#v

If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year's model. The system attempts to remake people to fit its own presuppositions. If people's wants are not naturally insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going. ↗

— Herman E. Daly

#consumerism #desire #economics #nature

. Cold Mountain . . . soared in his mind as a place where all his scattered forces might gather. Inman did not consider himself to be a superstitious person, but he did believe that there is a world invisible to us. He no longer thought of that world as heaven, nor did he still think that we get to go there when we die. Those teachings had been burned away. But he could not abide by a universe composed only of what he could see, especially when it was so frequently foul. ↗

— Charles Frazier-Cold Mountain

#mountain #nature #war #love

I have a natural tendency to go away when told to do so. Do you really want me to? ↗

— Margaret Way

#leaving #nature

Sometimes you don’t choose greatness, it chooses you. And when it does, it requires a certain level of understandin', courage and a degree of blind hope. ↗

— Jay Grewal

#inspirational #motivational #spiritual #courage

I found something! Courage--just that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#courage-in-love #courageous #fitzgerald #gatsby #inspirational

Si no quieres acabar en un manicomio, abre tu corazon y abandonate al curso natural de la vida ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#vida #nature

For the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man. ↗

— Northrop Frye

#nature #nature

It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust. ↗

— Sebastian Barry

#truth #love

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings. ↗

— Steven Johnson

#innovation #insightful #nature

The Moral Law isn't any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts. (...) The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There's not one of them which won't make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it isn't. If you leave out justice you'll find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials 'for the sake of humanity,' and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#instincts #moral-law #love