#insight

There is something cathartic about what has happened to me during this stay in hospital. I’ve heard others say that coming face to face with your own mortality can have this effect. You look with harsh, savage eyes at the life you are living and resolve to make the best of the time you have left, if you can be allowed the luxury of a few extra years to fulfill your plans. Around me, I see an urgency creep into the lives of friends once they have an AIDS diagnosis: they rush out and try to complete as many life projects as they can, before their health deteriorates. ↗

— David Menadue

#life

How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#despair #ignorance #insight #loneliness #love

We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring. ↗

— Jon Ronson

#insight #journalism #humor

Chance favors the connected mind. ↗

— Steven Johnson

#innovation #insightful #internet #nature

There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms -- if only because our species is such an insignificant latecomer in a world not constructed for us. So much the better. The answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there, waiting to be discovered. They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us -- the most difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery or consensus. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#morality #nature

Come on. I don't have any problem violating my own insights in practice. ↗

— Slavoj Žižek

#practise-vs-preach #insight

Respect those elder to you in years, in knowledge and spiritual attainment and act with love and compassion with those who are younger or less fortunate than you. ↗

— Shri Radhe Maa

#meditation #quotes-and-saying #quotes-of-life #radhe-guru-maa #radhe-maa

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#drafts #ideas #insight #notes #thinkers

In space you don't stop. ↗

— Christopher Carosa

#science #science

She could ask for anything, she thought dizzily, anything--an end to pain or world hunger or disease, or for peace on earth. But then again, perhaps these things weren't in the power of angels to grant, or they would already have been granted. And perhaps people were supposed to find these things for themselves. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#city-of-glass #clary-fray #insight #mortal-instruments #teens