β
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
β
β
Aristotle
β
When I discover who I am, Iβll be free.
β
β
Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
β
One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.
β
β
A.A. Milne
β
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
β
β
Marcel Proust
β
For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
β
β
Charles Bukowski
β
Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.
β
β
Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)
β
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but 'That's funny...
β
β
Isaac Asimov
β
I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking
β
β
Albert Einstein
β
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
β
β
Mahatma Gandhi
β
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
β
β
C.G. Jung
β
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
β
β
AndrΓ© Gide
β
Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.
β
β
Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)
β
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
β
β
T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets)
β
The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them
β
β
Thomas Merton (No Man Is an Island)
β
I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.
β
β
Hermann Hesse (Demian)
β
It takes courage...to endure the sharp pains of self discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.
β
β
Marianne Williamson (A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles")
β
Sometimes you have to kind of die inside in order to rise from your own ashes and believe in yourself and love yourself to become a new person.
β
β
Gerard Way
β
The best discoveries always happened to the people who weren't looking for them.
β
β
Morgan Matson (Amy & Roger's Epic Detour)
β
Youβll never be able to find yourself if youβre lost in someone else.
β
β
Colleen Hoover (November 9)
β
If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.
β
β
Kristin Hannah (The Nightingale)
β
In youth, it was a way I had,
To do my best to please.
And change, with every passing lad
To suit his theories.
But now I know the things I know
And do the things I do,
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you.
β
β
Dorothy Parker (The Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker)
β
We can't be afraid of change. You may feel very secure in the pond that you are in, but if you never venture out of it, you will never know that there is such a thing as an ocean, a sea. Holding onto something that is good for you now, may be the very reason why you don't have something better.
β
β
C. JoyBell C.
β
How do you not like the Internet? That's like saying, 'I don't like things that are convenient. And easy. I don't like having access to all of mankind's recorded discoveries at my fingertips. I don't like light. And knowledge.
β
β
Rainbow Rowell (Fangirl)
β
At the center of your being
you have the answer;
you know who you are
and you know what you want.
β
β
Lao Tzu
β
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
β
β
Friedrich Nietzsche
β
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
β
β
James Joyce (Ulysses)
β
Some beautiful paths can't be discovered without getting lost.
β
β
Erol Ozan
β
And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?
β
β
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
β
The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.
β
β
William James
β
The only journey is the one within.
β
β
Rainer Maria Rilke
β
There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.
β
β
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
β
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.
β
β
Aristotle
β
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
β
β
Nelson Mandela
β
Love, like everything else in life, should be a discovery, an adventure, and like most adventures, you donβt know youβre having one until youβre right in the middle of it.
β
β
E.A. Bucchianeri (Brushstrokes of a Gadfly (Gadfly Saga, #1))
β
It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters,
β
β
Amit Ray (Meditation: Insights and Inspirations)
β
When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself.
β
β
Bob Marley
β
To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.
β
β
C.G. Jung
β
When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.
β
β
Maya Angelou
β
I want to make my own discoveriesβ¦β¦.penetrate the evil which attracts me
β
β
AnaΓ―s Nin (Henry and June: The Unexpurgated Diary of AnaΓ―s Nin, 1931-1932)
β
It begins with absence and desire.
It begins with blood and fear.
It begins with a discovery of witches.
β
β
Deborah Harkness (A Discovery of Witches (All Souls, #1))
β
Rules for Self Discovery:
1. What we want most;
2. What we think about most;
3. How we use our money;
4. What we do with our leisure time;
5. The company we enjoy;
6. Who and what we admire;
7. What we laugh at.
β
β
A.W. Tozer
β
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
β
β
Will Durant
β
To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.
β
β
SΓΈren Kierkegaard
β
She had a sadness that was so deep, but it still could turn to light in a second, and when I saw her smile I wondered what it would be like to make her smile. I thought... I thought it would be like the discovery of smiling.
β
β
Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #1))
β
It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective.
