#era

He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#intelligence #professionalism #significance #vulnerability #intelligence

That's the thing about the script, is that how these people were affected by their decision, and how it could ultimately kill them, and I mean literally. ↗

— Kevin Williamson

#affected #could #decision #how #i

Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at. [p.93] ↗

— Northrop Frye

#literary-criticism #education

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#poetic #profound #sabina #tereza #tomas

Things don't go wrong and break your heart so you can become bitter and give up. They happen to break you down and build you up so you can be all that you were intended to be. ↗

— Charles Jones

#life

It does good to no woman to be flattered [by a man] who does not intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignis-fatuus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#flattery #love #secret-love #sense #unavowed-love

There was a moment in my life when I really wanted to kill myself. And there was one other moment when I was close to that. . . . But even in my most jaded times, I had some hope. ↗

— Gerard Way

#hope #life #suicide #life

The lotus is the most beautiful flower, whose petals open one by one. But it will only grow in the mud. In order to grow and gain wisdom, first you must have the mud --- the obstacles of life and its suffering. ... The mud speaks of the common ground that humans share, no matter what our stations in life. ... Whether we have it all or we have nothing, we are all faced with the same obstacles: sadness, loss, illness, dying and death. If we are to strive as human beings to gain more wisdom, more kindness and more compassion, we must have the intention to grow as a lotus and open each petal one by one. ↗

— Goldie Hawn

#depression #flower #growth #illness #kindness

The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#gratitude #joy #les-miserables #suffering #victor-hugo

There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#fitzgerald #loneliness #scott #life