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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ea3e16c | There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures. Each part assumes its proper dimensions: continents are not looked at in the light of islands, or islands considered as mere specks, which are, in truth, larger than many kingdoms of Europe. Africa, or North and South America, are w.. | travel worldview | Charles Darwin | |
| a0318f6 | The 'Manifesto' being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to . That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that ep.. | charles-darwin class-struggle communism darwin exploitation history karl-marx marx oppression | Friedrich Engels | |
| f469708 | Since men cannot create new forces, but merely combine and control those which already exist, the only way in which they can preserve themselves is by uniting their separate powers in a combination strong enough to overcome any resistance, uniting them so that their powers are directed by a single motive and act in concert. | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | ||
| a07c669 | It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires, and who can doubt that the interest we have in admitting or denying the reality of the Judgement to come determines the faith of most men in accordance with their hopes and fears. | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | ||
| 17af5a7 | He who blushes is already guilty. | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | ||
| 418f2d3 | Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. | emile | Jean Jacques Rousseau | |
| 1cbaf10 | All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication. | Julian Jaynes | ||
| cf603eb | We believe that religions are basically the same...they only differ on matters of creation, sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation. | pluralism reductionism religion | Steve Turner | |
| 4320846 | It is the strain of walking around the world-down the street, riding city buses and elevators, moving from place to place to place-and not knowing who might want to destroy you, who might like to fill your heart with poison, who might rob you and stab you, who might stand above you in the dark with a tarantula. | Joe Meno | ||
| cae3619 | A few years ago I was having a hot-cocoa nightcap at a dessert shop in Pasadena, California. Ordered it with whipped cream, of course. When it arrived at the table, I saw no trace of the stuff. After I told the waiter that my cocoa had no whipped cream, he asserted I couldn't see it because it sank to the bottom. But whipped cream has low density, and floats on all liquids that humans consume. So I offered the waiter two possible explanatio.. | Neil deGrasse Tyson | ||
| 6698d26 | By the way, were we to find life-forms on Venus, we would probably call them Venutians, just as people from Mars would be Martians. But according to rules of Latin genitives, to be "of Venus" ought to make you a Venereal. Unfortunately, medical doctors reached that word before astronomers did. Can't blame them, I suppose. Venereal disease long predates astronomy, which itself stands as only the second oldest profession." | Neil deGrasse Tyson | ||
| 5d45a0c | How do we change the way science is taught? Ask anybody how many teachers truly made a difference in their life, and you never come up with more than the fingers on one hand. You remember their names, you remember what they did, you remember how they moved in front of the classroom. You know why you remember them? Because they were passionate about the subject. You remember them because they lit a flame within you. They got you excited abou.. | teachers | Neil deGrasse Tyson | |
| 238219b | We must not pay attention just to reading and studying; rather, we should ask if we are open before the Lord. If we do not have an unveiled face, the glory of the Lord will not shine on us. If our heart is not open to God, God cannot give us any light. | Watchman Nee | ||
| c8ea8b7 | You ever get the feeling all hell's about to break loose and there's nothing you can do about it? | crime romance suspense-drama | Ali Vali | |
| c3ddbfc | All of [the] activities here have a surreptitious end-of-the-world feel to them:... these joggers sleepwalking in the mist like shadow's who have escaped from Plato's cave | Jean Baudrillard | ||
| 9a09ec1 | Bitter though it may be to many, Cadfael concluded, there is no substitute for truth, in this or any case. | ellis-peters truth | Ellis Peters | |
| e1038fa | Meet every man as you find him, for we're all made the same under habit, robe or rags. Some better made than others, and some better cared for, but on the same pattern, all. | Ellis Peters | ||
| 1d1c056 | Much of what we call emotion is nothing more or less than a certain kind - a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind - of thought. | Albert Ellis | ||
| 639d1c6 | The story of Terisa and Geraden began very much like a fable. She was a princess in a high tower. He was a hero come to rescue her. She was the only daughter of wealth and power. He was the seventh son of the lord of the seventh Care. She was beautiful from the auburn hair that crowned her head to the tips of her white toes. He was handsome and courageous. She was held prisoner by enchantment. He was a fearless breaker of enchantments. As i.. | Stephen R. Donaldson | ||
| 2d976e2 | I was my usual charming morning self, threatening blood feud with anyone fool enough to disturb my dreams. | Glen Cook | ||
