Wise Poets, Personal Writings, Clouds And Wisdom
Pablo Casals (December 29, 1876–October 22, 1973) On my last birthday I was ninety-three years old. That is not young, of course. In fact, it is older than ninety. But age is a relative matter. If you continue to work and to absorb the beauty in the world about you, you find that age does …
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George Orwell (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950) Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So …
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Winston Churchill (November 30, 1874 – January 24, 1965) The world looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame… The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is some one outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be …
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Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926 - January 22, 2022) It’s funny how much our surroundings influence our emotions. Our joys and sorrows, likes and dislikes are colored by our environment so much that often we just let our surroundings dictate our course. We go along with “public” feelings until we no longer even know our …
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Henry Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) You have to get to the point of no return before coming up again. There's no God protecting you. In the end you have to come back to yourself. It has got to be you doing something, whatever you decide upon. Do what you think you …
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Suzy Kassem They say that wisdom is a dying flower, and I disagree. In a world covered in mud, the lotus still continues to grow. Even after mankind washes itself away from the surface of the earth, knowledge will still remain. Look no further than the bosom of Nature. It offers all the solutions needed …
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Mario Vargas Llosa (March 28, 1936 -) A cross between a superhuman and a jester, the caudillo makes and unmakes things at his will, inspired by God or by an ideology in which socialism and fascism — two forms of statism and collectivism — are nearly always confused, and communicates directly with his people through …
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Martha Nussbaum (May 06, 1047 -) The condition of being good is that it should always be possible for you to be morally destroyed by something you couldn’t prevent. To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, …
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Pierre Elliott Trudeau (October 18, 1919 – September 28, 2000) The only constant factor to be found in my thinking over the years has been opposition to accepted opinion. Had I applied this principle to the stock market, I might have made a fortune. I chose to apply it to politics and it led me …
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May Swenson (May 28, 1913 – December 4, 1989) Poetry is based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming. This ambition involves a paradox: an instinctive belief in the senses as …
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Henry Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) We have talked breathlessly about equality and democracy without ever facing the reality of it. We shall have to take these despised and neglected ones to our bosom, melt into them, absorb their anguish and misery. We cannot have a real brotherhood so long as we …
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Henri Matisse (December 31, 1869 – November 03, 1954) The effort to see a thing without distortion takes something very much like courage and this courage is essential to the artist who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time: he has to look at life as he did …
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Giorgos Seferis (February 29 1900 – September 20, 1971) But to say what you want to say, You must create another language and nourish it for years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again.
George Bernard Shaw (July 26, 1856 – November 02, 1950) This is the joy of my life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself …
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David Hockney (July 09, 1937 -) I can get excitement watching rain on a puddle. And then I paint it. Now, I admit, there are not too many people who would find that exciting. But I would. And I want life thrilling and rich. And it is. I make sure it is.
But apparently man loves to kill things, the fleeting deer, the marvelous gazelle, and the great elephant. We love to kill each other. This killing of other human beings has never stopped throughout the history of man's life on this earth. If we could, and we must, establish a deep long abiding relationship with nature, …
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David Whyte (November 02, 1955 -) Anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world …
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Joyce Carol Oates (June 16, 1938 -) I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.
Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919 – February 08, 1999) Art and morals are… one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery …
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Robert Burton (February 8, 1577–January 25, 1640) Whosoever he is therefore that is overrun with solitariness, or carried away with pleasing melancholy and vain conceits, and for want of employment knows not how to spend his time, or crucified with worldly care, I can prescribe him no better remedy than this of study, to compose …
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Carl G Jung (July 26, 1875–June 6, 1961) One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. Moreover this way fits …
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Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899–June 14, 1986) There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do, what his acts correspond to, his sentiments, his ideas, or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the …
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From The Archives - Originally Published January 24, 2020 Justice Harry Blackmun (November 12, 1908 – March 4, 1999) We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in …
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Brent Staples (1951 -) Newspapers that championed white supremacy throughout the pre-civil rights South paved the way for lynching by declaring African Americans nonpersons. They embraced the language once used at slave auctions by denying Black citizens the courtesy titles Mr. and Mrs. and referring to them in news stories as “the negro,” “the negress” …
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Cass Robert Sunstein (September 21, 1954 -) People often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, …
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Brenda Ueland (October 24, 1891 – March 5, 1985) Why should we all use our creative powers…? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.
