"Reading laid the philosophical foundation of my being and changed my life."
-Richard H. Cracroft
"That which is of God is light; and he that recieveth light and continueth in God recieveth more light; and that light groweth brighter and brighter until the perfect day."
- Doctrine & Covenants 50:24
"He thought: How difficult it is to explain yourself to yourself. Sometimes there only is, and no knowing."
— Aidan Chambers
"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd."
- Alexander Pope
"I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room."
— Ray Bradbury
"A friend is someone with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud."
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"What so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling?"
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"A ruddy drop of manly blood, the surging sea outweighs. The world, uncertain, comes and goes. The lover, rooted, stays."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"You mean she would rather imagine herself relating to an absent person than build relationships with those around her?...She's a bit of a coward. That's why I have trouble with her eyes."
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"Sans toi, les émotions d'aujourd'hui ne seraient que la peau morte des émotions d'autrefois."
Without you, today's emotions would be the scurf of yesterday's.
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"At home we say a man who knows proverbs can't be all bad."
- Amélie
"I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong... but to feel strong."
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"Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past."
- Into the Wild
"I created you into diverse nations and tribes that you may come to know one another."
- Quran
"When I write a poem, I process experience. I take what's inside me - the raw, chaotic material of feeling or memory - and translate it into words and then shape those words into the rhythmical language we call a poem. This process brings me a wild kind of joy. Before, I was powerless and passive in the face of my confusion, but now I am active: the powerful shaper of my experience. I am transforming it into a lucid meaning."
-Gregory Orr
"Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be."
- William Hazlitt
"Reading allows us to drop deeply into the souls of others; to know some other people better than we know our friends, to learn that every person's response to life is unique and important."
-Richard H. Cracroft
"And she had loved him, sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!"
- Kate Chopin
"In abortion, the absolute must always be tempered by the contextual, because both are real, both valid, both hard. How can we do this? How can we refuse? Each abortion is a measure of our failure to protect, to nourish our own. Each basin I empty is a promise, but a promise broken a long time ago."
- Sallie Tisdale, We Do Abortions Here: A Nurse's Story
"and I'm not saying the effort is a waste of time, but I just love you for the things you couldn't change, though you've tried."
- Ben Folds
"Life is wonderful. Life is beautiful. We're all children of one big universe, so you don't have to be a chump."
- Ben Folds
"A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard. This is a radical mistake."
- William James, The Dilemma of Determinism
"I find a fatal flaw in the logic of love...
You want to fight for this love
But honey you cannot wrestle a dove.
So baby it's clear."
- The Shins
"The sun still shines."
- Sophie Scholl
"I somehow see what's beautiful in things that are ephemeral."
- She & Him
"There aren't a lot of things in our day that are without significance."
Elder D. Todd Christofferson
"You were already in a prison. You've been in a prison all your life...I didn't put you in prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars."
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"Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all."
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"With science, ideas can germinate within a bed of theory, form, and practice that assists their growth...but we, as gardeners, must beware...for some seeds are the seeds of ruin...and the most iridescent blooms are often the most dangerous."
- V for Vendetta (Novel)
"One should read Rousseau alone...in French...while naked."
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"Why is it that science requires determinism? Why would it require something that destroys itself? Science doesn’t require determinism, we do."
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“At some point, in the name of reason, we embrace the irrational.”
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“How interesting is that? That truth is a person. The commandments are important but it’s more important to follow the commander.”
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"If you take materialism seriously, you have to embrace eternal moral relativism. If you want to object to those positions on moral grounds, you have to step outside of materialist ontology to do so because materialism does not offer any."
- Dr. Gantt
"I think we should just skip the awkward, getting-to-know-each-other phase, where we lie to make each other happy and get to the stage where we're comfortable together, the good stage...sit in perfect silence with love every second."
- How to Say I Love You
"Held to the past, too aware of the pending."
- The Shins
"and being caught in between all you wish for and all you've seen and trying to find anything that you feel that you can believe in. May God's love be with you, always."
- Joseph Arthur
You don't see what you possess, a beauty calm and clear
It floods the sky and blurs the darkness like a chandelier
All the light that you possess is skewed by lakes and seas
The shattered surface, so imperfect, is all that you believe.
- The Hush Sound "You are the Moon"
Clementine: Are you NUTS?
Joel: It's been suggested
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"Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating."
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"Are we like those couples you see in restaurants? Are we the dining dead?"
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"I don't need nice. I don't need myself to be it, and I don't need anybody else to be it at me."
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Clementine: I wish you'd stayed.
Joel: I wish I'd stayed, too. NOW I wish I'd stayed. I wish I'd done a lot of things. I wish I'd... I wish I'd stayed... I do.
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
"The darkness is habitable."
- Michael Novok
"That Individual"
- Kierkegaard's epitaph
"Punch a moral relativist in the face and see what happens."
- Dr. Gantt
Cause' I don't know who I am without you.
All I know is that I should.
And I don't know if I can stand
Another hand upon you.
All I know is that I should.
- Missy Higgins
"It takes a kind of, I don't know, je ne seis quoi to take a woman to a nudist ping-pong bar on a first date."
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"You are unique. There are, I'm sure, uncommon things that you are particularly good at. Play to your strong suits, shine. Don't concentrate on things other people have told you you're no good at. Relish the talents you have. And always, always surround yourself with people that appreciate you."
