“To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means an awareness that oppression exists… secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor’s real name…”
— Chinua Achebe, “Spelling Out Proper Name”
8:58 pm • 29 May 2012 • 1 note • #quote #chinua achebe
“
It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble.
If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.
On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.
Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future. And it is precisely the mix of these two modes of thought that is central to the success of science.
”
— Carl Sagan
9:07 pm • 23 May 2012 • 1 note • #quote #Carl Sagan #science
“All things truly wicked start from an innocence. So you live day by day and enjoy what you have and do not worry. You lie and hate it and it destroys you and every day is more dangerous, but you live day to day as in a war.”
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
7:38 pm • 23 May 2012 • #quote #hemingway #a moveable feast
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
— Ernest Hemingway
12:52 am • 23 May 2012 • 5 notes • #quote #hemingway
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
— Carl Sagan
11:39 am • 8 May 2012 • 19 notes • #quote #carl sagan
“He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how: but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as I’d they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured.”
— James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”
12:34 pm • 20 April 2012 • #quote #James Joyce
“To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world.”
— Rudolf Steiner (via fuckyeahexistentialism)
1:57 am • 15 April 2012 • 725 notes • #quote
“…the dreamer is banished to obscurity. Well, I’m trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming, every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds.”
— Waking Life
6:50 pm • 30 March 2012 • 8 notes • #quote
“Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration… shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects… All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.”
— Nietzsche
9:38 pm • 21 March 2012 • 1 note • #quote #Nietzsche
“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
— Albert Einstein
(Source: physicsandchemistryrevision, via victorioushandofgod)
6:29 pm • 20 March 2012 • 6,300 notes • #quote
“From the moment of birth every human being wants happiness and freedom and wants to avoid suffering. In this we are all the same; and the more we care for the happiness of others the greater our own sense of each other becomes. Many of our problems are created by ourselves based on divisions due to ideology, religion, race, resources, economic status or other factors. The time has come to think on a deeper, more human level and appreciate and respect our sameness as human beings. And to have a respect for endangered cultures that share these principles. We are at the dawn of an age in which many people feel that extreme political concepts should cease to dominate human affairs. We should use this opportunity to replace them with universal human and spiritual values and ensure that these values become the fiber of the global family that is emerging. It is not possible to find peace with anger, hatred, jealousy or greed. At every level of society, familial, tribal, national and international, the key to a happier and more peaceful and successful world is the growth of compassion. We do not necessarily need to become religious, nor even believe in an ideology. We need only to develop our good human qualities and know that love and compassion are the most essential concepts for human survival. So long as human beings live and suffer, the only world open to our present knowledge, the brotherhood of man will seem an unattainable principle. In order for us to achieve real lasting peace among one another, the effort to realize that noblest and most satisfactory moral value must be occupation of every individual intelligence.”
— Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
8:13 pm • 18 March 2012 • 43 notes • #quote
“when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because.”
— E.E. Cummings
2:37 am • 17 March 2012 • 3 notes • #quote #cummings #poem
“Listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go”
— E.E. Cummings
2:28 am • 17 March 2012 • 2 notes • #quote #cummings
“All things desire to persist in their being.”
— Borges, ‘The Wall and the Books’ (via thoughtshrapnel)
(via fuckyeahexistentialism)
1:03 pm • 15 March 2012 • 204 notes • #quote
“In war planning as in everything else, human beings often get it wrong. It can be tragic to be wrong; it isn’t shameful. What is shameful is to possess the capacity to recognize and fix mistakes but to fail to do so, out of pride, politics, or indifference to the suffering of others…”
— The New Yorker
12:02 pm • 14 March 2012 • 5 notes • #quote #Afghanistan #news #war
