Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.”
― Frank Zappa

“If it comes, let it come. If it goes, it's ok, let it go. Let things come and go. Stay calm, don't let anything disturb your peace, and carry on.”
― Germany Kent

“The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Even as a child, she had preferred night to day, had enjoyed sitting out in the yard after sunset, under the star-speckled sky listening to frogs and crickets. Darkness soothed. It softened the sharp edges of the world, toned down the too-harsh colors. With the coming of twilight, the sky seemed to recede; the universe expanded. The night was bigger than the day, and in its realm, life seemed to have more possibilities.”
― Dean Koontz, Midnight

“There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human- in not having to be just happy or just sad- in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continuing increase in cranial volume... Childbirth is painful because the evolution of the human skull has been spectacularly fast and recent.”
― Carl Sagan, Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

“(...) darkness is beautiful. It has tremendous depth, silence, infinity. Light comes and goes; darkness always remains, it is more eternal than light. For light you need some fuel; for darkness no fuel is needed - it is simply there.”
― Osho, Freedom: The Courage to Be Yourself

“I never said it was easy to find your place in this world, but I’m coming to the conclusion that if you seek to please others, you will forever be changing because you will never be yourself, only fragments of someone you could be. You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day. That’s the natural order of this world. This is called the practice of detachment.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps

(Jun 26, 2018 03:05 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ][...] You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day. That’s the natural order of this world. This is called the practice of detachment.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps

Some of the earliest accounts or interpretative renderings of the Daoist tradition seem to emphasize getting in tune with the non-intellectual, unattached, natural impetus of the world or its regulatory indifference of how events unfold and happen. IOW, become coherent with the underlying, generic identity that actually survives death and loss of others. But in *1984*, there's a sinister "power" alteration of that idea where the citizen is encouraged to similarly dissolves oneself in the identity of the immortal Party.

O'Brien: "Alone—free—the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal." (Online Version)

~

"Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking."-- Marcus Aurelius