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.