β
β
Matt Haig (The Midnight Library)
β
Never underestimate the power of thought; it is the greatest path to discovery.
β
β
Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
β
It's life that matters, nothing but lifeβthe process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.
β
β
Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)
β
The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovery, but a process of creation. You are not discovering yourself, but creating yourself anew. Seek therefore, not to find out Who You Are, but seek to determine Who You Want to Be.
β
β
Neale Donald Walsch
β
Bottom line is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are.
β
β
Joss Whedon
β
It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.
β
β
Betty Friedan
β
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
β
β
Galileo Galilei
β
Hollowness: that I understand. I'm starting to believe that there isn't anything you can do to fix it. That's what I've taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps
β
β
Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train)
β
I suffer from life and from other people. I canβt look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful β only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
β
β
Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
β
This is a mournful discovery.
1)Those who agree with you are insane
2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.
β
β
Philip K. Dick (VALIS)
β
Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.
β
β
Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping)
β
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.
β
β
E.M. Forster
β
He not busy being born is busy dying.
β
β
Bob Dylan
β
It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.
β
β
Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)
β
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.
β
β
W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)
β
If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without.
β
β
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
β
There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.
β
β
Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)
β
The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.
β
β
Seneca (Natural Questions (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca))
β
Just because something seems impossible doesnβt make it untrue,
β
β
Deborah Harkness (A Discovery of Witches (All Souls, #1))
β
Courage doesnβt happen when you have all the answers. It happens when you are ready to face the questions you have been avoiding your whole life.
β
β
Shannon L. Alder
β
Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot.
β
β
E.A. Bucchianeri (Brushstrokes of a Gadfly (Gadfly Saga, #1))
β
Is Jase already gonna marry you?β
I start coughing again. βUh, No. No, George. Iβm only seventeen.β As if thatβs the only reason weβre not engaged.
βIβm this many.β George holds up four, slightly grubby fingers. βBut Jase is seventeen and a half. You could. Then you could live in here with him. And have a big family.β
Jase strides back into the room, of course, midway through this proposition. βGeorge. Beat it. Discovery Channel is on.β
George backs out of the room but not before saying, βHis bedβs really comfortable. And he never pees in it.
β
β
Huntley Fitzpatrick (My Life Next Door)
β
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
β
β
John Irving (Trying to Save Piggy Sneed)
β
As far as I can tell there are only two emotions that keep the world spinning year after year...One is fear. The other is desire.
β
β
Deborah Harkness (A Discovery of Witches (All Souls, #1))
β
If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.
β
β
J. Krishnamurti
β
Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together.
β
β
Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear)
β
War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.
β
β
Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)
β
Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.
β
β
Hermann Hesse
β
The Way to do is to be.
β
β
Lao Tzu
β
When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
β
β
Charles Baxter (Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction)
β
Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
β
β
StanisΕaw Lem (Solaris)
β
There's something liberating about not pretending. Dare to embarrass yourself. Risk.
β
β
Drew Barrymore
β
Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.
β
β
John Keats
β
Do you ever feel that way?"
"Lonely?"
I search for the words. "Restless. As if you haven't really met yourself yet. As is you'd passed yourself once in the fog, and your heart leapt - 'Ah! There I Am! I've been missing that piece!' But it happens too fast, and then that part of you disappears into the fog again. And you spend the rest of your days looking for it."
He nods, and I think he's appeasing me. I feel stupid of having said it. It's sentimental and true, and I've revealed a part of myself I shouldn't have.
"Do you know what I think?" Kartik says at last.
"What?"
"Sometimes, I think you can glimpse it in another.
β
β
Libba Bray (The Sweet Far Thing (Gemma Doyle, #3))
β
Your inner strength is your outer foundation
β
β
Allan Rufus
β
Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.
β
β
G.I. Gurdjieff
β
I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.
