Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky
Tag: Humanity
In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”
— baba dioum (via swissmiss)
All Ideas Are Dangerous
One must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous—dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say. And dangerous in this respect: that confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.”
— James Baldwin, Stranger in the Village (via Erica Avey)
Neither the spider has planned for the leaf nor the leaf for the spider—and yet there they are, an accidental pendulum propelled by the same forces that cradle the moons of Jupiter in orbit, animated into this ephemeral early-morning splendor by eternal cosmic laws impervious to beauty and indifferent to meaning, yet replete with both to the bewildered human consciousness beholding it.”
— Maria Popova, Figuring
“Is ‘aggression’ about thought, emotion, or something done with muscles?”
— Robert Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“Can you ever separate doing good from the expectation of reciprocity, public acclaim, self-esteem, or the promise of paradise?”
— Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
What if we measured true success not by the amount of money you have but by the amount of human energy you unlock, the amount of potential you enable? If that were our metric, our world would be a different place.”
— Jacqueline Novogratz (via swissmiss)
Through Suffering
“On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love. I want suffering in order to love.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have ‘an ambition of transcendence.’”
— Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
Lisa Marie Blair 