- Girl Walks into a Bar
"No, do not tell me you love me.
Love, more often than not, is a whimsy, fleeting feeling.
Falling in love is easy.
Why do people think that it earns them something?
No, do not tell me that you love me.
Commit to me.
Relate to me.
Forgive me.
Carry my burdens.
Comfort my fears.
Inspire my thoughts.
Give me hope.
Show me how to believe in love."
"Are you sad? There's no more candy, bird."
-Moonbird (1959)
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
— Mark Twain
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
— Friedrich Nietzsche
"I have often thought as I read stories and novels and poems, especially poems, that they are no more than authors' confessions transformed by their art into something that confesses for us all. Indeed, looking back on my life-long passion for reading, the one activity that has kept me going and given me the most and only lasting pleasure, I think this is the reason that explains why it means so much to me. The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself."
— Aidan Chambers (Postcards from No Man's Land)
"I must simply fight with shadows in my own defense."
- Socrates
Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?
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You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.
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Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.
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There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.
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Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
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All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.
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Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!
-Leonardo da Vinci
"Not being able to govern events, I govern myself."
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"In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity."
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"If what we have not seen does not exist, our knowledge is marvelously shrunk: How narrow are the limits of our mind!"
- Montaigne
Readings for Intensive Writers: 5/17/11
"As I write my life, I learn my thoughts, whether good or ill, conscious or subconscious. They are my thoughts, and as I come to recognize them I become less and less vulnerable to the Ophelia Syndrome through which others once dictated my life to me."
"Not many of us ask ourselves, "How do I feel? What do I think?"--and wait for an answer."
"Failure to achieve individuation leaves people dependent on other, stronger personalities for their identity. They fail to understand their uniqueness."
"But eventually every discipline enters into the unknown, the uncertain, the theoretical, the hypothetical, where teachers can no longer tell students with certainty what they should think."
"At its best, even science is creative art."
“I seldom use the word absolutely. It seldom fits."
-President Boyd K. Packer
“When a great adventure is offered, you don’t refuse it.” -Amelia Earhart
"Don't be afraid to go where you've never gone and do what you've never done, because both are necessary to have what you've never had and be who you've never been."
"It seems to me that people have vast potential. Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don’t. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever... " ~ Philip Adam
"I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring" -David Bowie
"A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it."
"It's hard not to like a man that not only notices the colors, but speaks them."
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"I watched the contents of his soul for a moment and saw a black-painted boy calling the name Jesse Owens as he ran through an imaginary tape. I saw him hip-deep in some icy water chasing a book, and I saw a boy lying in bed, imagining how a kiss would taste from his glorious next-door neighbor. He does something to me, that boy. Every time. It's his only detriment. He steps on my heart. He makes me cry."
- The Book Thief
"
More isn't always better, Linus. Sometimes it's just more.
"That means that the performers will periodically dance about and burst into song."
"Once upon a time, on the north shore of Long Island, not far from New York, there was a very, very large mansion, almost a castle. And on this very large estate lived a small girl. And life was pleasant there and very, very simple. But, then one day, the girl grew up and went beyond the walls of the grounds and found the world."
"Give up yourself and you will find your real self. Submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep nothing back. Nothing that you have not given away will ever really be yours. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else in thrown in."
- CS Lewis
"with so many people to love in my life, why do i worry about one? sometimes you just have to walk away."
"If true love were easy, everyone would have it." - Once Upon a Time
"We human beings have little comprehension of what we are. The difficulty is not that we are ignorant. It's that we are self-deceiving." - C. Terry Warner "What We Are"
"Then your mental illnesses arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives. And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and they try to be quiet, but you know they are there with their weird, coppery breath, leering at you from behind your back." - Anne Lamott
"Believe me. Men are either eaten up with arrogance or stupidity. If they are amiable, they are so easily led they have no minds of their own whatsoever." - Elizabeth Bennet
“There is more to sex appeal than just measurements. I don't need a bedroom to prove my womanliness. I can convey just as much sex appeal, picking apples off a tree or standing in the rain.”
― Audrey Hepburn
re ends another day, during which I have had eyes, ears, hands and the great world around me. Tomorrow begins another day. Why am I allowed two?"
"Music with dinner is an insult to both the cook and the violinist."
“Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”
“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.”
“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
“There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”
“Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.”
“If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?”
“I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.”
“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
“Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.”
“It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't.”
“That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.”
“A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish.”
- G.K. Chesterton
“Lying in bed would be an altogether supreme experience if one only had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.”
“I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had been right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things. The optimist's pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in thewrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”
“Science must not impose any philosophy,
any more than the telephone must tell
us what to say.”
- G.K. Chesterton
Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves her. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in her, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true. - Viktor Frankl
"Agency is the hinge on which our understanding of all other psychological phenomena turns." - Richard Williams
"ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32
"In the slums, in the broken body, in the children, we see Christ and we touch him." Mother Teresa
"It's a relationship. It's a relationship all the way down." - Dr. Reber
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
- Sylvia Plath
any more than the telephone must tell
us what to say.”
- G.K. Chesterton
Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves her. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in her, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true. - Viktor Frankl
"Agency is the hinge on which our understanding of all other psychological phenomena turns." - Richard Williams
"ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32
"In the slums, in the broken body, in the children, we see Christ and we touch him." Mother Teresa
"It's a relationship. It's a relationship all the way down." - Dr. Reber
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
- Sylvia Plath