β
β
Mary Oliver (Dream Work)
β
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
β
β
Hermann Hesse (BΓ€ume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte)
β
When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass β may pass in the first half hour β into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later. And conversely, erotic love may lead to Friendship between the lovers. But this, so far from obliterating the distinction between the two loves, puts it in a clearer light. If one who was first, in the deep and full sense, your Friend, is then gradually or suddenly revealed as also your lover you will certainly not want to share the Belovedβs erotic love with any third. But you will have no jealousy at all about sharing the Friendship. Nothing so enriches an erotic love as the discovery that the Beloved can deeply, truly and spontaneously enter into Friendship with the Friends you already had; to feel that not only are we two united by erotic love but we three or four or five are all travelers on the same quest, have all a common vision.
β
β
C.S. Lewis (Four Loves)
β
The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours - it is an amazing journey - and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins.
β
β
Bob Moawad
β
I waited to be told what was good about me. [...] All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you- the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.
β
β
Emma Cline (The Girls)
β
True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring β once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresomeβ¦ except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners.
And, as is true of any other strong and addicting drug, true first love is dangerous.
β
β
Stephen King (Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, #4))
β
I knew Noah worshipped Charlie Parker and that his toothbrush was green. That he wouldn't bother to button his shirts correctly but always made his bed. That when he slept he curled into himself and that his eyes were the color of the clouds before it rained, and I knew he had no problem eating meat but would subtly leave the room if animals started to kill one another on the Discovery Channel. I knew one hundred little things about Noah Shaw but when he kissed me I couldn't remember my own name.
β
β
Michelle Hodkin
β
I have realized; it is during the times I am far outside my element that I experience myself the most. That I see and feel who I really am, the most! I think that's what a comet is like, you see, a comet is born in the outer realms of the universe! But it's only when it ventures too close to our sun or to other stars that it releases the blazing "tail" behind it and shoots brazen through the heavens! And meteors become sucked into our atmosphere before they burst like firecrackers and realize that they're shooting stars! That's why I enjoy taking myself out of my own element, my own comfort zone, and hurling myself out into the unknown. Because it's during those scary moments, those unsure steps taken, that I am able to see that I'm like a comet hitting a new atmosphere: suddenly I illuminate magnificently and fire dusts begin to fall off of me! I discover a smile I didn't know I had, I uncover a feeling that I didn't know existed in me... I see myself. I'm a shooting star. A meteor shower. But I'm not going to die out. I guess I'm more like a comet then. I'm just going to keep on coming back.
β
β
C. JoyBell C.
β
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost... I am helpless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I am in the same place.
But, it isn't my fault.
It still takes me a long time to get out.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in. It's a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault. I get out immediately.
walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
I walk down another street.
β
β
Portia Nelson (There's a Hole in My Sidewalk: The Romance of Self-Discovery)
β
How despicably I have acted!" she cried; "I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable mistrust! How humiliating is this discovery! Yet, how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our aquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself.
β
β
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
β
To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally 'together' - when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.
β
β
Alain de Botton (On Love)
β
Outside, the ocean was crashing, waves hitting sand, then pulling back to sea. I thought of everything being washed away, again and again. We make such messes in this life, both accidentally and on purpose. But wiping the surface clean doesn't really make anything neater. It just masks what is below. It's only when you really dig down deep, go underground, that you can see who you really are.
β
β
Sarah Dessen (What Happened to Goodbye)
β
Occupied in observing Mr. Bingleyβs attentions to her sister, Elizabeth was far from suspecting that she was herself becoming an object of some interest in the eyes of his friend. Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty: he had looked at her without admiration at the ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticise. But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness. Of this she was perfectly unaware: to her he was only the man who made himself agreeable nowhere, and who had not thought her handsome enough to dance with.
β
β
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
β
A story is not like a road to follow β¦ it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
β
β
Alice Munro (Selected Stories)
β
The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.
