Adrian & Armand a voluntary coincidence
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I want to suggest to you that citizens of free societies, democracies, do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting around their fellow-citizen’s opinions, even their most cherished beliefs. In free societies, you must have the free play of ideas. There must be argument, and it must be impassioned and untrammeled. A free society is not calm and eventless place - that is the kind of static, dead society dictators try to create. Free societies are dynamic, noisy, turbulent, and full of radical disagreements. Skepticism and freedom are indissolubly linked; and it is the skepticism of journalists, their show-me, prove-it unwillingness to be impressed, that is perhaps their most important contribution to the freedom of the free world. It is the disrespect of journalists-for power, for orthodoxies, for party lines, for ideologies, for vanity, for arrogance, for folly, for pretension, for corruption, for stupidity, maybe even for editors-that I would like to celebrate…and that I urge you all, in freedom’s name, to preserve.
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002 -
Your love is different from mine. What I mean is, when you close your eyes, for that moment, the center of the universe comes to reside within you. And you become a small figure within that vastness, which spreads without limit behind you, and continues to expand at tremendous speed, to engulf all of my past, even before I was born, and every word I’ve ever written, and each view I’ve seen, and all the constellations, and the darkness of outer space that surrounds the small blue ball that is earth. Then, when you open your eyes, all that disappears.
I anticipate the next time you are troubled and must close your eyes again.
The way we think may be completely different, but you and I are an ancient, archetypal couple, the original man and woman. We are the model for Adam and Eve. For all couples in love, there comes a moment when a man gazes at a woman with the very same kind of realization. It is an infinite helix, the dance of two souls resonating, like the twist of DNA, like the vast universe.
Oddly, at that moment, she looked over at me and smiled. As if in response to what I’d been thinking, she said, “That was beautiful. I’ll never forget it.Banana Yoshimoto, Lizard -
Love is the kind of thing that’s already happening by the time you notice it, that’s how it works, and no matter how old you get, that doesn’t change. Except that you can break it up into two entirely distinct types — love where there’s an end in sight and love where there isn’t.
Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi -
O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, Hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being loved, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being extolled, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being honored, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being praised, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being preferred to others, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being consulted, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being approved, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being humiliated, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being despised, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of suffering rebukes, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being calumniated, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being forgotten, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being ridiculed, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being wronged, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being suspected, Deliver me, Jesus.That others may be loved more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be esteemed more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That, in the opinion of the world, others may increase and I may decrease, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.That others may be chosen and I set aside, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be praised and I unnoticed, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be preferred to me in everything, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.Amen.
The Litany of Humility
Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val (1865-1930) -
(via miasaysgoodbye)
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Who can give the Childlike Empress
The new name that will make her well?
Not you, not I, no elf, no djinn,
Can save us from the evil spell.
For we are figures in a book -
We do what we were invented for,
But we can fashion nothing new
And cannot change from what we are.
But there’s a realm outside Fantastica,
The Outer World is its name,
The people who live there are rich indeed
And not all the same.
Born of the Word, the children of man,
Or humans, as they’re sometimes called,
Have had the gift of giving names
Ever since our worlds began,
In every age it’s they who gave
The Childlike Empress life,
For wondrous new names have the power to save.
But now for many and many a day,
No human has visited Fantastica,
For they no longer know the way.
They have forgotten how real we are,
They don’t believe in us anymore.
Oh, if only one child of amn would come,
Oh, then at last the thing would be done.
If only one would hear our plea.
For them it is near, but for us too far,
Never can we go out to them,
For theirs is the world of reality.
But tell me, my hero, you so young,
Will you remember what I have sung?The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende -
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have one before us, the labyrinth is fully known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
Joseph John Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces -
I am the Water of Life,
Out of myself I grow.
The more you drink of me,
The fuller I will flow.The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende -
Ein Mensch ist durchaus kein Prophet,
doch sieht er wie es weitergeht.
Die guten Zeiten sind zu Ende,
es hebt sich ab die Zeitenwende.
Europas ganzes Missgeschick
enthüllt sich seinem Zukunftsblick.
Deutschland verrottet und verroht,
Gewalt wird Bürgern angedroht
von den vermeintlich hoch gestellten,
die als die guten Menschen gelten.
Das Ökodiktatur-Gesindel
kommt an die Macht durch Trug und Schwindel,
und keiner hat das Land gewarnt
vor Kommunisten, grün getarnt.
Kaum ist der grüne Spuk vorbei,
ertönt das Muezzingeschrei.
Die Kirchenglocken sind verstummt,
die Frauen gehen schwarz vermummt,
und keiner hat das Land gewarnt
vor Dschihadisten, fromm getarnt.
Der Geist Europas wird vernichtet
und Allahs Herrschaft aufgerichtet. -
They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life. They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment -
Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.
Herbert George Wells, The Time Machine, 1895. -
I wish I could’ve lived my life without making any wrong turns. But that’s impossible. A path like that doesn’t exist. We fail. We trip. We get lost. We make mistakes. And little by little, one step at a time, we push forward. It’s all we can do. On our own two feet.
Natsuki Takaya, Fruits Basket -
As I see it, you are living with something that you keep hidden deep inside. Something heavy. I felt it from the first time I met you. You have a strong gaze, as if you have made up your mind about something. To tell you the truth, I myself carry such things around inside. Heavy things. That is how I can see it in you.
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 -
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.
Marcus Tullius Cicero -
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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