#meaning

[upliftourday]

[pratchettquotes]

One of the recurring philosophical questions is:

"Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?"

Which says something about the nature of philosophers, because there is always someone in a forest. It may only be a badger, wondering what that cracking noise was, or a squirrel a bit puzzled by all the scenery going upwards, but someone. At the very least, if it was deep enough in the forest, millions of small gods would have heard it.

Things just happen, one after another. They don't care who knows. But history...ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it's not history. It's just...well, things happening one after another.

Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

[philosophybits]

You should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you. If you hold your commitments lightly, in such a way that you can always divest yourself from one or the other of them if they conflict, then it doesn’t hurt you when things go badly. But you want people to live their lives with a deep seriousness of commitment: not to adjust their desires to the way the world actually goes, but rather to try to wrest from the world the good life that they desire. And sometimes that does lead them into tragedy.

Martha Nussbaum, in A World of Ideas, by Bill Moyers

[risestarkiss]

Rise Ramblings #265

Well that explains this:

...and possibly this?

[theeroticlover]

I might not be always with you, but there will always be this invisible bond between you and me...

[dk-thrive]

You'll notice that I haven't talked about love. Or about happiness. I've talked about becoming - or remaining - the person who can be happy, a lot of the time, without thinking that being happy is what it's all about. It's not. It's about becoming the largest, most inclusive, most responsive person you can be.

— Susan Sontag, from "Notes on 'Camp'" in "Against Interpretation" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966) (via Whiskey River)

[thirdity]

Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commence from that point on.

Georges Bataille, Guilty

[kiindr]

if it makes you happy, it matters. it does not have to make sense to others. specifically to those who shame other people for having certain interests. we're all here for a brief time and if we don't spend it doing things we find meaningful, it's just plain tragedy.

[sallyrooneygf]

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

[quotelr]

Smile doesn't mean that someone is happy. Sometimes it just means that you're strong.

Zayn Malik

[upliftourday]

[nobeerreviews]

Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person

-- Sylvia Plath

[elisaenglish]

We touch, where hands become a sacrament, a ritual of love between us two...

[philosophybits]

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

[blackswaneuroparedux]

The artist must have something to say, for mastery over form is not his goal but rather the adapting of form to its inner meaning.

- Walter Kandinsky, Dance Curves (1926)

[urmomswifesworld]