Impermanence

An undercurrent of trauma runs through ordinary life, shot through as it is with the poignancy of impermanence. If we are not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, we are suffering from pre-traumatic stress disorder. There is no way to be alive without being conscious of the potential for disaster.
--Mark Epstein

Laugh

Making raspberries, the sound that children use to take down pomposity, is one of the first noises infants make. We must laugh at the unbearable.
--Martin Rowson

Suffering

Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more. It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local, political intervention.
--Susan Sontag

Tragic

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
--D.H. Lawrence

Bad Tools

My world is laden with bad tools, because my culture is simultaneously obsessed with productivity and novelty. It is a perfect vector for fixation, because the failure of a tool only feeds the desire for new tools. Meaning, I get to feel honorable in my vigilant search for productivity while scratching my itch for novelty.
--Frank Chimero

Doubt

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.
--Simone Weil

Ponder

If you don't ponder the end of the world on a regular basis, I don't think you're really human.
--Edan Lepucki

Counting

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
--Gottfried Leibniz

Gimmick

Like everything else on the news, you get bored, disasters get to seem a gimmick, like all those TV timeouts in football.
--John Updike

Story

No one ever regrets taking the path that leads to a better story.
--John Hagel

The Story

At any given moment, you have the power to say: This is not how the story is going to end.
--Chris Mason Miller

Wisdom

Wisdom, in our modern world, may boil down to recognizing that LOL and fail and trashy and omg don't actually represent different categories of human experience.
--Heather Havrilesky

Bliss

If the remission of pain is happiness, then the emergence from distraction is aesthetic bliss.
--Saul Bellow

Mockery

We should all mock death as much as we can, because in the end death makes a mockery of all of us.
--Bill Paxton

Good Days

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.
--Annie Dillard

Decent Human

It's insulting to imply that only a system of rewards and punishments can keep you a decent human being. Isn't it conceivable a person wants to be a decent human being because that way he feels better?
--Isaac Asimov

Passage

To be human is to be aware of the passage of time; no concept lies closer to the core of our consciousness.
--Dan Falk

Silent

What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.
--Colum McCann