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Explore more quotes by Rebecca Solnit
"Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds."
Empathy
"It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after."
Ethics
"The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest)."
Philosophy
"Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it."
Despair
"Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that's acceptance."
Forgiveness
"Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge."
Nature
"Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use, time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space - for wilderness and public space - must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space."
Imagination
"Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone."
Writing
"No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more."
Discovery
"Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited...Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection."
Joy
Exlpore more Courage quotes
"You have to have courage to begin anything. Without courage and enthusiasm, there is nothing."
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Personal Development
"True kindness is evidence of true courage."
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Personal Development
"If I am sufficiently brave to extract the cancer of fear, I have effectively gutted my conviction that what stands before me is impossible."
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Personal Development
"Life begins at the edge of your fears."
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Personal Development
"Don't fear to sing alone. If your song is right and melodies are touching, listeners will appear."
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Personal Development
"Fear is unnecessary cargo when sailing to success."
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Personal Development
"He, who fails to acknowledge and appreciate the real courage of our fathers, fails to appreciate the real lessons that the courage of our fathers teaches us today! The courage and the wisdom that propelled our fathers to move unrelentingly in their days must be nothing to us, but, a real reason for us to be more than courageous enough to do the undone distinctively in our days."
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Personal Development
"We stand the risk of failure, because you refused to take risks. So life demands risks."
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Personal Development
"Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die."
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Personal Development
"Do I dare Disturb the universe?"
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Personal Development
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