#z

We humans are naturally disposed to worship gods and heroes, to build our pantheons and valhallas. I would rather see that impulse directed into the adoration of daft singers, thicko footballers and air-headed screen actors than into the veneration of dogmatic zealots, fanatical preachers, militant politicians and rabid cultural commentators. ↗

— Stephen Fry

#religious-extremism #zealotry #nature

To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature - the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy grades, the water, the soil, the air itself. ↗

— Dee Brown

#indians #nature #nature

But the nature of the universe is such that the ends never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#rationalizations #unsourced #nature

... cynicism is the only tool that can scrape away the tint off rose-coloured glasses. ↗

— Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

#flame-lily #great-zimbabwe #hangman #mystrey #parnormal

I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air -- or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#laziness #london #watson #nature

Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want women who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life. Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage, its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#beauty #body-image #consumer #cosmetic-surgery #cosmetics

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#philosophy #politics #men

How intense can be the longing to escape from the emptiness and dullness of human verbosity, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labour, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion! ↗

— Boris Pasternak

#peace #quiet #zhivago #music

Every living organism is fulfilled when it follows the right path for its own nature. ↗

— Marcus Aurelius

#fulfilment #nature #organism #rightness #self-actualization

But the philosophical and scientific process which I call 'secularization' necessarily involves the divesting of spiritual meaning from the world of nature; the desacralization of politics from human affairs; and the deconsecration of values from the human mind and conduct. ↗

— Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas

#secularization #nature