(Source: andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
Reblogged from RHPolitics.
September 10, 2011, 6:04pm
oh, larissa
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“Listening to GOP Presidential candidates talk about science is like listening to children talk about sex: They know it exists, they have strong opinions about what it might mean, but they don’t have a clue what it’s actually about.”
“There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.”
— Freya Stark
“The point is that there’s often an indefatigable gap between the rigors of cost-benefit analyses and the emotional hunches that drive our decisions. We say we want to follow the evidence, but then the evidence rubs against a bias like loss aversion, and so we make an exception. We’ll follow the evidence next time.”
— Jonah Lehrer (via ninakix)
Reblogged from Young and Brilliant.
“To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intellingent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one’s self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived - this is to have succeeded.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (via janettt, quote-book, infinitebutterflies, thresca)
“Our business in life is not to get ahead of others but to get ahead of ourselves, to break our own records, to outstrip our yesterdays by our today.”
— Stewart B. Johnson (via awakenedbysunrise)
Reblogged from CHELS!Epop.
“If people were as captivated by public affairs as they are by erotic ones, the economy would be very strong.”
— magdalena; reader’s comment left at the NYT
“…no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (via katieschenk) (via claudia)
“As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed as ignorant as you were at twenty-two, you’d always be twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.”
— Mitch Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie) (via thresca)
Reblogged from thresca.
There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak… However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.
… So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
…The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.
Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
— J.K. Rowling, from her 2008 Harvard Commencement Address (via spaceships)
I don’t like HP, but this was actually quite good. To have known failure, learnt from it, then change and grow only makes you stronger. Emerging from failure is like overcoming a fear, no?
Reblogged from the pandas are moshing.
May 23, 2009, 11:11am
“I never played with dolls, I never dreamt of getting married or having children. I dreamt about love, passion, seduction and a bohemian life. To me, the most important thing is freedom. The only way you can be free is if you don’t lie to yourself or others and you assume responsibility for yourself.”
— Diane von Furstenburg (via wornjournal)
Reblogged from WORN FASHION JOURNAL.
