#sen

What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way? ↗

— Roland Barthes

#memory #past #present #time #biography

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. ↗

— Thomas Paine

#common-sense

He who must travel happily must travel light. ↗

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

#common-sense #common-sense

It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning. ↗

— H.G. Wells

#morning #common-sense

Common sense is seeing things as they are; and doing things as they ought to be. ↗

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

#senisibility #common-sense

To love in the sense of passion-love is the contrary of to live. It is an impoverishment of one's being, an askesis without sequel, an inability to enjoy the present without imagining it as absent, a never-ending flight from possession. ↗

— Denis de Rougemont

#love #never-ending #passion #possession #present

Memories establish the past; Senses perceive the present; Imaginations shape the future. ↗

— Toba Beta

#memories #senses #imagination

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories. ↗

— Siri Hustvedt

#memory #past #present #imagination

Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces. You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew. I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. ↗

— Iain Pears

#civilization #denunciation #evil #good #jews

Imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present. ↗

— John Green

#inspirational #present #imagination