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I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
Sarah Williams

Bertrand Russell
“It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”
Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell
“When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.”
Bertrand Russell

Socrates
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
Socrates

Emil M. Cioran
“A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.”
E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born
tags: life

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433 books | 72 friends

Kelly S...
189 books | 38 friends

Georgie...
102 books | 14 friends

Melanie...
51 books | 56 friends

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257 books | 61 friends

Holly
193 books | 51 friends

alexander
603 books | 34 friends

Sasha
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