“Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it.”
More from Rebecca Solnit on Philosophy
“...I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival...”
“the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.”
“I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good...”
“A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.”
“Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.”
“The art is not one of forgetting but letting go”
“[B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears.”
“The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”
“... a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane.”
“The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.”
Others on Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein
22 quotes“The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.”
Christopher Hitchens
22 quotes“How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of...”
Nietzsche
22 quotes“One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior.”
Carl Jung
21 quotes“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
Immanuel Kant
20 quotes“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
Heraclitus
19 quotes“All things flow nothing abides.”
H. L. Mencken
17 quotes“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
C.S. Lewis
15 quotes“[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
14 quotes“Consciousness is man's greatest misfortune, still I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfaction...”
Samuel Beckett
14 quotes“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
Napoleon
14 quotes“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”
Isaac Asimov
13 quotes“Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.”