We often think the only way to create happiness is to try to control the outer circumstances of our lives, to try to fix what seems wrong or to get rid of everything that bothers us. But the real problem lies in our reaction to those
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“For many have won a great name through the mistaken beliefs of the multitude—and what can be imagined more shameful than that?”
― The Consolation of Philosophy
― The Consolation of Philosophy
“All art is a work in progress. It’s helpful to see the piece we’re working on as an experiment. One in which we can’t predict the outcome. Whatever the result, we will receive useful information that will benefit the next experiment. If you start from the position that there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, and creativity is just free play with no rules, it’s easier to submerge yourself joyfully in the process of making things. We’re not playing to win, we’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of fun. A more skillful goal might be to find comfort in the process. To make and put out successive works with ease.”
― The Creative Act: A Way of Being
― The Creative Act: A Way of Being
“... there is no place whatever for hatred in the minds of the wise. Only an utter idiot would hate good men, and it is irrational to hate the wicked; for if vice is a species of mental disease comparable to illness in the body, since we regard those who are physically ill as wholly undeserving of hatred and deserving rather of pity, then men with minds oppressed by wickedness, a condition more dreadful than any sickness, should all the more be pitied rather than hounded.”
― The Consolation of Philosophy
― The Consolation of Philosophy
“For the nature of man is such that he is better than other things only when he knows himself, and yet if he ceases to know himself he is made lower than the brutes. For it is natural for other animals not to have this self-knowledge; in man it is a fault. How far from your true state have you wandered when you think you can be at all improved by the addition of the beauties of other things!”
― Theological Tractates/The Consolation of Philosophy
― Theological Tractates/The Consolation of Philosophy
“I think of how the mystics read
by the light of their own bodies.
What a world of darkness that must have been
to read by the flaming hearts
that turn into heaps of ash on the altar,
how everything in the end is made
equal by the wind.
— Timothy Liu, from “Vox Angelica,” The New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois University, 2000”
―
by the light of their own bodies.
What a world of darkness that must have been
to read by the flaming hearts
that turn into heaps of ash on the altar,
how everything in the end is made
equal by the wind.
— Timothy Liu, from “Vox Angelica,” The New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois University, 2000”
―
Colleen’s 2024 Year in Books
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