#iving

O Life, How oft we throw it off and think, — 'Enough, Enough of life in so much! — here's a cause For rupture; — herein we must break with Life, Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged, Maimed, spoiled for aspiration: farewell Life!' — And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes And think all ended. — Then, Life calls to us In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice, Above us, or below us, or around . . Perhaps we name it Nature's voice, or Love's, Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamed To own our compensations than our griefs: Still, Life's voice! — still, we make our peace with Life. ↗

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

#giving-up #life #life

Ravens bring things to people. We're like that. It's our nature. We don't like it. ↗

— Peter S. Beagle

#ravens #nature

We just did an awesome job of not dying. ↗

— John Green

#good-job #surviving #awesome

The function of the well-intentioned individual, acting in isolation, is to formulate or disseminate theoretical truths. The function of the well-intentioned individuals in association is to live in accordance with those truths, to demonstrate what happens when theory is translated into practice, to create small-scale working models of the better form of society to which the speculative idealist looks forward. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#ends-and-means #social-living #nature

Simon drove as if he knew something about physics that Einstein hadn’t thought of and God never intended. If nature abhorred a vacuum, Simon positively loathed one, and rushed to fill in the tiniest gap in the heavy flow of speeding traffic. He passed on the right, left, center, and all variations in between, and the Keble responded as if involved in some kind of blood compact with its human master. ↗

— Don Winslow

#driving #nature

Across the will of Nature Leads on the path of God; Not where the flesh delighteth The feet of Jesus trod. O bliss to leave behind us The fetters of the slave, To leave ourselves behind us, The graveclothes and the grave. We follow in His footsteps; What if our feet be torn? Where He has marked the pathway All hail the briar and the thorn! Scarce seen, scarce be heard, unreckoned, Despised, defamed, unknown Or heard but by our singing, On, children, ever on! ↗

— Gerhard Tersteegan

#nature

I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was. ↗

— John Fowles

#nature #past #solitude #nature

Dying is as natural as being born, and all of us have to face it someday. Some sooner than others. It's difficult to understand the meaning of it all. The question isn't, 'Why do we die?' The correct question is, 'Why do we live? ↗

— S.M. Reine

#nature

I wanted to give you a victory. But by their essential nature triumphs can’t be given. ↗

— Lois McMaster Bujold

#give #giving #nature #nature-of-things #triumph

Be like the flower, content with its nature. ↗

— Seth D.

#contentment #desire #happiness #identity #living