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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0811db8 | Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science. --EDWIN P. HUBBLE (1889-1953), The Nature of Science | Neil deGrasse Tyson | ||
| ee77eaf | And yes, every one of our body's atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago. We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out - and we have only just begun. | Neil deGrasse Tyson | ||
| 45c8c74 | Consider an adult who tends to the traumas of a child: spilled milk, a broken toy, a scraped knee. As adults we know that kids have no clue of what constitutes a genuine problem, because inexperience greatly limits their childhood perspective. Children do not yet know that the world doesn't revolve around them. As grown-ups, dare we admit to ourselves that we, too, have a collective immaturity of view? Dare we admit that our thoughts and be.. | Neil deGrasse Tyson | ||
| 09bf737 | Collectively, these findings tell us it's conceivable that life began on Mars and later seeded life on Earth, a process known as panspermia. | Neil deGrasse Tyson | ||
| 745719f | We must be brought to a place where, naturally gifted though we may be, we dare not speak except in conscious and continual dependence on Him. | Watchman Nee | ||
| e86ca2c | All we have left of liberty is an ad-man's illusion. | Jean Baudrillard | ||
| ac0bf44 | Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. | map reality simulation territory | Jean Baudrillard | |
| 85f42c3 | Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum. | Jean Baudrillard | ||
| 88de7a3 | If human emotions largely result from thinking, then one may appreciably control one's feelings by controlling one's thoughts - or by changing the internalized sentences, or self-talk, with which one largely created the feeling in the first place. | Albert Ellis | ||
| e230f57 | The purpose of life--if it may be said to have purpose--is not ease. It is to choose, and to act upon the choice. In that task, we are not measured by outcomes. We are measured only by daring and effort and resolve. | Stephen R. Donaldson | ||
| 3b6011f | For a moment after his voice faltered and fell, the sanctuary was silent, and the voice throbbed like weeping, as if in his words the people recognized themselves, recognized the failure he described as their own. But then a new voice arose. Saltheart Foamfollower said boldly, "My Lord, we have not reached our end. True, the work of our lifetime has been to comprehend and consolidate the gains of our forebearers. But our labour will open th.. | Stephen R. Donaldson | ||
| ab38435 | The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. By fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess. When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way life has to be. You cease to marvel at just how much evil man con conjure by existing. | fortune | Glen Cook | |
| 7600996 | It is an age lurching along the lip of a dark precipice, peeking fearfully into chaos's empty eyes, enrapt, like a giddy rat trying to stare down a hungry cobra. The gods are restless, tossing and turning and wakening in snippets to conspire at mischief. Their bastard offspring, the hundred million spirits of rock and brook and tree, of place and time and emotion, find old constraints are rotting. The Postern of Fate stands ajar. The world .. | Glen Cook | ||
| 2ec8f8d | Combat is fear and management of fear far more than it is organized murder. Those who manage fear best will seize the day. | Glen Cook | ||
| ca4cf1e | There is no vengeance as terrible as the vengeance a coward plots in the dark of his heart. | Glen Cook | ||
| 4be8c53 | No one will sing songs in our memory. We are the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar. Our traditions and memories live only in these Annals. We are our own mourners | Glen Cook The Black Company | ||
| a9a493f | You feel guilty. You wonder why him and not me, then you're glad it was him and not you, then you feel guilty. Soldiers live. And wonder why. | war | Glen Cook | |
| 81f90e9 | Stella realized then that Charlie's unhappiness had locked him out of this community as effectively as hers had, and she felt a dull sense of confirmation, she felt she might have known, this is the nature of people, they unerringly select as their victim the one who most needs their warmth. | Patrick McGrath | ||
| 0aa1984 | Behind every vocation there is a fetish. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| f07472d | I admired him more than anyone but I didn't wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to me. | envy jealousy love | Hanif Kureishi | |
| 53f9cfb | Now, watching her sleep, and closing his eyes, he felt, in this particular intimacy - stowed beneath her duvet - that he was intruding. At the same time, he knew, settling down, you couldn't dislike anyone you'd seen sleep | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| ff34406 | This was the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself, for bigger and better houses with more mod cons, the painstaking accumulation of comfort and, with it, status - the concrete display of earned cash. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 8ac25c9 | 'Hsst blrGb@ fy 'n tlqy lshrT@ lqbD `ly w twjh ly thm@ Hyz@ `ql l ymknny ltHkm fyh. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| a9c02d5 | The girl had many virtues: money, a car--a gold-coloured Capri, in which she played the latest funk--a big house and a rich father. When Valentin asked, 'What does your boyfriend do?' she replied, 'But I don't have one, really. