You’ve got to live right, too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the...
Yet surely that story she had imagined was a real thing? If you created a story with your mind surely it was just as much there as a piece of needlework that you created with your fingers? You could not see it with your bodily eyes, that was all....t...
In the Christian religion, though perhaps not in any other, we frequently find a conception of god that is selfcontradictory and therefore corresponds to nothing. That is the conception formed by the following three propositions taken together: 1. Go...
BOTTOM There are things in this comedy of Pyramus and Thisby that will never please. First, Pyramus must draw a sword to kill himself; which the ladies cannot abide. How answer you that? SNOUT By'r lakin, a parlous fear. STARVELING I believe we must ...
Volunteering to help others is the right thing to do, and it also boosts personal happiness; a review of research by the Corporation for National and Community Service shows that those who aid the causes they value tend to be happier and in better he...
I just read this great quote by Junot Diaz, he was talking about true intimacy, and he was saying that it was the willingness to be vulnerable and to be found out. That’s what I felt that YA did. It wasn't pretentious, and it wasn’t hiding its he...
Watch a man--say, a politician--being interviewed on television, an you are observing a demonstration of what both he and his interrogators learned in school: all questions have answers, and it is a good thing to give an answer even if there is none ...
In the violent scorn of her revolted pride, of her indignant honor, had she forgotten a lowlier yet harder duty left undone? In her contempt and dread of yielding to mere amorous weakness had she stifled and denied the cry of pity, the cry of conscie...
She asked another question: "What does it matter if the rhinos die out? Is it really important that they are saved?" This would normally have riled me... but I had comes to think of her as Dr. Spock form Star Trek - an emotionless, purely logical cre...
Last-Minute Message For a Time Capsule I have to tell you this, whoever you are: that on one summer morning here, the ocean pounded in on tumbledown breakers, a south wind, bustling along the shore, whipped the froth into little rainbows, and a reckl...
We are all born and someday we’ll all die. Most likely to some degree alone.What if our aloneness isn’t a tragedy? What if our aloneness is what allows us to speak the truth without being afraid? What if our aloneness is what allows us to adventu...
Respect the man of noble races other than your own, who carries out, in a different place, a combat parallel to yours -- to ours. He is your ally. He is our ally, be he at the other end of the world. Love all living things whose humble task is not op...
Yet I never sought what is real, yearned for the real, but rather I have yearned for dreams more than solid things. I can say I love the textures of dreams. The way they hover and almost taste. The clouds and darkness that linger behind, mostly unsee...
Are there times in our lives when we come across a problem, and we look for our own solution? Are there times when perhaps we try to figure out how WE can solve a problem, rather than taking it to God? Perhaps we like to think we are doing a good thi...
Something refused to come into focus in my thinking. Indistinctly, as though in a fog, shapes moved toward me and retreated just beyond cognition. But that getting a hold of things is the uncertainty. As the Tractatus says right at the beginning, “...
The summer I turned eleven, I found out that ghosts are real. Guess it's hard to rest nice and easy in your coffin if you got stuff on your mind. Your soul stays chained to earth instead of zipping up to heaven to sing in one of the angel choirs. Som...
At eighteen, she already looks like a woman of sorrows and as her breaths start becoming shorter, tired of looking over her shoulder, she only wants to get away from this city where no one can fathom her love- boundless and profane and real, like her...
I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a thousand miles wide, we ...
And I remember when I met him, it was so clear that he was the only one for me. We both knew it, right away. And as the years went on, things got more difficult – we were faced with more challenges. I begged him to stay. Try to remember what we had...
Falling in love for the first time is a completely transcendent experience. It’s like eating pizza-flavored ice cream. Your brain can’t even process that level of joy. Love makes people do crazy things like kill other people or shop at Crate & Ba...
For the admirable gift of himself, and for the magnificent service he renders humanity, what reward does our society offer the scientist? Have these servants of an idea the necessary means of work? Have they an assured existence, sheltered from care?...