Martha Nussbaum (May 06, 1947 -) You see people doing that today where they feel that society has let them down, and they can’t ask anything of it, and they can’t put their hopes on anything outside themselves. You see them actually retreating to a life in which they think only of their own satisfaction, …
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David Attenborough (May 08, 1926 -) We tend to think we are the be all and end all—but we’re not. The sooner we can realize that the natural world goes its way, not our way, the better.
Katherine “Kate” J Boo (August 12, 1964 -) Very little journalism is world changing. But if change is to happen, it will be because people with power have a better sense of what’s happening to people who have none.
Milan Kundera (April 01, 1929 -) The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth, neither Anna nor Karenin, but where everyone has the right to be understood, both Anna and Karenin… Every novel says to the reader, “Things are not as simple as they seem.” …
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Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock (August 13, 1899 – April 29, 1980) There is as much anticipation in confronting good food as there is in going on a holiday or seeing a good show. There are two kinds of eating — eating to sustain and eating for pleasure. I eat for pleasure.
Constantine Peter Cavafy (April 17, 1863 – April 29, 1933) Like a good tailor who fashions a suit for one man (or even two) resplendently; and an over coat that might suit two or three — thus for me might my poems be made “to fit,” in one case (or perhaps in two or three). …
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George Dyson (March 26, 1953 -) Living without telephone, computer, internet, or even electric light, I had time beyond measure to think. I found myself thinking about what, if anything, a tree might think. Not thinking the way we think, but the way a single neuron thinks, integrating information over time. It might take years …
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James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like …
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Kim Phúc I have carried the results of war on my body. You don’t grow out of the scars, physically or mentally. I am grateful now for the power of that photograph of me as a 9-year-old, as I am of the journey I have taken as a person. My horror — which I barely …
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Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (February 01, 1884 – March 10, 1937) I've always sought novelty, variety, dangers – otherwise [life] would all have seemed too cold, too empty.
Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) Guns symbolize the power of a minority over the majority, and they’ve become the icons of a party that has become a cult seeking minority power… The dots are easy to connect, because they’re so close together, and because they’re the entry and exit wounds inflicted on US society …
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Emil Mihai Cioran (April 08, 1911 – June 20, 1995) When I meet friends or people I know who are going through a difficult period, I usually have this advice for them: ‘Spend 20 minutes in a cemetery, and you’ll see that, though your worry won’t disappear, you’ll almost forget about it and you’ll feel …
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Simone Weil (February 03, 1909 – August 24, 1943) To desire friendship is a great fault. Friendship should be a gratuitous joy like those afforded by art or life. We must refuse it so that we may be worthy to receive it; it is of the order of grace. It is one of those things …
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(September 19, 1920 - May 20, 2022)🌹 All the dead from wars and natural events and school shootings and street crimes and domestic crimes that each of us has once again escaped and felt terrible about and plan to go and leave wreaths or paper flowers at the site of. There’s never anything new about …
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Claudia Hammond (May 23, 1971 -) We know that time has an impact on memory, but it is also memory that creates and shapes our experience of time. Our perception of the past moulds our experience of time in the present to a greater degree than we might realize. It is memory that creates the …
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Joseph Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) Whatever my fate is, is what I need. If you bring love to that moment, not discouragement, you will find the strength. Any detour or disarray you can learn from is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege!
Anna Kamieńska (April 12, 1920 – May 10, 1986) I’ve learned to value failed conversations, missed connections, confusions. What remains is what’s unsaid, what’s underneath. Understanding on another level of being.
Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913 – February 12, 1980) We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope, on another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the concept of perpetual warfare… To be against war is not enough, it …
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Karel Čapek (January 09, 1890 – December 25, 1938) All of us have begun to feel that there is something odd and insoluble about the conflicts between world-views, generations, political principles, and whatever else divides us… Hatred, lack of knowledge, fundamental distrust, these are the psychic world of communism… I count myself among the idiots …
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Ada Limón I want to focus on how useful poetry can be in our daily lives. Poetry is one of the few art forms that has breath built right into it. It literally wants us to breathe, to pause for a moment and pay attention to what matters. Whether it’s a tree that we are …
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Thích Nhất Hạnh (October 11, 1926 - January 22, 2022) The peace we seek cannot be our personal possession. We need to find an inner peace which makes it possible for us to become one with those who suffer, and to do something to help our brothers and sisters, which is to say, ourselves
William Sidney Porter (O’Henry) (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910) I'll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2. The technical points you can get from Bliss Perry. If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you …
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John William Coltrane (September 23, 1926–July 17, 1967) It is really easy for us [jazz musicians] to create. We are born with this feeling that just comes out no matter what conditions exist. Otherwise, how could our founding fathers have produced this music in the first place when they surely found themselves (as many of …
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Willa Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) Art is a matter of enjoyment through the five senses. Unless you can see the beauty all around you everywhere, and enjoy it, you can never comprehend art.