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 1714284 | Everything has become very conventional. You're either in or you're out. I'm with the out- with the weird, the impossible, the victimised and the broken. It's the only place to be. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 3a9c8ac | Sometimes I felt the whole world was converging on this little room. And as I became more intoxicated and frustrated I'd throw open the bedroom window as the dawn came up, and look across the gardens, lawns, greenhouses, sheds and curtained windows. I wanted my life to begin now, at this instant, just when I was ready for it. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| d03a09c | The interesting people you wanted to be with - their minds were unusual, you saw things freshly with them and all was not deadness and repetition. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 2718cdd | ttsl lmdh ytHmWl lns kl dhlk, l'nhm `tdw `l~ dhlk. w lm y`d bmknhm 'n yrw mkny@ 'n tkwn l'shy mkhtlf@. m yfjy'ny lys lkm lkthyr ldhy yTlbh lns, bl lqlyl ldhy yTlbwnh. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 1795915 | A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life. | Alain de Botton | ||
| cf11e01 | We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 12a9e13 | But if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends are often equally bloody. We're familiar with political love that ends in tyranny, where a ruler's firm conviction that he has the true interests of his nation at heart ends up lending him the confidence to murder without qualms (and 'for their own good') all who disagree with him. Romantic lovers are similarly inclined to vent their frustration on dissenters.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| e32ea64 | Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism. | moralism | Alain de Botton | |
| a860883 | An urgent wish is no guarantor of a sound solution. | Alain de Botton | ||
| bf7ae96 | it seems impossible to talk of love and letting live, and if we are left to live, we are not usually loved. | Alain de Botton | ||
| ceed72d | The motor of our ingenuity is the question 'Does it have to be like this?', from which arise political reforms, scientific developments, improved relationships, better books. | Alain de Botton | ||
| e29a9a5 | history tells us of the case of a man living under the peculiar delusion that he was a fried egg. Quite how or when this idea had entered his head, no one knew, but he now refused to sit down anywhere for fear that he would 'break himself' and 'spill the yolk'. His doctors tried sedatives and other drugs to appease his fears, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, one of them made the effort to enter the mind of the deluded patient and sugges.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 7099151 | Confident that cast-iron walls separate our nature and situation from theirs, comfortable in the well-broken-in saddle of our high horse, we have exchanged our capacity to be tolerant for detachment and derision. It is the tragedian's task, then, to force us to confront an almost unbearable truth: every folly or myopia of which any human being in history has been guilty may be traced back to some aspect of our collective nature. Because we .. | Alain De Botton | ||
| eac940d | But we would do well to meditate daily, rather as the religious do on their God, on the 9.5 trillion kilometres which comprise a single light year, or perhaps on the luminosity of the largest known star in our galaxy, Eta Carinae, 7,500 light years distant, 400 times the size of the sun and 4 million times as bright. We should punctuate our calendars with celebrations in honour of VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant in the constellation Cani.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 56548e3 | What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between the worthwhile ends to which money might be put and the often morally trivial and destructive mechanisms of its generation. | material-goods meaning money things triviality wealth | Alain de Botton | |
| 59671d2 | The travails of being an employee include not only uncertainty about the duration of one's employment, but also the humiliation of many working practices and dynamics. With most businesses shaped like pyramids, in which a wide base of employees gives way to a narrow tip of managers, the question of who will be rewarded - and who left behind - typically develops into one of the most oppressive of the workplace, and one which, like all anxiet.. | status-anxiety | Alain de Botton | |
| 34290fe | We take this idea of love (being loved, rather than loving) with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will anticipate our needs, read our hearts, act selflessly, and make everything better. It sounds "romantic," yet it is a blueprint for disaster." | romanticism | Alain de Botton | |
| 311d2fc | At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through--and which therefor.. | anonymity cafeteria diner disappointment motorways travel | Alain de Botton | |
| 7bb7b2e | We charm by coincidence rather than design. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 0410667 | Our "ego" or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated, and ever vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect." -- | Alain de Botton |