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“I see you're leaving me and taking up with the enemy the cold comfort of the in between a little less than a human being a little less than a happy high a little less than a suicide the only things that you really tried.<BR”

Elliott Smith (1969–2003) American singer-songwriter

Fond Farewell.
Lyrics, From a Basement on the Hill (posthumous, 2004)

“Ultrarunners — even the fiercest competitors — grow to love each other because we all love the same exercise in self-sacrifice and pursuit of transcendence. Because that’s what we’re all chasing — that “zone” where we are performing at the peak of our abilities. That instant when we think we can’t go on but do go on. We all know the way that moment feels, how rarely it occurs, and the pain we have to endure to grab it back again. The longer an ultrarunner competes, I believe, the more he grows to love not only the sport, not only his fellow ultrarunners, but people in general. We all struggle to find meaning in a sometimes painful world. Ultrarunners do it in a very distilled version.”

Scott Jurek (1973) American ultramarthon runner

Source: Eat and Run (2012), Ch. 12, pp. 119-120

“As to the First, methought I had some feeling in the Passion of Christ, but yet I desired more by the grace of God. Methought I would have been that time with Mary Magdalene, and with other that were Christ’s lovers, and therefore I desired a bodily sight wherein I might have more knowledge of the bodily pains of our Saviour and of the compassion of our Lady and of all His true lovers that saw, that time, His pains. For I would be one of them and suffer with Him. Other sight nor shewing of God desired I never none, till the soul were disparted from the body. The cause of this petition was that after the shewing I should have the more true mind in the Passion of Christ.”

Julian of Norwich book Revelations of Divine Love

Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Chapter 2

“The softer you find your child is, the more you are to seek occasions, at fit times, thus to harden him. The great art in this is, to begin with what is but very little painful, and to proceed by insensible degrees, when you are playing, and in good humour with him, and speaking well of him: and when you have once got him to think himself made amends for his suffering by the praise is given him for his courage; when he can take pride in giving such marks of his manliness, and can prefer the reputation of being brave and stout, to the avoiding a little pain, or the shrinking under it; you need nor despair in time and by the assistance of his growing reason, to master his timorousness, and mend the weakness of his constitution.”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Sec. 115
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

“By this sinister elision, this slipping from true remorse, the belief that the suffering we have precipitated ought to ennoble us, or at least make us less ignoble from then on, to disguised self-forgiveness, the belief that suffering in some way ennobles life, so that the precipitation of pain comes, by such a cockneyed algebra, to equal the ennoblement, or at any rate the enrichment, of life, by this characteristically twentieth-century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of that accusing death; and hardened myself, to say nothing of it at Bourani. I was still determined to tell Julie, but at the right time and place, when the exchange rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked looked very likely to be high.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Source: The Magus (1965), Ch. 52

“And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex

Source: The Second Sex

“I love you much
most beautiful darling
more than anyone on the earth
and I like you better
than everything in the sky.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

“There’s more to honesty than … than an arrangement of words. They say faeries can’t lie, but you lie in your intentions, your attitude, your demeanor”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

“It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

“Dragon kind was no less cruel than mankind. The Dragon, at least, acted from bestial need rather than bestial greed.”
~ A thought by Lessa ~”

Anne McCaffrey book Dragonflight

Source: Dragonflight

“You don’t have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run faster than the guy next to you.”

Jim Butcher (1971) American author

“I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Source: Three Lives & Tender Buttons

“I hated him more than anything. I loved him more than anything. Because, he was everything. And I hated that, too.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: It's Not Summer Without You

“Public discourse is sometimes hotter and more negative than it should be, which can, in my opinion, trigger someone who is less than stable.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Interview with Jon Ralston, Ralston Live (18 June 2015) http://watch.knpb.org/video/2365512486/ <br class="br">Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016)

“The great end of education is, to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the use of its own powers, rather than fill it with the accumulation of others.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 134.

“If some of the dynamical models have their way…Juliette could meet her less-than-Shakespearean demise sooner than indicated in the official forecast.”

Lixion Avila (1950) American meteorologist

On Tropical Storm Juliette in 2007 http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2007/ep14/ep142007.discus.003.shtml?

“He whose intellect overcomes his desire is higher than the angels; he whose desire overcomes his intellect is less than an animal.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

As quoted in The Rumi Collection : An Anthology of Translations of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi (2000) by Kabir Helminski

“What is there more mysterious than clarity?… What more capricious than the way in which light and shade are distributed over hours and over men?”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Socrates, p. 107. Ellipsis in original.
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

“Which means we’re cheaper than the Chinese, cheaper than [the] Russians or anywhere else – and we’re doing it in the United States with American labour costs.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)

“A space of time costs of various modes of transportation, e. g., travel taking longer on foot than by air, longer upstream than down.”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Living Systems: Basic Concepts (1969)