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
Tag: Quote
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
Virginia Woolf on Being and Non-being
Every day includes much more non-being than being.”
— Virginia Woolf, from “A Sketch of the Past,” Moments of Being
“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
— Donald Winnicott, psychoanalyst (via Dana Levin)
Do you also have a ‘stop doing’ list?
Most of us lead busy but undisciplined lives. We have ever-expanding ‘to do’ lists, trying to build momentum by doing, doing, doing—and doing more. It rarely works. Those who built the good-to-great companies, however, made as much use of ‘stop doing’ lists as ‘to do’ lists. They displayed a remarkable discipline to unplug all sorts of extraneous junk.”
— Jim Collins, as excerpted from Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t
And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests and sometimes one positively ought (that is my idea).”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
“Talking about our problems is our greatest addiction. Break the habit. Talk about your joys.”
— via swissmiss)
“Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.”
— Toni Morrison, Sula (via @missberlyreads)
There is something I ‘know,’ which is that spatial dimensions beyond the Big 3 exist. I can even construct a tesseract or hypercube out of cardboard. A weird sort of cube-within-a-cube, a tesseract is a 3D projection of a 4D object in the same way that 
is a 2D projection of a 3D object. The trick is imagining the tesseract’s relevant lines and planes at 90 degrees to each other (it’s the same with and a real cube) because the 4th spatial dimension is one that somehow exists at perfect right angle to the length, width, and depth of our regular visual field. I ‘know’ all this just as you probably do…but now try to really picture it. Concretely. You can feel, almost immediately, a strain at the very root of yourself, the first popped threads of a mind starting to give at the seams.”
— David Foster Wallace, Everything and More
