Signposts

What we choose to fight is so tiny…
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from the poem “The Watching Man”  <link>

It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

— C.S. Lewis  <link>

Don’t you believe that there is in man a deep so profound as to be hidden even to him in whom it is?

— St. Augustine, “The Trinity”  <link>

To depend on God alone is our true autonomy.

— Nicolas Gomez Davila (via)  <link>

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

— Vaclav Havel (via)  <link>

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

— Mark Twain  <link>

The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.

— Agnes Repplier  <link>

A little socializing, like a little whiskey, is good. But more is not better. The sobriety of solitary silence is superior to the sloughing off of self into the social, and the value of the latter is to enhance, by way of contrast, the delights of the former. Thus spoke the introvert.

— Bill Vallicella (via)  <link>

Nothing is worth more than this day.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe  <link>

A Moment’s Halt—a momentary taste
Of Being from the Well amid the Waste—
And Lo!—the phantom Caravan has reach’d
The Nothing it set out from—Oh, make haste!

— Omar Khayyam, from The Rubaiyat, XLVIII, tr. Edward Fitzgerald  <link>

He who wishes to learn must believe.

— Aristotle  <link>

Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is really worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It’s okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.

— Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories (via)  <link>