Enigmatic Ambiance

The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile. -- Plato

[bookmania]

Just because you’re taught that something’s right and everyone believes it’s right, it don’t make it right.

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (via bookmania)

[enigmaticambiance]

“Put bluntly, too many of us spend years, even decades, in pursuit of someone else’s plan for our one precious life.”

Chase Jarvis, Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

[mismatchingsockss]

j.r.r. tolkien, all that is gold does not glitter

[enigmaticambiance]

“Grief is a liar and an ocean. Just when you think you’ve reached the shore, it rises up again and swallows you whole. Weeks can go by without any tears at all, and then an unexpected card stuck in a book can knock you flat on your face sure as any tsunami. And your throat burns and sputters and chokes, drowning in a torrent of salt-stung water, as you gasp for air and try so desperately to wake up from this dream.” ― Mary Marantz, Dirt: Growing Strong Roots in What Makes the Broken Beautiful

Photo by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash

[enigmaticambiance]

“Most people need love and acceptance a lot more than they need advice.”

Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

[enigmaticambiance]

“And there's nothing wrong with being a lizard either. Unless you were born to be a hawk.” 

― Leigh Bardugo, Shadow and Bone

Photo by Kim O’Hara on Unsplash

[enigmaticambiance]

“Strangely, some of us respond to feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by vowing to work even harder and longer. It doesn’t help that our culture glorifies burnout as a measure of success and self-worth. The implicit message is that if we aren’t perpetually exhausted, we must not be doing enough. That great things are reserved for those who bleed, for those who almost break. Crushing volume is somehow now the goal. Burnout is not a badge of honor.”

Greg McKeown, Effortless: Make It Easy to Get the Right Things Done

[enigmaticambiance]

Land, Sea, and Sky

Waves crash and roll Up to my knees in sticky sand Grandfather helps me up and says Taking me by the hand "Sometimes in life you have to make choices And not just whether to eat soup or tofu I'm talking about where you belong Where you are most like you "Your mother is from the sky She flew down here at birth And as much as she loves this little planet She wasn't meant for Earth "Your father loves the land The land is from where he came And I can't say I understand But I love him all the same "I am from the sea I could watch the waves all night And when my time has come to go To be buried there would be my delight" When he suddenly passed away And his sand mixed with the sea's I remembered his last words About who I was meant to be "You could be from the sky, sea, land," he said "Or anything else you choose Just don't try to please others Yourself is something you cannot lose" "Grandfather, I'm from the clouds It's a little bit of each I've been to the sea and sky And of course the sandy beach "Grandfather, that’s where I'm meant to be!" 

- Emily

[enigmaticambiance]

“I do things differently because I don’t go by a rule book because I lead from the heart, not the head, and albeit that’s got me into trouble in my work, I understand that, but someone’s got to go out there and love people and show it.” - Princess Diana 

[enigmaticambiance]

People see luck where hard work  really took place.  Dreams that took a decade to create. - nothing big just started yesterday

Jennae Cecelia, I Am More Than a Daydream

[davideor94]

Few moments before the day faded - Rome, Italy

(Source instagram.com/davideor94)

© Davide Oricchio 2021

[alessiazeffiretti]

Alba di lago

[aznaudrey]

sunny days 

[enigmaticambiance]

How tall is your sunflower? That’s what most people seem to care about. How big a brand, how much market share, how many online followers. Too many marketers spend most of their time running a hype show, trying to get just a little bigger. The thing is, tall sunflowers have deep and complex root systems. Without them, they’d never get very high.

Seth Godin, This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See

[enigmaticambiance]

Even though your dreams seem beyond the horizon, you can reach them. It may take as long as walking 20 miles in the desert, or it may come as quick as  driving down the street. - ask, believe, receive

Jennae Cecelia, I Am More Than a Daydream

[just--space]

A Starry Night of Iceland : On some nights, the sky is the best show in town. On this night, the sky was not only the best show in town, but a composite image of the sky won an international competition for landscape astrophotography. The featured winning image was taken in 2011 over Jökulsárlón, the largest glacial lake in Iceland. The photographer combined six exposures to capture not only two green auroral rings, but their reflections off the serene lake. Visible in the distant background sky is the band of our Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy. A powerful coronal mass ejection from the Sun caused auroras to be seen as far south as Wisconsin, USA. As the Sun progresses away from its current low in surface activity toward a solar maximum a few years away, many more spectacular images of aurora are expected. via NASA

[enigmaticambiance]

“And I dream too much and I don’t write enough and I’m trying to find God everywhere.”

— Anis Mojgai, from Those Who Can Ride in an Airplane For the First Time