Janna Levin We’re all intrinsically of the same substance…. The fabric of the universe is just a coherent weave from the same threads that make our bodies. How much more absurd it becomes to believe that the universe, space and time could possibly be infinite when all of us are finite.
Eckhart Tolle (February 16, 1948 -) You recognize worry as futile and destructive, so you are able to let it go when it happens. You find inner peace and contentment in the present moment. And perhaps you begin to realize that you are not a person but an essential and intrinsic part of the evolution …
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Clive Staples Lewis (November 29, 1898 – November 22, 1963) Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
Woody Guthrie (July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) I hate a song that makes you think that you're not any good. [...] Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling. I am out to fight those kinds of songs to …
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Annelies Marie Frank (June 12, 1929 – February or March 1945) I have often been downcast, but never in despair; I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure, romantic and interesting at the same time. In my diary I treat all the privations as amusing. I have made up my mind now to lead a …
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Charles M Blow And I have come to see things clearly again — things that seem so simple to me now, but that somehow I couldn’t see then: that life is a series of peaks and valleys, and it is a fool’s errand to try to flatten them out. That beauty is in the connections …
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Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 04, 1975) Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in …
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Hermann Hesse (July 02, 1877 – August 09, 1962) Great masses of people these days live out their lives in a dull and loveless stupor. Sensitive persons find our inartistic manner of existence oppressive and painful, and they withdraw from sight… I believe what we lack is joy. The ardor that a heightened awareness imparts …
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James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at …
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Chah Subhaddo known in English as Ajahn Chah (June 17, 1918 – January 16, 1992) If you let go a little, you have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you have complete peace.
Naomi Shihab Nye (March 12, 1952 -) Two helpful words to keep in mind at the beginning of any writing adventure are pleasure and spaciousness. If we connect a sense of joy with our writing, we may be inclined to explore further. What’s there to find out? Perhaps too much stock has been placed in …
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Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) We, none of us, choose the century we are born in, or the skin we are born in, or the chromosomes we are born with. We don’t choose the incredibly narrow band of homeostasis within which we can be alive at all — in bodies that die when their …
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Václav Havel (October 5, 1936–December 18, 2011) There is far more at stake here than simply standing up to those who would like once again to divide the world into spheres of interest, or subjugate others who are different from them, and weaker. What is now at stake is saving the human race. In other …
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Léon Bloy (July 11, 1846–November 3, 1917) There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do, what his acts correspond to, his sentiments, his ideas, or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register …
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Françoise Sagan (June 21, 1935 – September 24, 2004) I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love… Love lasts about seven years. That's how long it takes for the cells of the body to totally replace themselves.
Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear. It mustn’t be fancy. I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now […] sort of tap dance through it. I always feel that whatever isn’t necessary shouldn’t be …
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Aldous Huxley (July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963) Human beings are immensely complicated creatures, living simultaneously in a half dozen different worlds. Each individual is unique and, in a number of respects, unlike all the other members of the species. None of our motives is unmixed, none of our actions can be traced back …
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Eckhart Tolle (February 16, 1948 -) Most humans are still, almost literally, possessed by thought. They don’t think, but thinking happens to them. The beginning of spiritual awakening is the realization that you are not the voice in your head but the one who is aware of the voice. You are the awareness behind your …
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Margaret Higgins Sanger (September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966) No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.
David Whyte (November 02, 1955 -) We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a different way, a clear, rested, embodied voice, our life as a sudden, emphatic statement, one we can recognize as our …
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Roger Angell (September 19, 1920 -) What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. […] It no longer matters so much what the caring …
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Erin Westgate Although some people’s lives may be higher on one dimension than others, happiness, meaning, and richness represent three components or dimensions of the good life, rather than independent types of life.
William Wordsworth (April 07, 1770 – April 23, 1850) Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility. The emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears.
Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926 - January 22, 2022) 🌹 March 16, 2007 Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh (AP Photo, file) If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water …
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Steve Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, …
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Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) The arguments about abortion in the US are about one thing: controlling women… A lot of people with a lot of power don’t see why women should have jurisdiction over their own bodies. That’s the anti-abortion argument in a nutshell, in that they claim a foetus, or even an …
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Rob Brezsny What does it mean to feel real? Some people have a hard time doing that. They have such false ideas about who they are that they rarely feel real. Others are so distracted by trivial longings that they never have the luxury of settling into the exquisite at-home-ness of feeling real. For those …
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Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if …
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Milan Kundera (April 01, 1929 -) We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come… There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything …
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Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) We read for countless reasons and books transform us in countless ways, reckoned and unreckoned. We read the way we love — with our whole selves, with the flickering constellation of values, longings, traumas, joys, hopes, despairs, formative experiences, and half-remembered impressions composing the self. We read with our …
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Even those of us who have not filled the bathtub with emergency water, withdrawn extra cash from the bank and stocked up on food will be entering the new millennium sobered by the awareness that unknown problems of our own making are an enduring part of existence. New York Times Señor Tao (April 17, 1948 -) This …
Clare of Assisi, born Chiara Offreduccio (July 16, 1194 – August 11, 1253) There are some who do not pray nor make sacrifices; there are many who live solely for the idolatry of their senses. There should be compensation. There should be someone who prays and makes sacrifices for those who do not do so. …
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David Suzuki (March 24, 1936 -) Concentration is not to try hard to watch something. In zazen if you try to look at one spot you will be tired in about five minutes. This is not concentration. Concentration means freedom. So your effort should be directed at nothing. You should concentrate on nothing.
Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913–February 12, 1980) Now, when it is hard to hold for a moment the giant clusters of event and meaning that every day appear, it is time to remember [poetry], which has forever been a way of reaching complexes of emotion and relationship, the attitude that is like the attitude of …
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Willa Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Most of our young authors start to write a story and make a few observations from …
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Peter Russell The call to let go lies at the heart of the world’s spiritual traditions. Not being attached to outcomes, surrendering desires, accepting the present, opening to a higher power, relinquishing the ego, practicing forgiveness — all entail letting go. Why is letting go deemed so important? Holding on, these teachings repeatedly affirm, limits …
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Adyashanti (October 26, 1962 -) This whole universe is indeed a mirror. So if you are resisting something, what you get back is your experience of resisting something. . . . It's like you walk up to God's vending machine and you say, 'I really don't want to have this experience.' And you put that …
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Carl Gustav Jung ( July 26, 1875 – June 06, 1961) It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects …
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Brenda Ueland (October 24, 1891 – March 5, 1985) Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers… Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.
Alexandra Tempus We are now at the dawn of America’s Great Climate Migration Era. For now, it is piecemeal, and moves are often temporary. … But permanent relocations, by individuals and eventually whole communities, are increasingly becoming unavoidable.
Michael Coleman Talbot (September 29, 1953 – May 27, 1992) Time and again the limits of our language define the limits of our understanding of the universe. The indistinguishability of subatomic particles points out still another weakness of our linguistic approach to understanding reality. For instance, all electrons are exactly alike. It is as if …
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Eckhart Tolle (February 16, 1948 -) Many narratives, especially the repetitive ones, generate anxiety, anger, hatred, and other negative emotions. These narratives constitute what we might call the unobserved mind. This unobserved mind is responsible for most of the human-made suffering on the planet, both personal and collective.
Marvin Hartley Bell (August 3, 1937 – December 14, 2020) Much of our lives involves the word 'no.' In school we are mostly told, 'Don't do it this way. Do it that way.' But art is the big yes. In art, you get a chance to make something where there was nothing.
Valerie Andrews Children have a magical capacity to see the land as an animal does; to experience the sky from the perspective of a flower or a bee; to feel the earth quiver and breathe beneath us; to know a hundred different smells of mud and listen unselfconsciously to the soughing of the trees.
Ezra Klein (May 09, 1984 -) The conventional wisdom is that there is some argument, yet unmade and perhaps undiscovered, that will change the minds of the roughly 30 percent of American adults who haven’t gotten at least one dose. There probably isn’t … Polio and measles were murderous, but their near elimination required vaccine …
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Kim Addonizio (July 31, 1954 -) What I've learned is simple: if you nurture it, it will expand, and it will nurture you in return. I have also learned that it is a kind of salvation. Sometimes it's more than enough and sometimes it's not enough — by that I mean one's own creativity. If …
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James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) Given the conditions in this country to be a black writer was impossible. … My father didn't think it was possible — he thought I'd get killed, get murdered. He said I was contesting the white man's definitions, which was quite right.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (June 29, 1900–July 31, 1944) Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of the trees… I longed for night and for …
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Czesław Miłosz (June 30, 1911 – August 14, 2004) “So lasting they are, the rivers!” Only think. Sources somewhere in the mountains pulsate and springs seep from a rock, join in a stream, in the current of a river, and the river flows through centuries, millennia. Tribes, nations pass, and the river is still there, …
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Jane Hirshfield (February 24, 1953 -) Metaphors give words a way to go beyond their own meaning. They are handles on the door of what we can know and of what we can imagine. Each door leads to some new house and some new world that only that one handle can open… What’s amazing is …
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Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) People are dying. Aquatic animals are baking in their shells. Fruit is being cooked on the tree. It’s time to act… Human beings crave clarity, immediacy, landmark events. We seek turning points, because our minds are good at recognizing the specific – this time, this place, this sudden event, …
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Ida Bell Wells (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931) I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching, and I have told it so often that I know it by heart. I do not have to embellish; it makes its own way.
Émile Zola (April 02, 1840 – September 29, 1902) I repeat with the most vehement conviction: truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it. Today is only the beginning, for it is only today that the positions have become clear: on one side, those who are guilty, who do not want the light …
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Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart - Star Trek: The Next Generation) The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proved again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less-developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are …
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Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.
Charles M Blow (August 11, 1970 -) Black people are targeted by the criminal justice system and that is used to target them by the electoral system. Either way, if you are Black in America, you are a target.
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Here I am, and here you are, and here is the robin’s egg in its near-life collision with chance. To ask for its meaning is as meaningless a question as to demand the meaning of a color or the meaning of a bird. On this particular day, at this …
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Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 04, 1975) For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequaled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved …
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Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915–March 26, 1980) I decide that (the declaration of love), though I repeat and rehearse it day by day through the course of time, will somehow recover, each time I utter it, a new state. Like the Argonaut renewing his ship during his voyage without changing its name, the subject in …
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Alain de Botton (December 20, 1969 -) At its most basic, charity means offering someone something they need but can’t get for themselves. This is normally and logically understood to mean something material. We overwhelmingly associate charity with giving money. But, in its widest sense, charity stretches far beyond financial donations. Charity involves offering someone …
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Adam Zagajewski (June 21, 1945 – March 21, 2021) Poets must have firm opinions about life and death, but not political opinions: I don’t think that tax reform legislation is any business of poets.
Romain Rolland (January 29, 1866 – December 30, 1944) The hammer is not all: the anvil also is necessary. Had destiny descended only upon some weakling, or on an imitation great man, and bent his back under this burden, there would have been no tragedy in it, only an everyday affair. But here destiny meets …
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Henrik Johan Ibsen (March 20, 1828 – May 23, 1906) I almost think we're all of us Ghosts … It's not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling …
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Archilochus (680–645 BC) Nothing can be surprising any more or impossible or miraculous, now that Zeus, father of the Olympians has made night out of noonday, hiding the bright sunlight, and . . . fear has come upon mankind. After this, men can believe anything, expect anything...
Sy Montgomery (February 7, 1958 -) What is the soul? Some say it is the self, the “I” that inhabits the body; without the soul, the body is like a lightbulb with no electricity. But it is more than the engine of life, say others; it is what gives life meaning and purpose. Soul is …
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Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) You think out what actually happened, you tell friends long stories about it, you mull it over in your mind, you connect it together at leisure, then when the time comes to pay the rent again you force yourself to sit at the typewriter, or at …
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Alejandra Pizarnik (April 29, 1936 – September 25, 1972) But, who is Death? A figure that harrows and wastes wherever and however it pleases. This is also a possible description of the Countess Bathory. Never did anyone wish so hard not to grow old; I mean, to die. That is why, perhaps, she acted and …
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Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) I don’t think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.
John William Coltrane (September 23, 1926–July 17, 1967) History shows that the innovator is more often than not met with some degree of condemnation; usually according to the degree of his departure from the prevailing modes of expression or what have you. Change is always so hard to accept… Innovators always seek to revitalize, extend …
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Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
Barbara Jean Lee (July 16, 1946 -) I was the sole member of Congress to vote against the war in Afghanistan. Congress has yet to stand up against endless militarism On 11 September 2001, the world witnessed a terrible attack against our nation that took thousands of lives and changed millions more lives forever. The …
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Edward Roscoe Murrow (April 25, 1908 – April 27, 1965) The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.
