To be a revolutionary is to be in possession of an imagination capable of leaping across the frontier of the familiar to envision a new order in whic… - Maria Popova

"Are we to despair or rejoice over the fact that even the greatest loves exist only "for a time"? The time scales are elastic, contracting and expanding with the depth and magnitude of each love, but they are always finite — like books, like lives, like the universe itself. The triumph of love is in the courage and integrity with which we inhabit the transcendent transience that binds two people for the time it binds them, before letting go with equal courage and integrity."

It takes a rare courage to recognize that feelings are the most perishable of our possessions, even more so than opinions, for an opinion — that is, a real opinion, which is qualitatively different from a fleeting impression or a borrowed stance — is arrived at via a well-reasoned argument with oneself. Not so a feeling — feelings coalesce out of the vapors that escape from the deepest groundwaters of our unreasoned and unreasonable being, and whatever rainbows they may scatter for a moment when touched with the light of another, they diffuse and evaporate just as readily, just as mysteriously.

Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, [cynicism] is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive.