“What nourishes me, destroys me”
When something good happens, I am happy, and there is no confusion in my mind about whether it is rational for me to be happy. When something terrible happens, I do not flee my sadness by searching for fake consolations and false silver linings. I visualize the past and future of humankind, the tens of billions of deaths over our history, the misery and fear, the search for answers, the trembling hands reaching upward out of so much blood, what we could become someday when we make the stars our cities, all that darkness and all that light — I know that I can never truly understand it, and I haven't the words to say.
Feeling Rational http://lesswrong.com/lw/hp/feeling_rational/ (April 2007)
“It was a soufflé of a speech, light, pleasant, digestible, and nourishing also.”
Of a talk by Lewis Carroll
The Lewis Carroll Picture Book (1899) p. 356
Source: "Turning Loss into Beauty: The Tragedies of Geling Yan" in The Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB930264290705115630 (25 June 1999)
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)
Source: Desert Solitaire
"A Few Pages of Notes," http://books.google.com/books?id=hXVHAAAAYAAJ&q=%22An+idealist+is+one+who+on+noticing+that+a+rose+smells+better+than+a+cabbage+concludes+that+it+is+also+more+nourishing%22&pg=PA435#v=onepage The Smart Set (January 1915); later published in A Little Book in C Major http://books.google.com/books?id=EAJbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22An+idealist+is+one+who+on+noticing+that+a+rose+smells+better+than+a+cabbage+concludes+that+it+is+also+more+nourishing%22&pg=PA19#v=onepage (1916)
1910s
Source: A Book of Burlesques
