Strive to be uncynical, to be a hope-giving person, to be a steward of substance. Choose to lift people up, not to lower them down because it is a ch… - Maria Popova

However divided we may feel within ourselves, it is the sum total of our warring fractions that make us who we are — fragmentary but indivisible.

It is a beautiful impulse–to contain the infinite in the finite, to wrest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb toward higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the times themselves.

This is the paradox of transformative experience: Because our imagination is bounded by our existing templates of how the world as we know it works, we fail to anticipate the greatest transformations — the events and encounters so unmoored from the familiar that they transfigure our map of reality and propel us into a wholly novel mode of being.