In the old world, you were defined by what you consumed*. In the new world, you are defined by what you create.

— Christopher Carfi: Defining “You” (via tommaso) (via luminol)

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

— e.e.cummings (via sabine)

He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.

— T.S. Eliot (re: Henry James) (via enquotations)

Since the dawn of time, human beings have felt the need to share - from food to art. Sharing is part of the human condition. A person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone

— Paulo Coelho(author of The Alchemist and many other best sellers) talking to TorrentFreak, explaining why he decided to share his books for free. (via jhalickman) Very appropriate quote to post to Tumblr. (via peterwknox)

Personality begins where comparison ends.

— Karl Lagerfeld (via seriouslythough)

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

—

CS Lewis (via vasta). Done and done.

Lewis is referring to what Kierkegaard calls the aesthetic mode of living, which relies on the tactics of rotation and repetition. Rather than living lives of deeper meaning, we cultivate distractions and affairs and pastimes, rotating through them and repeating them to stave off existential emptiness.

I don’t think I’m being dramatic when I say that the West’s response to the crisis of meaning in our lives has been this precise stratagem: “Wrap [our hearts] round with hobbies and little luxuries…”

And the web is a catalogue of this exchange.

(via mills)

This is a somewhat cynical, yet insightful and probably true opinion of modern life and the internet. 

All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.

— Jack Kerouac (via mirza)

We all—every single one of us—have a stack of unread New Yorkers that we feel guilty about not having read yet.

— Sheila, from Gawker