Short is good, and concise is fun, and in a world where we have too many facts, we appreciate a quick picture that synthesizes facts into something meaningful rather than a summary of disjointed facts.

Penelope Trunk. Next Phase of Your Career: Design.

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

Emily Dickinson.

Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable. 

C.S. Lewis. A GRIEF OBSERVED.

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.
Philip K. Dick. How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later.

We all...must find some balance in accepting less than perfection and yet having some beauty.

Francis Schaffer. LETTERS.

Painting is a mute revealer and yet often speaks more perceptively to the interpreting mind than concept bearing words. For it impresses us with the irrefutable power of immediate intuition.

Paul Tillich. Mass and Personality. ON ART AND ARCHITECTURE.

quoted by Dr Christine Gapes. Severed Connections: Using Theological Imagination to explore Youth’s Response to Violence at Port Arthur.

If the devil can hinder us from taking the supreme climb and getting rid of wrong traditions about God, he will do so; but if we keep true to God, God will take us through an ordeal which will bring us out into a better knowledge of Himself.

Oswald Chambers. MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST. The Supreme Climb (meditation on Genesis 22:2). 

The value of college is personal growth, but that value is hard to get to...

Penelope Trunk, summarizing Richard Arum, professor at NYU and author of the book Academically Adrift, in What To Do In College Right Now