#v

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses. ↗

— George Eliot

#initiative #positivity #rose

[T]he period between four and six in the morning is called the Brahmamuhurta, the Brahmic time, or divine period, and is a very sacred time to meditate. (140) ↗

— Swami Satchidananda

#meditation #morning #sacred #yoga

Vittoria slipped off her robe. 'You've never been to bed with a yoga master, have you? ↗

— Dan Brown

#yoga

Quoting from Thomas Merton Dialogues With Silence The true contemplative is not one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but is one who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect to anticipate the words that will transform his darkness into light. He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation. He does not demand light instead of darkness. He waits on the Word of God in silence, and, when he is answered it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence. It is by his silence itself, suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God. (17) ↗

— Stephen Cope

#darkness #god #light #silence #transformation

Attempting to contain the infinite within finite symbolism of language may result in scholarship, but it will not produce devotion. (110) ↗

— Prem Prakash

#finite #infinite #yoga

Before you judge me as some kind of 'anything goes' language heathen, let me just say that I'm not against usage standards. I don't violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don't wear a bikini to a funeral when I want to look like a respectful person. There are social conventions for the way we do lots of things, and it is to everyone's benefit to be familiar with them. But logic ain't got nothin' to do with it. ↗

— Arika Okrent

#language #linguistics #prescriptivism #education

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished. It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#criminal-justice-system #cycle-of-violence #desperation #greed #homelessness

We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without. ↗

— Immanuel Kant

#poverty #riches #rich

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#misery #poverty #poverty

It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that, whenever we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation—of loneliness, poverty, and misery, the end and extreme of things—the thought of God comes into one's mind. ↗

— Vincent Van Gogh

#poverty