#there

He explained how ridiculous the clowning was, and there and then I decided to settle down and play seriously. ↗

— Mary Lou Williams

#decided #down #explained #how #i

Each reform, therefore, improving the economical and political situation of the workers proves to be an arm that increases the energy with which the proletarian struggle of classes is fought. ↗

— Clara Zetkin

#classes #each #economical #energy #fought

I soon became convinced... that all the theorizing would be empty brain exercise and therefore a waste of time unless one first ascertained what the population of the universe really consists of. ↗

— Fritz Zwicky

#became #brain #consists #convinced #empty

I don't even know what I'm looking for, although I hope I'll know it if I find it along the way. Sometimes I want to simplify my life into a simple bare thing. And other times I want to complicate it so thoroughly that everything I touch will become bound in some way to me. I've become quite aware of my contradictions, but there's no true resolution in that. ↗

— David Levithan

#contradictions #david-levithan #life #life

Recently, I’ve begun to think of scoliosis as a metaphor for my life. I’ve struggled to please teachers, employers, parents, boyfriends, husbands, twisting myself into someone I can’t be. I hurt when I do this, because it’s not natural. And it never works. But when I stretch my Self, instead, the results are different. When I’m reaching for my personal goals—to be a good mother, wife, friend and writer—I feel my balance return. And the sense of relief, as I become more the woman I truly am, is simply grand. ↗

— Linda Wisniewski

#life

Just like science, there must be other kinds of sensations which haven't yet been felt by the human heart at all. ↗

— Toba Beta

#heart #life #out-there #sensation #unknown

Pain, too, comes from depths that cannot be revealed. We do not know whether those depths are in ourselves or elsewhere, in a graveyard, in a scarcely dug grave, only recently inhabited by withered flesh. This truth, which is banal enough, unravels time and the face, holds up a mirror to me in which I cannot see myself without being overcome by a profound sadness that undermines one's whole being. The mirror has become the route through which my body reaches that state, in which it is crushed into the ground, digs a temporary grave, and allows itself to be drawn by the living roots that swarm beneath the stones. It is flattened beneath the weight of that immense sadness which few people have the privilege of knowing. So I avoid mirrors. ↗

— Tahar Ben Jelloun

#eating-disorder #eating-disorders #mirrors #poetry #self-esteem

For if God is a title of the highest power, He must be incorruptible, perfect, incapable of suffering, and subject to no other being; therefore they are not gods whom necessity compels to obey the one greatest God. ↗

— Lactantius

#compels #god #gods #greatest #highest

The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind. ↗

— Lactantius

#all things #amplified #confess #exploits #frequently

Therefore let men withdraw themselves from errors; and laying aside corrupt superstitions, let them acknowledge their Father and Lord, whose excellence cannot be estimated, nor His greatness perceived, nor His beginning comprehended. ↗

— Lactantius

#aside #beginning #cannot #comprehended #corrupt