Short thoughts

Everything terrible is something that needs our love. - Rilke

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You can tell the size of the man by the size of things that bother him.

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There is no feeling so tragic as wishing you had tried harder.

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If I keep a green bough in my heart the singing bird will come. - Chinese proverb

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The universe whispers until it screams.

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J’entends ta voix dans tous les bruits du monde. - Paul Eluard

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Yet culture is important. Without it we remain emotionally uneducated. There are consequences of fake culture that are comparable to the consequences of corruption in politics. In a world of fakes, the public interest is constantly sacrificed to private fantasy, and the truths on which we depend for our rescue are left unexamined and unknown.

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The way you do anything

Is the way you do everything

Buddhist saying

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Love yourself and watch

Today

Tomorrow

Always

Buddhist saying

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Percentages are true only for epidemiologists, while people live out their lives as a series of n=1 experiments. There is an arrogance in the certainty of numbers that will always be undone by the stochastic process that is life. - DNA Exchange 

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You're really preserving a kind of state park in the middle of your psyche where nothing can intrude, where only fiction happens.  -Alan Gurganus

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I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious...

... Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions. It talks about the arc of life and the quality of experience in ways that I’ve found fruitful to think about. Religion has been profoundly effective in enlarging human imagination and expression. It’s only very recently that you couldn’t see how the high arts are intimately connected to religion.

...It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege…

...I worry that I’m not pessimistic enough. My own life is full of profound satisfactions, and I’m distracted from the fact that the world is not in good shape. I cherish time, for instance, and for the most part I have control over my time, which is a marker of a very high standard of living as far as I’m 
concerned. At some point I created an artificial tropic for myself, where I could do exactly what I wanted to do and be rewarded for it. There’s a puritanical hedonism in my existence.  

                                                                                     -Robinson

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The war against poshlost' was a cultural obsession of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia from the 1860s to 1960s.

Poshlost' is the Russian version of banality, with a characteristic national flavoring of metaphysics and high morality, and a peculiar conjunction of the sexual and the spiritual. This one word encompasses triviality, vulgarity, sexual promiscuity, and a lack of spirituality.

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If there is no wind, row.

Brothers K

"The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha.

I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring.

I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them.

Here they have brought the soup for you, eat it, it will do you good. It’s first-rate soup, they know how to make it here.

I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard.

And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is.

It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach."

DFW

“This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.”

Purpose

Hypomnema, definition:

• taking notes on the reading, conversations, and reflections that one hears or engages in oneself; keeping kinds of notebooks on important subjects, which must be reread from time to time so as to reactualize their contents

• Their objective is not to bring the mysteries of consciousness to light, the confession of which—be it oral or written—has a purifying value (not be taken for intimate diaries or for those accounts of spiritual experience (temptations, struggles, falls, and victories)

(Dave Sandford, Lake Erie waves)