Patrick Calder

assurance and inexpressible delight

Let the philosophers rave on about the summum bonum and mystics about embracing God. They are still vertical humans and therefore even their adorations still have something aggressive about them. Humans in the horizontal position have always struck me as less likely to be violent and destructive. So I take my place beside the poets, and less arrogant than the philosopher or mystic, am prepared to find the greatest good and embrace God whenever I hold a woman in the act of love. It is then I know with assurance and inexpressible delight that whatever it is life promises us, this must be it; and that a universe containing this experience must have something grandly important going for it.

— Irving Layton (via Katie West)

Curiosity

I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.

- Albert Einstein, (via Holly)

Change

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single minute before starting to improve the world.

- Anne Frank, (via Holly)

Mysterious Ways

The ways of God and government and girls are all mysterious, and it is not given to mortal man to understand them.

Robert Heinlein

smile

I like her because she smiles at me and means it.

- Anonymous

Beautiful and Strange

Thought I shared this a while ago, but it came up again in reading today:

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

- Francis Bacon

We are here to…

We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!

— Nicolas Cage to Cher in Moonstruck

enjoy

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

- George Santayana

Confidence

Confidence is 10% hard work and 90% delusion.

— Tina Fey

Dare

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

– Theodore Roosevelt

You may see me only as a drunken, vice-ridden gnome whose friends are just pimps and girls from the brothels. But I know about art and love, if only because I long for it with every fiber of my being.

– Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge