#ems

Anchor It took twenty horses to lug me through the shipyard on the back of a cart like a fifteen-and-a-half ton pantomime dame. My spitting image was weighed on the other side of the bow: two fat men in drag; we felt as though no-one could ever bring us down. ↗

— Natalie Scott

#poems #poetry #titanic #men

Sometimes, the only way to solve your problems in life, the only way to conquer your fears, is if you face them. If you face your problems, they just flee. But if you flee instead, run away from them, they only get bigger, and they can totally destroy you. ↗

— Elizabeth Newton

#bravery #christian #fear #monsters #motivational

Whether it means prizing the value of lessons learned, building games into your creative process, or getting gifts upon certain milestones of achievement, self-derived rewards make a big difference…You cannot ignore or completely escape the deeply ingrained short-term reward system within you. But you can become aware of what really motivates you and then tweak your incentives to sustain your long-term pursuits. ↗

— Scott Belsky

#self-motivation #motivational

My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do. ↗

— Anne Stevenson

#because #confusion #contrary #earlier #enjoys

The machines are too dull when we are lion-poems that move & breathe. ↗

— Michael McClure

#lion #machines #nature #poems #poetry

Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but uncontrollable, whereas sufficiently complex symbolic descriptions are controllable but unpredictable. ↗

— Howard Pattee

#philosophy #science #systems #nature

Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly. ↗

— Erica Jong

#religions #systems #religion

Religion which takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#solving-problems #religion

[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#art #criticism #desire #films #gravity

Big whirls have little whirls, That feed on their velocity; And little whirls have lesser whirls, And so on to viscosity. ↗

— Lewis Fry Richardson

#science #systems #science