-esteem and they have compromised their great potential. They have settled for a life of mediocrity, days of despair and nights of tears. They are no more than living deaths confined to cemeteries of their choice. Yet they need not remain in that state. They can be resurrected from their sorry condition. They can each perform the greatest miracle in the world. They can each come back from the dead... ↗

— Og Mandino

#choices #mediocrity #miracle #potential #potential-for-greatness

The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain. ↗

— Lisa St Aubin de Terán

#content #creativity #form #imagination #structure

Sometimes, we feel conscious but unable to move our body. The first thing to do is focus in a prayer, then start to wink frequently. By this way, slowly but sure our body can be moved totally by our persistent willpower. ↗

— Toba Beta

#conscious #control #dream #dreams #focus

Do I dream you? Or you dream me? Or does someone, something bigger than all' - her hands swept the vast constellations above them - 'this beauteous calamity, dream everything we see and more? ↗

— David Hewson

#existentialism #questions #dreams