Generation Snowflake Quotes

Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free

When your focus is on how you feel about things in the world then the things of the world slip from view, your little boat of learning things for what they are are swamped by the swells of how you feel about them. With hard work and with learning, the things of the world are still somehow out there, waiting for you to know about them, no matter how you feel. They survive how you feel about them and they are there before and after the storms of your feelings roar through and abate. Feelings aren't much of a compass to go by.

The snowflake revolution will not be televised - it will be pirated online, go viral and rapidly dissipate in the quicksand of post-millennial conformity.

Some people may harrumph and grumble, 'Generation Snowflake!', but what is the harm in trying to make an individual's life less stressful through a single simple action?

I think there’s something seriously wrong with a society that thinks it’s wrong to tell the truth, because it could potentially hurt someone’s feelings. You’re not doing anyone any favors if you don’t allow snowflakes to develop coping skills, by shielding them from uncomfortable thoughts.

All praise to winter, then, was Henry's feeling. Let others have their sultry luxuries. How full of creative genius was the air in which these snow-crystals were generated. He could hardly have marveled more if real stars had fallen and lodged on his coat. What a world to live in, where myriads of these little discs, so beautiful to the most prying eye, were whirled down on every traveler's coat, on the restless squirrel's fur and on the far-stretching fields and forests, the wooded dells and mountain-tops,--these glorious spangles, the sweepings of heaven's floor.

Everything from self-help guides to teen magazines regularly feature tips on 'being your own best friend' and 'reaffirming your self-worth'. Advice includes such gems as writing down 'amazing things about yourself every morning'. So if we wonder where Generation Snowflake gets its sense of self-regard from, the self-esteem movement must take some of the credit (or blame). It is an industry dedicated to creating ego-boosting, self-oriented youth.

Educating the young traditionally allowed new generations to join in the Great Conversation of civilization by furnishing access to the works and insights of previous generations of thinkers and writers from the dawn of history. Today it seems we only want to facilitate a conversation in which the young talk to themselves, about themselves. Treating the curriculum as a mirror in this way inevitably gives pupils a sense that they are the center of this universe. This is our mini-me Generation Snowflakers being told that thousands of years of literature, philosophy and historical insight should be sidelined to accommodate to their immediate interests. This inevitably feeds the idea that their own identity should be a trump card.

Millennial Pink This is not your mother’s shade of pink. In fact, it’s more like your grandmother’s shade of pink. Millennial pink isn’t pink “on steroids” (a phrase those marketing to GenXers used a lot). Millennial pink is pink on pot. It’s mellow, dusty, faded, and co-opted as our own. Best of all, it’s suitable for all sixty-three genders. According to Slate magazine, “Millennial pink is the Elizabeth Warren of colors—no matter how tired we are of hearing about it, it persists.

The child raised for his station, never leaving it, could not be exposed to the disadvantages of another. But given the mobility of human things, given the unsettled and restless spirit of this age which upsets everything in each generation, can one conceive of a method more senseless than raising a child as though he never had to leave his room, as though he were going to be constantly surrounded by his servants? If the unfortunate makes a single step on the earth, if he goes down a single degree, he is lost. This is not teaching him to bear suffering; it is training him to feel it. One thinks only of preserving one’s child. That is not enough. One ought to teach him to preserve himself as a man. to bear the blows of fate, to brave opulence and poverty, to live, if he has to. in freezing Iceland or on Malta’s burning rocks. You may very well take precautions against his dying. He will nevertheless have to die. And though his death were not the product of your efforts, still these efforts would be ill conceived. It is less a question of keeping him from dying than of making him live. To live is not to breathe; it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence.

Gleefully pointing out the mistakes of previous generations while not daring to make any of your own is boorish heckling from the sidelines, not living.

I am looking out of my window where thick snowflakes are swirling, like out of a picture book. I imagine catching one of the flakes with my tongue, as I did when I was a child – to melt away on it. Soon everything is covered in white and bundled up. The snow muffles the noise, makes the world more comfortable and covers all worries with its whiteness. The shapes are getting softer and the land is becoming something magical. The surrounding is transformed into a dreamscape full of bizarre forms that generate friendliness among strangers. Here a smile, there a good word and the world enchanted.

The new kids that were coming in—even the ones who wanted to get where he was—professed love for the rituals and the fundamentals and claimed to be committed to the process, but were really just corporate minions in khakis rather than suits. They were from a generation of special snowflakes who expected trophies for showing up, and everything to be easy, and for everybody to care about them and safeguard them as their parents would. They had no more depth than their Facebook posts. Than their relentless egoism. Than their soulless frivolities.