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The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.
Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.
— Pearl S. Buck -
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in addition to the kind of intense self-criticism and self-interrogation that goes with the Socratic personality, you’ve got to follow through on the negro national anthem, which is “lift every voice.” And listen to every voice.
In some ways it goes back to the polyphonic qualities in certain kinds of music. You’re not going to be able to actually perform if you have not cultivated the faculty of receptivity and learning how to listen. Part of the problem of the elites on Wall Street is that they’re tied to the economists they hire to rationalise their activity. They don’t want to listen to other voices. In the first place they don’t want to listen to certain liberal progressive economists like Paul Krugman and others.
Part of the legacy of John Maynard Keynes here, regardless of what Brother Niall Ferguson has to say about the future, is that Keynes was deeply concerned about the future – read his essay on grandchildren. Learning how to listen means that you can’t just hang around people who think like you and look like you, and then think your Socratic personality is gonna flower and flourish.
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The Ancient Greeks would have considered us modern creatures incredibly unsophisticated in the way we talk about love. We tend to use a single word to cover so many different kinds of relationships and emotions. The Greeks would have been shocked at the crudeness of our expression, because they identified six different varieties of love. What were the Greek loves? And how might they revolutionise the way we think about love today? Find out in this video on The Six Varieties of Love.
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That’s why I like you. You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.
— John Green (via jazzylittledrops)(Source: hourglasss, via jazzylittledrops)
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des hommes et des chatons
(Source: deshommesetdeschatons)
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(Source: makerhousetucson, via kidpres)
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It takes courage to interrogate yourself. It takes courage to look in the mirror and see past your reflection to who you really are when you take off the mask, when you’re not performing the same old routines and social roles. It takes courage for folk to stand up.
— Cornel West -
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The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: Economic Efficiency, Social Justice and Individual Liberty.
— John Maynard Keynes -
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There is no time for playing around. You have been retained as counsel for the unhappy. You have promised to bring help to the shipwrecked, the imprisoned, the sick, the needy, to those whose heads are under the poised axe. Where are you deflecting your attention? What are you doing?
— Seneca -
…And here’s another image of diarrhea. This is Marie Saylee, nine months old. You can’t see her, because she’s buried under that green grass in a little village in Liberia, because she died in three days from diarrhea — the Hershey squirts, the runs, a joke. And that’s her dad.
But she wasn’t alone that day, because 4,000 other children died of diarrhea, and they do every day. Diarrhea is the second biggest killer of children worldwide, and you’ve probably been asked to care about things like HIV/AIDS or T.B. or measles, but diarrhea kills more children than all those three things put together. It’s a very potent weapon of mass destruction.
…So you’d be thinking by now, okay, the solution’s simple, we give everyone a toilet. And this is where it gets really interesting, because it’s not that simple, because we are not simple. So the really interesting, exciting work — this is the engaging bit — in sanitation is that we need to understand human psychology…
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We are allowing two people who love each other to have that recognised, and I cannot see what is wrong with that for neither love nor money. I just cannot. I cannot understand why someone would be opposed.
I understand why people do not like what it is that others do. That is fine. We are all in that category.
But I give a promise to those people who are opposed to this bill right now. I give you a watertight guaranteed promise.
The sun will still rise tomorrow. Your teenage daughter will still argue back to you as if she knows everything.Your mortgage will not grow. You will not have skin diseases or rashes, or toads in your bed. The world will just carry on. So do not make this into a big deal.
This bill is fantastic for the people it affects, but for the rest of us, life will go on.
— New Zealand MP Maurice Williamson uses the power of laughter to show his support for the gay marriage bill
