“It is only the sacred things that are worth touching,”

�� The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (b. 16 October 1854).

“The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.

�� Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

virgendemayo

“Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance is a judgment. Sometimes the glance they meet is their own, reflected back from a real mirror […] She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others and in particular how she appears to men is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.”

— John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)  (via angelbabyscum)

“Men are greedy, they want to learn much, and get their knowledge cheap. So they think that every truth they have paid for with experience and loss of energy entitles them to a few more truths gratis: or, in philosophic language, a priori, by deduction. They are not ashamed to speculate with a gift that has been given them. Instead of looking, listening, touching, seeking, they want to infer and conclude. … But nothing comes of their “conclusions” save metaphysical systems and empty prattle. It is surely time to give up conclusions, and get truth a posteriori, as did Shakespeare, Goethe, Dostoevsky; that is, every time you want to know anything, go and look and find out. And if one is lazy, or horrified at a new experiment, let him train himself to look on ultimate questions with indifference, as the positivists do.”

— Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible

“How do I look away now that I have seen you?”

— — Rachel Mennies, from “April 18, 2017,” The Naomi Letters

“Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

“I don’t know what I want, only that I’m desperate for it, that I can’t stop asking.”

�� Kim Addonizio, from “The Singing”

The past is just a story we tell ourselves.

Spike Jonze / Her 

Everybody dies, but not everybody lives.

It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself.

— Maya Angelou

Before you speak, ask yourself: is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence?

Sai Baba

Is the world such and evil place that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence?

Sally Rooney, Normal People 

Accept yourself, love yourself, and keep moving forward. If you want to fly, you have to give up what weighs you down.

��� Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

If you read the history of the development of chemistry and particularly of physics, you will see that even such exact natural sciences could not, and still cannot, avoid basing their thought systems on certain hypotheses. In classical physics, up to the end of the 18th century, one of the working hypotheses, arrived at either unconsciously or half-consciously, was that space had three dimensions, an idea which was never questioned. The fact was always accepted, and perspective drawings of physical events, diagrams, or experiments, were always in accordance with that theory. Only when this theory is abandoned does one wonder how such a thing could ever have been believed. How did one come by such an idea? Why were we so caught that nobody ever doubted or even discussed the matter? It was accepted as a self-evident fact, but what was at the root of it? Johannes Kepler, one of the fathers of modem or classic physics, said that naturally space must have three dimensions because of the Trinity! So our readiness to believe that space has three dimensions is a more recent offspring of the Christian trinitarian idea.

Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology
(via inthenoosphere)

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once … and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

Susan Sontag, At the Same Time (via inthenoosphere)

What can I say, that will enable you to understand the depth of my sorrow?

Mary Shelley, from Complete Works; ���Frankenstein,” publ. c. 1818 (via violentwavesofemotion)

The body needs to create too. Beware feeling you’re not good enough to deserve it. Beware feeling you’re too good to need it. Beware all the hatred you’ve stored up inside you, and the locks on your tender places.

Audre Lorde, from a letter to Pat Parker featured in Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde & Pat Parker

The birds fly quietly through us. Oh, I who wish to grow, I look out, and inside me the tree grows. [ . . . ] I take refuge, and refuge is inside me.

Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Steven Cassedy, from an excerpt provided in Flight from Eden