#tory

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger. ↗

— Ben Okri

#mythology #stories #storytelling #life

Bruno withdrew from the field of history more resolutely than Vigo; that is why I prefer the former’s retrospect but the latter’s prospect. As an anarch, I am determined to go along with nothing, ultimately take nothing seriously – at least not nihilistically, but rather as a border guard in no man’s land, who sharpens his eyes and ears between the tides. ↗

— Ernst Jünger

#anarchy #ernst-jünger #history #nihilism #time

Half of writing history is hiding the truth. ↗

— Joss Whedon

#foucault #history #lies #truth #lie

Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. ↗

— Sarah Vowell

#coffee #history #coffee

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe you have done. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#belief #rewriting-history #sherlock-holmes #belief

Constantine saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing this inscription: conquer by this. At the sight, he himself was struck with amazement and his whole army also. ↗

— Eusebius

#church-history #constantine #orthodoxy #patristics #saints

You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it. ↗

— Roger Kahn

#defeat #victory #life

Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#good #history #invincibility #tyrants #victory

...neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency. ↗

— Jared Diamond

#life

Narratives are the primary way in which we make sense of our lives, as opposed to, for example schema,cognition, beliefs, constructs. Definition of narrative include the important element of giving meaning to events and experiences over time by connecting them as a developing, continuing story. ↗

— Jacqui Stedmon

#life-story #narrative #perspective #experience