#very

The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#knowledge #life #progress #reason #faith

Real hope combined with real action has always pulled me through difficult times. Real hope combined with doing nothing has never pulled me through. ↗

— Jenni Schaefer

#recovery #life

Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. ↗

— Frederick Douglass

#life

Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#franz-kafka #heaven #kafka #life #moment

A little reckless bravery may end up saving your life. ↗

— Henry Chancellor

#bravery #life #saving #true #life

The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest. ↗

— George Eliot

#everyday-life #life

It was the cool gray dawn, and there was a delicious sense of repose and peace in the deep pervading calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred; not a sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation [...] Gradually the cool dim gray of the morning whitened, and as gradually sounds multiplied and life manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to the musing boy [...] All Nature was wide awake and stirring, now; long lances of sunlight pierced down through the dense foliage far and near, and a few butterflies came fluttering upon the scene. ↗

— Mark Twain

#nature #life

How can the word love, the word life, even fit in the mouth? ↗

— Jandy Nelson

#jandy-nelson #life #love #the-sky-is-everywhere #life

If something is wrong, it matters not if a thousand men are for it; you must still oppose it. If something is just, no amount of popular outcry should stay you from your course. ↗

— Terry Goodkind

#morality #truth #men

The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people's salt and other people's cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#greed #horror #nightmares #slavery #sweat