the text that i collect

But I have seen the best of you and the worst of you, and I choose both.

Do you ever realize how badly you’re going to miss a moment while you’re living it? Like wow, these are the good days. I am here and I am happy and I feel alive.

Love is trusting someone enough to tell them what’s really bothering you

"Some academic institutions and political agendas view the humanities as superficial or as if they were an adornment. Without history, literature, the fine arts, and philosophy, we cannot know who we were and who we want to become. Today, with the extraordinary leaps in all the sciences, we need the humanities more than ever in order to answer, or at least pose, the big ethical questions regarding these discoveries." ― Jennifer Clement

If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

If there’s a thing I’ve learned in my life it’s to not be afraid of the responsibility that comes with caring for other people. What we do for love: those things endure. Even if the people you do them for don’t”

Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo’s David is just a million hits with a hammer. We’re all of us a million bits put together the right way.

Don’t chase people. Be an example. Attract them. Work hard and be yourself. The people who belong in your life will come find you and stay. Just do your thing.

Even if you know what’s coming, you’re never prepared for how it feels.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

He loved her, he loved her, and until he’d loved her she had never minded being alone.

I fall apart subtly. It’s not loud. It’s bags under my eyes, and meals skipped. It’s not laughing at my favorite shows, not singing along to my favorite songs. It’s subtle, but oh my god, it is real and right now I’m in a million pieces.

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.

Intimacy between people requires closeness as well as distance. It is like dancing. Sometimes we are very close, touching each other or holding each other; sometimes we move away from each other and let the space between us become an area where we can freely move. To keep the right balance between closeness and distance requires hard work, especially since the needs of the partners may be quite different at a given moment. One might desire closeness while the other wants distance. One might want to be held while the other looks for independence. A perfect balance seldom occurs, but the honest and open search for that balance can give birth to a beautiful dance, worthy to behold.

The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder at that which one would not have been able to guess.

Love others so radically they wonder why.