Damian Patterson

“But if you consider any man a friend whom you do not trust as you trust yourself, you are mightily mistaken and you do not sufficiently understand what true friendship means.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic: Volume I

“companies have borrowed models from gambling design in order keep us on our devices (like the casino’s model to keep players in front of slot machines). Using rewards—providing a sense of mission, offering buzzes and beeps that cue our hormonal system, meeting the felt need for companionship, and more—they’ve mastered the science of keeping us glued to our screens.”
― Dru Johnson, Human Rites: The Power of Rituals, Habits, and Sacraments

“Rather than wanting to be excellent—like the prideful—or to be honored for our worthiness—like the ambitious—in vainglory we seek only the “manifestation of excellence,” that is, we want more than anything to be well known and widely known.”
― Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies

“The task of prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord. Notice that I suggest for the prophet in a really numbed situation a quite elemental and modest task.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination