Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

“Find a place where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.” Joseph Campbell.

“To sit outside a Paris cafe at breakfast is to observe the city as it wipes the sleep from its eyes: the soft clink of a cup and saucer, the turning of newspaper pages, the passerby with a cigarette who asks for a light, and me at my little round table, nibbling a speculoos, sipping my cafe creme.”
― Stephanie Rosenbloom, Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude

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“I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

"SOCRATES: I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher; for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder."--(Plato, Theaetetus 155c-d)

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Animals, like us, are living souls. They are not things. They are not objects. Neither are they human. Yet they mourn. They love. They dance. They suffer. They know the peaks and chasms of being.”
― Gary Kowalski, The Souls of Animals

“It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven

“The truth." Dumbledore sighed. "It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“Unseen in their flight,
wild geese faintly call,
passing high overhead,
in the depths of night.
Instinctive travelers,
on invisible highways.
I envy their lack of lostness.”
― John Mark Green, Taste the Wild Wonder: Poems

“I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”
― Werner Heisenberg