Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

— Rainer Maria Rilke (via biwwfy)

Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood.

— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 ch. 19, p. 303  (via pax-caelestis)

It is okay to be at a place of struggle. Struggle is just another word for growth. Even the most evolved beings find themselves in a place of struggle now and then. In fact, struggle is a sure sign to them that they are expanding; it is their indication of real and important progress. The only one who doesn’t struggle is the one who doesn’t grow. So if you are struggling right now, see it as a terrific sign — celebrate your struggle.

— Neale Donald Walsch (via onlinecounsellingcollege)

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

— Langston Hughes (via loverfly)

Don’t settle. Don’t finish crappy books. If you don’t like the menu, leave the restaurant. If you’re not on the right path, get off it.

— Chris Brogan   (via bluishtigers)

Why is European philosophy “philosophy”, but African philosophy ethnophilosophy, the way Indian music is ethnomusic — an ethnographic logic that is based on the very same reasoning that if you were to go to the New York Museum of Natural History (popularised in Shawn Levy’s Night at the Museum [2006]), you only see animals and non-white peoples and their cultures featured inside glass cages, but no cage is in sight for white people and their cultures – they just get to stroll through the isles and enjoy the power and ability of looking at taxidermic Yaks, cave dwellers, elephants, Eskimos, buffalo, Native Americans, etc, all in a single winding row.

— Hamid Dabashi, “Can non-Europeans think?” (via zombimatter)

If you are getting a colonial education, you are learning how to solve imperial problems, not people’s problems.

— Hatem Bazian (via blkcowrie)

It doesn’t make sense to call ourselves ugly, because we don’t really see ourselves. We don’t watch ourselves sleeping in bed, curled up and silent with chests rising and falling with our own rhythm. We don’t see ourselves reading a book, eyes fluttering and glowing. You don’t see yourself looking at someone with love and care inside your heart. There’s no mirror in your way when you’re laughing and smiling and happiness is leaking out of you. You would know exactly how bright and beautiful you are if you saw yourself in the moments where you are truly yourself.

— dirty wings   (via safiyahhh)

I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.

— Neil Gaiman, M Is for Magic  (via closedforprayer)