#ow

Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. ↗

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

#pain #sorrow #experience

Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better. ↗

— Kay Redfield Jamison

#knowledge #wisdom #experience

I have my own opinions, but my songs don't share them. ↗

— Shania Twain

#my own #opinions #own #share #songs

The higher one climbs on the spiritual ladder, the more they will grant others their own freedom, and give less interference to another's state of consciousness. ↗

— Paul Twitchell

#climbs #consciousness #freedom #give #grant

So, I was offered this job to come down there but first it was suggested that I take a trip around the country in the areas in which we worked to see what it's all about, and I tell you that was a revelation to me. ↗

— Ben Shahn

#areas #around #come #country #down

Experience hath shown, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#power #tyranny #experience

To my mind, ‘magic’ is the hard-to-define quality of the things that stir up mystical feelings like amazement, curiosity, imagination, and above all wonder. Magic is that which renders something beautiful in a spiritual sense. It is that which makes one feel as if the world is more than it is presently understood to be, and yet at the same time the world is working itself out in a good and beautiful way. Magic underlies the relationship between us, and the greater immensities of birth and death. Thus the experience of being in the presence of something magical is an empowering, uplifting experience. Magic, understood this way, contributes meaning to life. ↗

— Brendan Myers

#life #magic #mystical #beauty

Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home. ↗

— Gregory Maguire

#home #isolation #experience

You may be a lady but you are still the man! ↗

— Lynda Barry

#experience

It was a life, she eventually concluded, that had been lived in the middle ground, where contentment and love were found in the smallest details of people's lives. It was a life of dignity and honor, not without sorrows yet fulfilling in a way that few experiences ever were. ↗

— Nicholas Sparks

#dignity #fulfilling #honor #life #love