underscored

@underscored

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It is not observation of nature that makes a man thoughtful; it is the fact that nature never answers. The grown man asks, and asks, and the sphinx remains silent, and suddenly he remembers that it always has been so.

Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (1957)
2w ago

To live, according to this sense of the word, we must not only observe and learn, we must also feel; we must not be mere spectators of action, we must act; we must not describe, but be subjects of description. Deep sorrow must have been the inmate of our bosoms… sickening doubt and false hope must have chequered our days… Who that knows what "life" is, would pine for this feverish species of existence?

2w ago

We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public events or attending to private ones. There is never a moment when new distress is not succeeding old.

4w ago

Instead of rich and poor, high and low, they are to be classed, — First, by their sorrows... Secondly, all who have the same maladies... Thirdly, all who are guilty of the same sins, whether the world knows them or not; whether they languish in prison, looking forward to the gallows, or walk honored among men, they also form a class. Then proceed to generalize and classify the whole world together, as none can claim utter exemption from either sorrow, sin, or disease; and if they could, yet Death, like a great parent, comes and sweeps all through one darksome portal, — all his children.

3mo ago

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine and can no longer live without it. We cannot even imagine life without machines. Yet machines have enslaved us. They determine our movements and our thoughts.

4mo ago

life stares mutely back at us, immense and indifferent, having abled us with opposable thumbs and handicapped us with a consciousness capable of self-reference that renders us dissatisfied with the banality of mere survival.

6mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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