ambivalence is my personal outlet. Its purpose is to collect what inspires me. While it primarily is not intended to be viewed others, perhaps you might enjoy it anyway. With others work and my own combined, credit is given when possible.
Vomit.
Pick myself up.
It’ll work out.
It always does.
I haven’t died yet.
I haven’t crashed entirely, and even if I were to, the sun would still set and you’d fall asleep and I would too.
Erik Satie - Gymnopédie No. 1 from 1888
Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person you will pass on the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would anyone want to be anything but kind in the meantime
Excerpt from the epilogue of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris
(Source: tulsa.humanists.net)
Some people don’t want to be saved. Because saving means changing. And changing is always harder than staying the same. It takes courage to face yourself in the mirror and look beyond the reflection. To find the you that you should have been. The you that got derailed by cruel childhood events. Events that took your life’s natural trajectory and twisted it. Changing it into something unimaginable, or even incredible.
— Dick Grayson as Batman
And just as we built them, we took the buildings down, brick by brick. We took the steel and the gold and the silver and the oil and put them back beneath the skin of the earth where they belonged. We turned the roads back to rocks and grass and flowers. We told the animals “We’re sorry.” We took our clothes off and felt the wind on our skin and you and I, we were not ashamed.
Then we turned around, and walked back into the sea.
Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.
8:6 Book of Song of Solomon
When you wake up in the mornin’ baby
look inside your mirror
You know I won’t be next to you
You know I won’t be near
I’d just be curious to know if you can see yourself as clear
as someone who has had you on his mind.
An excerpt of ‘Mama, You’ve Been On My Mind’ by Bob Dylan.
I have not given up caring.
I just realised what is worth caring for.
Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsay able than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.
An excerpt from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
Dan: Everybody wants to be happy.
Larry: Depressives don't. They want to be unhappy to confirm they're depressed. If they were happy they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live. Which can be depressing.
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
Excerpt from Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins
