Albert Bierstadt

When we live constantly in the abstract - whether it be abstractness of thought or of feelings one has thought - it soon comes about that contrary to our own feelings and our own will the things in real life, which, according to us, we should feel most deeply turn into phantasms. Living so much on one's imagination actually erodes one's ability to imagine, especially one's ability to imagine the real. Living mentally on what is not and cannot be, we are, in the end, unable even to ponder what might really be.

Fernando Pessoa Book of Disquiet

To stray beyond the lines is to imply you are through with your visions, that you wish to join the mêlée.

Lytton Smith

A fact is what won’t go away, what we cannot not know, as Henry James remarked of the real. Yet when we bring one closer, stare at it, test our loyalty to it, it begins to shimmer with complication. Without becoming less factual, it floats off into myth. Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar looks at the sky, his lawn, the sea, starlings, tortoises, Roman rooftops, a girl, giraffes and much else. He wants only to observe, to learn a modest lesson from creatures and things. But he can’t. There is too much to see in them, for a start. … And there is too much of himself and his culture in the world he watches anyway: the universe is littered with the signs of our needs, with mythologies.

Michael Wood

Zhu Naizheng（朱 乃正 Chinese, b.1935）

孤翔

You coffee shop revolutionary son of a bitch.

Felipe Andres Coronel

She didn’t like to be talked about. Equally, she didn’t like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people’s feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated.

The Children’s Book, A.S. Byatt

I’m not so worried about the dangers of mental junk food. No, my worry is that you won’t put enough really excellent stuff into your brain. I’m talking about what you might call the “theory of maximum taste.” This theory is based on the idea that exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness. The theory of maximum taste says that each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit—the best that it habitually consumes and is capable of consuming. ... Our maximum taste shrinks. Have you ever noticed that 70 percent of the people you know are more boring at 30 than they were at 20? I’m worried about the future of your maximum taste. People in my and earlier generations, at least those lucky enough to get a college education, got some exposure to the classics, which lit a fire that gets rekindled every time we sit down to read something really excellent. I worry that it’s possible to grow up now not even aware that those upper registers of human feeling and thought exist.

David Brooks

jensenacklesmishacollins:

Ei talupoegadele - No to peasants.

...

The majority speaks Sense.

http://jensenacklesmishacollins.tumblr.com/post/99414721364/as-i-said-there-was-a-protest-against-union