Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege.
I want to live in a world where all women have access to education, and all women can earn PhD’s, if they so desire.
Privilege does not have to be negative, but we have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.
Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism // Bell Hooks
Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.
// Immanuel Kant
The planet has survived everything, in its time.
It will certainly survive us.
Jurassic Park // Michael Crichton
After all, what is happiness? Love, they tell me.
But love doesn’t bring and never has brought happiness.
On the contrary, it’s a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield;
it’s sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time
if we’re doing the right thing.
Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.
The Witch of Portobello // Paulo Coelho
Because if you base your self-worth on what everyone else thinks of you,
you hand all your power over to other people and become dependent
on a source outside of yourself for validation.
Then you wind up chasing after something you have no control over,
and should that something suddenly place its focus somewhere else,
or change its mind and decide you’re no longer very interesting,
you end up with a full-blown identity crisis.
You Are a Badass // Jen Sincero
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human:
the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears,
to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger,
to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown…
The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road // Paul Theroux
So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself:
who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived
or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
// Hunter S. Thompson
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow –
this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.
Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage // Elizabeth Gilbert
Few of us ever live in the present.
We are forever anticipating what is to come
or remembering what has gone.
// Louis L’Amour
If you feel okay only when life is happy and easy-breezy-beautiful Cover-Girl, then guess what? You are not free. You are the prisoner of your own indulgences, enslaved by your own intolerance, crippled by your own emotional weakness. You will constantly feel a need for some external comfort or validation that may or may not ever come.
Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope // Mark Manson
