#ty

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#nature #nature

Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling. ↗

— Honoré de Balzac

#feeling #sincerity #women #nature

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus at a discount and like everything else in a world ruled by the laws of exchange value, literature is required to submit itself to the requirements of the market and must learn, like any other commodity, to adapt and serve needs that lie outside of itself and its concrete value. It is forced to stand not for itself but for an ideological cause of one sort or another, whether it be political, social or literary. It cannot exist for itself: like everything else it has to be justified. And for this very reason the power of storytelling is automatically devalued. Literature is reduced to the status of complimentary utilitarian functions: as a pastime to provide distraction and entertainment, or as a heightened activity that would claim to explore 'great truths' about the human condition. ↗

— Michael Richardson

#commodity #entertainment #literature #stories #surrealism

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

Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things. ↗

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

#christ #christian-religion #christianity #god-father #god-son

I can't tell them what to do!" "Why not?" the other girl demanded. "Honestly, Clary, if you don't start utilizing a bit of your natural feminine superiority, I just don't know what I'll do with you. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#clary-fray #isabelle-lightwood #mortal-instruments #nature

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do. ↗

— Steve Martin

#life

Trees're always a relief, after people. ↗

— David Mitchell

#forest #humanity #nature #trees #nature

If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#simplicity #nature

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony. ↗

— Benjamin Britten

#beautiful #beauty #cruel #disappointment #everlasting