β
β
Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
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When I was little and running on the race track at school, I always stopped and waited for all the other kids so we could run together even though I knew (and everybody else knew) that I could run much faster than all of them! I pretended to read slowly so I could "wait" for everyone else who couldn't read as fast as I could! When my friends were short I pretended that I was short too and if my friend was sad I pretended to be unhappy. I could go on and on about all the ways I have limited myself, my whole life, by "waiting" for people. And the only thing that I've ever received in return is people thinking that they are faster than me, people thinking that they can make me feel bad about myself just because I let them and people thinking that I have to do whatever they say I should do. My mother used to teach me "Cinderella is a perfect example to be" but I have learned that Cinderella can go fuck herself, I'm not waiting for anybody, anymore! I'm going to run as fast as I can, fly as high as I can, I am going to soar and if you want you can come with me! But I'm not waiting for you anymore.
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C. JoyBell C.
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people had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. nobody realized how boring it would become. with the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. on a roller coaster. at a movie. still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. you know the dinosaurs aren't going to eat the kids. the test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. and because there's no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance for real salvation. real elation. real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention.
the laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.
without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.
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Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia)
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A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.
I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow.
In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze.
I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge;' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.
But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning.
There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. 'If I have seen further than other men,' said Isaac Newton, 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.
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Isaac Asimov (Adding a Dimension: Seventeen Essays on the History of Science)
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It's a factβeveryone is ignorant in some way or another.
Ignorance is our deepest secret.
And it is one of the scariest things out there, because those of us who are most ignorant are also the ones who often don't know it or don't want to admit it.
Here is a quick test:
If you have never changed your mind about some fundamental tenet of your belief, if you have never questioned the basics, and if you have no wish to do so, then you are likely ignorant.
Before it is too late, go out there and find someone who, in your opinion, believes, assumes, or considers certain things very strongly and very differently from you, and just have a basic honest conversation.
It will do both of you good.
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Vera Nazarian (The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration)
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HELPED are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.
HELPED are those who love the entire cosmos rather than their own tiny country, city, or farm, for to them will be shown the unbroken web of life and the meaning of infinity.
HELPED are those who live in quietness, knowing neither brand name nor fad; they shall live every day as if in eternity, and each moment shall be as full as it is long.
HELPED are those who love others unsplit off from their faults; to them will be given clarity of vision.
HELPED are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception, and realize an partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.
HELPED are those who love the Earth, their mother, and who willingly suffer that she may not die; in their grief over her pain they will weep rivers of blood, and in their joy in her lively response to love, they will converse with the trees.
HELPED are those whose ever act is a prayer for harmony in the Universe, for they are the restorers of balance to our planet. To them will be given the insight that every good act done anywhere in the cosmos welcomes the life of an animal or a child.
HELPED are those who risk themselves for others' sakes; to them will be given increasing opportunities for ever greater risks. Theirs will be a vision of the word in which no one's gift is despised or lost.
HELPED are those who strive to give up their anger; their reward will be that in any confrontation their first thoughts will never be of violence or of war.
HELPED are those whose every act is a prayer for peace; on them depends the future of the world.
HELPED are those who forgive; their reward shall be forgiveness of every evil done to them. It will be in their power, therefore, to envision the new Earth.
HELPED are those who are shown the existence of the Creator's magic in the Universe; they shall experience delight and astonishment without ceasing.
HELPED are those who laugh with a pure heart; theirs will be the company of the jolly righteous.
HELPED are those who love all the colors of all the human beings, as they love all the colors of the animals and plants; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
HELPED are those who love the lesbian, the gay, and the straight, as they love the sun, the moon, and the stars. None of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
HELPED are those who love the broken and the whole; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
HELPED are those who do not join mobs; theirs shall be the understanding that to attack in anger is to murder in confusion.
HELPED are those who find the courage to do at least one small thing each day to help the existence of another--plant, animal, river, or human being. They shall be joined by a multitude of the timid.
HELPED are those who lose their fear of death; theirs is the power to envision the future in a blade of grass.
HELPED are those who love and actively support the diversity of life; they shall be secure in their differences.
HELPED are those who KNOW.
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Alice Walker