“There is nothing to prove and nothing to protect. I am who I am and it’s enough.”
― Richard Rohr

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”

Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.” — Ernest Hemingway

“Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity. A revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real. It happens because it had to happen.”

 

 

“Never, never be afraid to do what’s right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.”

I am learning to see.
I don’t know why it is,
but everything
enters me more deeply
and doesn’t stop where it once used to.

 

This passage profoundly touches me.  So beautiful.

 

Poverty in youth, when it is mastered, has the sovereign quality that it concentrates the will-power upon striving and the spirit upon hope.  By stripping away our material existence to its essentials and exposing its drabness, it fosters in us an inexpressible longing for the ideal life.  The well-to-do young man is offered a hundred dazzling and crude distractions- horses, hunting and gambling, rich food, tobacco, and all the rest- occupations for his baser nature at the expense of everything in him that is high-minded and sensitive   The poor young man struggles to stay alive; he contrives to eat, and his only solace is in dreaming.  His only theater is the free show that God provides, the sky and the stars, flowers and children, mankind whose sufferings he shares and the created world in which he is trying his wings.  He lives so close to humanity that he sees its soul, so close to the divine creation that he sees God.  He dreams and feels his own greatness; dreams again and feels tenderness.  He progresses from the egotism of the man who suffers to the compassion of the man who meditates, and an admirable sentiment is born in him, of self-forgetfulness and feeling for others.  Reflecting on the countless delights that nature showers on minds open to receive them, and denied to those whose minds are closed, he ends, a millionaire of spirit, by pitying the millionaire of nothing buy money.  All hatred disappears from his heart as enlightenment grows in him.  Indeed, is he really unhappy?  No, he is not.  A young man’s poverty is never miserable.  Any youngster, poor as he may be, with health and strength, a buoyant stride and clear eyes, hot-flowing blood, dark hair, fresh cheeks, white teeth and clean breath, is an object of any to any aged emperor.  And then, he gets up every morning to earn his livelihood, and while his hands are busily employed his backbone gains in pride and his mind gains in ideas.  His day’s work done, he returns to the delights of his contemplative life.  He may live with feet enmeshed in affliction and frustration, hard-set on earth amid the brambles and sometimes deep in mud; but his head is in the stars.  He is steadfast and serene, gentle, peaceable, alert, sober-minded, content with little, and benevolent; and he blesses God for having bestowed on him those two riches which the rich so often lack- work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worth of freedom.