deep shadows

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work

“Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïveté.”

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I just choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that out death brings no pleasure to our world.

Man is only truly great when he acts from his passions.

“If there's one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it's that you can't fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It's a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees.”

“Country, bluegrass, rock and roll, it was all designed to provide real service to humanity, to be a balm against the cruel reality of this physical plane” says Barnes. “It was a doorway to a vast cosmos that could give you strength and lift you up. My mother grew up on a sharecropping farm in central Texas, and they’d pull the car up to the house at night and run the radio off the battery just so they could listen to the Grand Ole Opry. People forget how much this music used to mean because nowadays it feels more like advertising or lifestyle branding, but I’m trying to capture that relevance, that spiritual connection, that essence of where it came from.”

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them…a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.”

Joy comes in the doing, pain comes in the over-thinking.

When we are no longer able to change a situation we are challenged to change ourselves. 

A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.