When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.
- Abraham Heschel
When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.
- Abraham Heschel
I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely “played.”
May Sarton
Letter to Louise Bogan
3rd July 1955
Via Letters of Note
Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.
David Bowie via philosophical.quote
And little by little I began to wake up to the fact that I am, like everyone else in the academic humanities, really just scraping by in a ghost-career, a vestige of an older order that no one has yet worked up the courage to put out of its misery, but that really cannot continue to fulfill its purported function of shaping well-rounded citizens, when it is so fully subordinated to the primary function of the 21st-century university, which is, namely, fundraising.
Justin Smith-Ruiu via Alan Jacobs
I find the continuing mission of Voyager 1 so moving, for the way its name alone evokes a time of promise, for the thought of that tiny contraption way out there in the vastness at the edge of the heliosphere — perhaps the farthest any human-made thing may ever travel — a bit battered, swiftly aging, still doing the work it was purposed to do.
I feel exactly the same way, but also claim a self-description: I too am "a bit battered, swiftly aging, still doing the work [I] was purposed to do."
Noted by Alan Jacobs