| 69f956e | You who come after me, scribbling these Annals, by now realize that I shy off portraying the whole truth about our band of blackguards. You know they are vicious, violent, and ignorant. They are complete barbarians, living out their cruelest fantasies, their behavior tempered only by the presence of a few decent men. I do not often show that side because these men are my brethren, my family, and I was taught young not to speak ill of kin. T.. | Glen Cook | ||
| 8fdfa53 | Imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul. | passion | Alister E. McGrath | |
| e823c1c | Like the character Moliere who discovered to his astonishment that he had been speaking prose all his life, I discovered to my astonishment that I had been immersed in philosophical problems all my life. And I had been drawn into the same problems as great philosophers by the same felt need to make sense of the world...The chief difference between me and them, of course, was that whereas they had something to offer by way of solutions to th.. | Bryan Magee | ||
| 6c91cf3 | I was beginning to understand how the Irish mentality worked. The more foolish, illogical or surreal one's actions were perceived t be (and mine surely fell into one of these categories), the wider the arms of hospitality were opened in salutation. | Tony Hawks | ||
| 78d5548 | The destination was not really the point. The true desire was to get away--to go, as he concluded, 'anywhere! anywhere! so long as it is out of the world! | Alain de Botton | ||
| 25ca913 | Beauty, then, is a fragment of the divine, and the sight of it saddens us by evoking our sense of loss and our yearning for the life denied us. | Alain de Botton | ||
| ef0f907 | Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives. | hopes humiliation life nature perspective | Alain de Botton | |
| 98f4832 | writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence. | Alain de Botton | ||
| be53652 | Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities. | influence minds others priorities satisfaction soul | Alain de Botton | |
| 511595d | Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available. | fruit impatience modernity | Alain de Botton | |
| 4901756 | It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided. | work | Alain de Botton | |
| 392f544 | A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily. | failure forgiveness judgmentt tragedy | Alain de Botton | |
| ee4f41f | Whereas we can say something sensible and polite to any stranger, it is only in the presence of the lover we wholeheartedly believe in that can we date to be extravagantly and boundlessly unreasonable. | Alain de Botton | ||
| ce9223c | What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 275133e | One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love. | literature | Alain de Botton | |
| 8493363 | How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships - if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love. Esther's | Alain de Botton | ||
| 63acc49 | I will never be able to do or be everything you want, nor vice versa, but I'd like to think we can be the sort of people who will dare to tell each other who we really are. The alternative is silence and lies, which are the real enemies of love. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 0f2edb9 | For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we know--without ever having constructed one ourselves--that a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and ba.. | complexity complicated construction design elegance intuition simplicity | Alain de Botton | |
| c78c814 | I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise, but learned. And it has succeeded. It has not taught us to seek virtue and to embrace wisdom: it has impressed upon us their derivation and their etymology ... We readily inquire, 'Does he know Greek or Latin?' 'Can he write poetry and prose?' But what matters most is what we put last: 'Has he become better and wiser?' We ought .. | Alain de Botton | ||
| c757462 | Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism or aggression but, at the rare moments one can imagine it, always love. | love | Alain de Botton | |
| df89823 | Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship. | Alain de Botton | ||
| af36342 | What does it mean that man is a 'social animal? Only that humans need one another in order to define themselves and achieve self-consciousness, in a way that molluscs or earthworms do not. We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there aren't others around to show us what we're like. 'A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character,' wrote Stendhal, suggesting that character has its genesis in the reactions of others to ou.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| ce40b6b | It seemed impossible, from within love at least, that this could have been anything but fate. It would have taken a steady mind to contemplate without superstition the enormous probability of a meeting that had turned out to alter our lives. Someone at (30,000 feet) must have been pulling strings in the sky. | Alain de Botton | ||
| af8ece9 | Some things in this world just ain't mean to be, not in the times we want 'em to, and the heart has to hold it in this world as a remembrance, a promise for the world that's to come. There's a prize at the end of all of it, but still, that's a heavy load to bear. | the-good-lord-bird | James McBride |