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[marcstarcphantom]

i think i’m in love with kindness. genuine kindness is so rare these days, i’m conditioned to expect someone’s freezing mentality or fiery words. i fall a little in love with people who let me bask in their warmth too. i think kindness, true kindness, is so hard to find. find those people and latch on, there’s so few left in this world.

j.e.b. (( kindness is underrated. ))

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“Your entire universe is in your mind and nowhere else. To expand the universe, expand your mind.”

— Deepak Chopra (via quotemadness)

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I began learning long ago that those who are happiest are those who do the most for others. - Booker T. Washington

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Day 5

“Let me tell you how the world becomes better.  The world becomes better when good people like you look at themselves and decide what kind of life they want to live, and what they’re willing to do to make it that way.  This does not mean you need to fight more.  It means you need to find ways to fight less.  Sometimes, our immediate response to the way the world is, is anger, and the world is the way it is, because sometimes our immediate response to it is, anger.” ~ Iain Thomas, Every Word you Cannot Say (Page 30)

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The way to peace, is peace.  The way to war, is war.  Peace, is not a means to the outcome of war.  War, is not a means to the outcome of peace.  Peace is the way.

The way to happiness, is happiness.  The way to anger, is anger.  Happiness is not a means to the outcome of anger.  Anger, is not a means to the outcome of happiness.  Happiness is the way.

This is not to say that anger won’t or shouldn’t come up in our lives—it’s an emotion that we all undoubtedly feel.  This is to say though, that we should never take action on anger as a means to get to a happy end.  Feeling anger and acting on anger are two very different positions.  And as I’m sure you’re already aware, acting from a place of anger usually leads to actions you later regret and words you later wish you could take back.  Let anger come, be mindful of how it makes you feel, let time bring you down to a calm and collected state, decide how you want to act, then take action in a way that will lead you back to a state of happiness.

The same is true with how we respond to awful, upsetting, depressing news in the world that we’re spoon-fed on a regular basis.  Our immediate emotional reaction is often, anger.  And as mentioned above, anger begets more anger.  And anger acted upon, begets more anger to be acted upon.  If we want the world to become better, then we need to become better.  We need to be the person who breaks the cycle.  When we’re judged, we need to choose understanding.  When we’re rejected, we need to choose acceptance. When we’re shamed, we need to choose compassion.  We need to be the person we wish we had when we were angry or hurting and we need to pay forward into the world the actions we wish we would see more of.  It’s not somebody else’s job to make the world better, it’s ours.

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“I’ve noticed something about people who make a difference in the world: They hold the unshakable conviction that individuals are extremely important, that every life matters. They get excited over one smile. They are willing to feed one stomach, educate one mind, and treat one wound. They aren’t determined to revolutionize the world all at once; they’re satisfied with small changes. Over time, though, the small changes add up. Sometimes they even transform cities and nations, and yes, the world.”

— Beth Clark

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“Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.”

— Jack Kerouac, On The Road (via the-book-diaries)

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“Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic”

— Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (via the-book-diaries)

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“A soul that carries empathy is a soul which has survived enormous pain.”

— Unknown

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“Emerson said that a library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them. When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume, a thing among things. When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to its reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for we change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that the man of yesterday is not the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of a book, each rereading, each memory of that rereading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus.”

— Jorge Luis Borges, “Poetry,” Seven Nights (trans. Eliot Weinberger)

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“All of us need to be in touch with a mysterious, tantalizing source of inspiration that teases our sense of wonder and goads us on to life’s next adventure.”

— ROB BREZSNY