underscored

@underscored

25 clips · 1 follower

Follow
Tag:meaningClear

It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.

Henry James
6d ago

What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, possibly, Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware — to pay heed. For we are not objects.

1w ago

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.

1w ago

We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death. In fact, they are composed of thousands of days, each one a world in itself.

1w ago
theconvivialsociety
Do Not Resign From Life

We've made machines that can fly faster and farther than the swallow-tailed kite, but in no way does it follow that the kite should cease from its flight or that it is somehow diminished because of the advent of flying machines. That there is something else in the world that flies tells us nothing about whether the kite ought to fly.

2w ago

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

2w ago

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. Yet I would not exchange this sadness for the complacency of those who have ceased to be responsive.

3w ago

The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

3w ago

The eye is not merely a physical organ, but the supreme instrument of the mind; it is the only sense that can perceive beauty, and beauty is the only thing that makes life worth living.

4w ago
notboring.co
Riding the Leopard

The greater our means, the harder it might be to find meaning. The more we accomplish, the sooner we ask, "Cool, now what?"

4w ago

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn.

1mo ago

The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem that he can spend his life working on.

1mo ago

The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies. After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.

1mo ago

I'm filled with gratitude to have had this experience and to get to play this amount of music with my children, and friends who I've known since they were little kids, too. It's been an incredible thrill and a great thing for my family and me to get to spend that amount of time together.

2mo ago

The true paradox is that we become most fully alive at the moment when we cease to live for ourselves alone. It is in the surrender of self that self is found.

2mo ago

The true paradox of the human condition is that we are simultaneously utterly insignificant and infinitely precious—strangers to the universe yet the only part of it that knows itself.

2mo ago

It is also a peculiar question, lexically and syntactically, for it presupposes two things about the life of the heart: a movement and a destination, as if love rose to its feet one day and headed for an elsewhere, left without a map, got lost, lost to seasons and cycles, lost like the mammoth and the human dorsal fin and the surnames of millennia of daughters.

2mo ago

From art to religion to sex, instrumentalisation has drained away intrinsic value. But life is about more than material benefits.

3mo ago
themarginalian.org
What Happens When We Die

Whatever our beliefs, these sensemaking playthings of the mind, when the moment of material undoing comes, we — creatures of moment and matter — simply cannot fathom how something as exquisite as the universe of thought and feeling inside us can vanish into nothingness.

3mo ago

Dividing life into stages is an ancient, unifying urge—an effort to contain something altogether too fluid, like trying to hold water in a cardboard box.

3mo ago

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

3mo ago

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

Start saving quotes →