Posts tagged truth
When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
Unhappy as we are (and we would be less so if there were no element of greatness in our condition) we have an idea of happiness but we cannot attain it. We perceive an image of the truth and possess nothing but falsehood, being equally incapable of absolute ignorance and certain knowledge.
I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die.
It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.
This is water.
In 2005, author David Foster Wallace was asked to give the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. However, the resulting speech didn’t become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death. It is, without a doubt, some of the best life advice we’ve ever come across, and perhaps the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of education.
We made this video, built around an abridged version of the original audio recording, with the hopes that the core message of the speech could reach a wider audience who might not have otherwise been interested. However, we encourage everyone to seek out the full speech (because, in this case, the book is definitely better than the movie).(h/t machaffer.)
[Nice illustrative film adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech titled This is Water.]
Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.
If you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Quiet by Susan Cain
Writing is a delicious agony.
Excellent advice.
But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
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All the quotes on this site are marked with the author's name, except those marked with TBV; those quotes are my own.
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