To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we… see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory…
Nikolai Yaroshenko, “Mt. Elbrus in the Clouds,” 1894, oil on canvas. From nostalgiya.
(Source: commons.wikimedia.org)
Nikolai Kozlovsky, Kiev, Ukraine, c. 1960s, from nostalgiya.
The first duty of love is to listen.
Paul Tillich (via revolutionwithin)
What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone,
in the forest, at night, cherished by this
wonderful, unintelligible,
perfectly innocent speech,
the most comforting speech in the world,
the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges,
and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it.
It will talk as long as it wants, this rain.
As long as it talks I am going to listen.
Thomas Merton (via sharanam)
Ansel Adams, “Stream, Sea, Clouds,” Rodeo Lagoon, California, 1962 from melisaki
Ansel Adams, “Trees and Snow”, 1933, from arsvitaest via: Photo Tractatus
If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.
Japanese Proverb (via couleurs & commondense)
The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable.
Gary Lutz, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” in the Believer (via invisiblestories)
Bobby McFerrin, “Brief Eternity” [Vocabularies, 2010] from grooviejazz & moonlitcorner.
(Source: itunes.apple.com, via )
