“Life is a complex
with real and imaginary parts”
Source: From My Pen, On Life
“Individuality is the driving force of any society. Every individual acts according to his own will and does things uniquely, good or bad. Everyone contributes in his or her own different way to society”
Source: Fearless and Free: How One Man Changed my Life ǀ Self-help story on life, love and making a fresh start
“Space travel is a grand enough venture, a daunting enough task, that it requires the dedication of the many, not the mere fervour of a few.”
Source: To Be Taught, If Fortunate
“Believe in the beauty of your own journey, for it is the path that only you can tread and the story that only you can tell.”
“A better system will not automatically ensure a better life,' Havel wrote. 'In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.' The smallest choices you and I make, every single day, can change the world for better or worse. The simple act of refusing to live a lie has the power to transform who we are and what we are capable of, both as individuals and as a society. In other words, trying our best to live a congruent life is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves and each other.”
Source: Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions
“She got off the train, thinking that she never felt really human until she reached Harlem and thus got away from the hostility in the eyes of the white women who stared at her on the downtown streets and in the subway. Escaped from the openly appraising looks of the white men whose eyes seemed to go through her clothing to her long brown legs. On the trains their eyes came at her furtively from behind newspapers, or half-concealed under hatbrims or partly shielded by their hands. And there was a warm, moist look about their eyes that made her want to run.
These other folks feel the same way, she thought—that once they are freed from the contempt in the eyes of the downtown world, they instantly become individuals. Up here they are no longer creatures labeled simply 'colored' and therefore all alike. She noticed that once the crowd walked the length of the platform and started up the stairs toward the street, it expanded in size. The same people who had made themselves small on the train, even on the platform, suddenly grew so large they could hardly get up the stairs to the street together. She reached the street at the very end of the crowd and stood watching them as they scattered in all directions, laughing and talking to each other.”
Source: The Street
“Every standardized institution, by definition and design, is focused on efficiency above all else, and generic motives and universal motives are efficient ways of moving the needle—on average, at least. But they’re horrible for your own fulfillment. Not only do standardized views of motivation ignore everything that is important about who you are, but by incessantly focusing all of our attention on a small set of institutionally ordained motives, the Standardization Covenant constrains our thinking about what a personal motive can even be.
Fortunately, dark horses reveal the hidden truth about motivation. ... The lives of dark horses demonstrate the remarkable specificity of micro-motives.”
Source: Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment
“It's time to stop caring about what other people think and start living for ourselves. We should never dull our shine for somebody else.”
Source: Snackable Existentialism: Small Portions, Big Ideas
“It was more than happiness. More than affection or gratitude. It was something deeper. It was the sense of being seen and loved exactly for who he was.”
Source: Masterpiece
“But sometimes when you put two very different people together, a kind of magic, an alchemy, occurs. Bea said I was like eggs and sugar, and she was flour and butter, and when you mixed us together, we were more than just the combination of our ingredients, we were the whole damn cake.”
Source: Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting