#v

What is harder than rock? What is softer than water? Yet hard rocks are hollowed out by soft water? ↗

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#jimi-the-kewl #natural-questions #seneca #nature

I hope you haven't given up on the S.Q.'s of the world, Reynie. As you see, there are a great many sheep in wolves' clothing. If not for S.Q.'s good nature, we'd never have escaped. ↗

— Trenton Lee Stewart

#human-nature #trust #nature

The source of all light is in the eye. ↗

— Alan Wilson Watts

#nature #observation #relativity #nature

And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#moral #morality #nature #supreme-being #nature

Everyone judges constantly: positively judging one person is the same as negatively judging everyone else; it is to say that that person is superior in some sense. ↗

— Criss Jami

#human #human-nature #judging #judgmental #logic

What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be. ↗

— David Mitchell

#violence #war #nature

I’ve always been a sort of self-imposed outsider, not a geeky outsider or a snobby outsider but, I just have a natural desire to live on the fringe. I’m not like a weirdo with a trench-coat but I just prefer to be alone or minimally surrounded by people. ↗

— Sara Quin

#living-on-the-fringe #outsider #sara-quin #solitude #surrounded-by-people

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché. ↗

— Khaled Hosseini

#writing #nature

Perfect by nature, icons of self indulgence. Just what we need more lies about our world. ↗

— Evanescence

#nature

[T]hat state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings --- the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horor from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite [...] in the hope that if we apply all the metaphors of normality, that if we heap them high enough, we shall, in the end, be able to approximate that state metaphorically. ↗

— Amitav Ghosh

#love #love