#ura

Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness- natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#courage

Terror made me cruel . . . ↗

— Emily Brontë

#haunting #supernatural #terrorism

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. ↗

— Barack Obama

#president

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. ↗

— John F. Kennedy

#civic-responsibility #inaugural-address #politics #responsibility

The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or…ideologies…all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#tao #nature

I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#interview #job #judgement #observation #paris-review

Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts... ↗

— Robert Fulghum

#spirit

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit. ↗

— Noel Coward

#discouraging #few #honesty #how #many

I got swirling eyes and the capacity to shatter windows with my bare voice. Tod got teleportation and invisibility. The supernatural world is so far from fair. ↗

— Rachel Vincent

#supernatural #supernatural

How come when mortals want things, their only option is to make a deal with Hell and sell their soul? Why can’t they make deals with God in exchange for good behavior?" It was another of those rare moments when I’d surprised Carter. I waited for the glib answer I’d mentioned to Seth, something along the lines of goodness being its own reward. The angel considered for several seconds. "Humans make those deals all the time," he said finally. "They just don’t make them with God." "Then who are they making them with?" I exclaimed. "Themselves. ↗

— Richelle Mead

#fiction #georgina #god #paranormal #romance