Henry James (April 15, 1843 – February 28, 1916)A second chance - that is the delusion. There was never to be but one. We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the …
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Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola (April 02, 1840 – September 29, 1902) I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.
Francis Bacon (January 22, 1561 – April 09, 1626), also known as Lord Verulam There it is. I don't believe in anything, but I'm always glad to wake up in the morning. It doesn't depress me. I'm never depressed. My basic nervous system is filled with this optimism. It's mad, I know, because it's optimism …
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Eckhart Tolle (February 16, 1948 -) Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and …
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Clive Staples Lewis (November 29, 1898 – November 22, 1963) Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point …
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David Whyte (November 02, 1955 -) The poet lives and writes at the frontier between deep internal experience and the revelations of the outer world. There is no going back for the poet once this frontier has been reached; a new territory is visible and what has been said cannot be unsaid. The discipline of …
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Augustine of Hippo (November 13, 354 – August 28, 430) also known as Saint Augustine Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; …
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Olivia Laing Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That’s what art is, it’s the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together. The irrepressibility of the life in the works, regardless of the times, the histories, the life stories, it’s …
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Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913–February 12, 1980) In times of crisis, we summon up our strength.Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: …
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Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (January 29, 1860 – July 15, 1904) My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take.
Benjamin Disraeli (December 21, 1804 – April 19, 1881) In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbors. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbor …
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EE Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962) …love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness; the truth more first than sun more last than star…
David Suzuki (March 24, 1936 -) I raise my hand; I take a book from the other side of the desk; I hear boys playing ball outside my window; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighboring woods - in all these I am practicing Zen, I am living Zen. No worldly discussion is …
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Aung San Suu Kyi (June 19, 1945 -) It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.
John Anthony Burgess Wilson (February 25, 1917 – November 22, 1993) That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. …
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Lucy Schildkret Dawidowicz (June 16, 1915 – December 5, 1990) Some people think that the professional historian's personal commitments — to his people, his country, his religion, his language — undermine his professional objectivity. Not so. Not so, as long as historians respect the integrity of their sources and adhere strictly to the principles of …
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Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983) known by his pen name Tennessee Williams I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people.
Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.
Mary Cennamo Robison (January 14, 1949 -) For about 10 years I didn't publish much of anything, and I didn't have anything. I had nothing, and I really didn't know if I ever would again. … It's about pride, really; feeling the words on the page can never represent you. It's the worst thing you …
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Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887 – April 21, 1948) Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing — I suppose that’s what a vocation means — at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction.
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) To be a complete human being is to befriend the fear of fragility, intimate and menacing as it is — the work of a lifetime that begins in those most formative and fragile years when we first become aware of a world separate from ourselves, a world we must …
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Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931) You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts; And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime. And in much of your talking, thinking is …
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Ben Okri (March 15, 1959 -) We are a people who are massaged by fictions; we grow up in a sea of narratives and myths, the perpetual invention of stories. … Your mother would tell you stories to illustrate a hundred different points, lessons, morals she wanted to get across to you. Or you'd tell …
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Theodor Seuss Geisel aka Dr Seuss (March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991) I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living; it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.
Richard Purdy Wilbur (March 1, 1921 – October 14, 2017) As embarrassing as that word is — ‘inspiration’ — I do think it corresponds to my experience. A poem comes looking for me rather than I hunting after it.
Alexander Popov (November 16, 1971 -) The water is your friend…..you don't have to fight with water, just share the same spirit as the water, and it will help you move.
Guan Moye (February 17, 1955) pen name Mo Yan For a writer, the best way to speak is by writing. You will find everything I need to say in my works. Speech is carried off by the wind; the written word can never be obliterated.
Martin Seligman (August 12, 1942 -) The important thing about imagination is that it gives you optimism.
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face… Love your mouth… This is flesh… Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest …
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Sir Isaac Newton (December 25, 1642 – March 20, 1727) I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst …
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Mary Ruefle (1952 -) We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love — a connection between things. This arcane bit of knowledge is respoken every day into the ears of readers of great books, and also appears to perpetually slip under a carpet, utterly forgotten.
Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) Usually the people who are the most generous are people who have the least to give. I learned this first-hand as a newspaper carrier when I was 12 years old. The biggest tips came from the poorest people. I was surprised by this, but I …
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Johnny Cash (February 26, 1932 – September 12, 2003) You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any …
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Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
Diane Ackerman (October 07, 1948 -) People often use religious terminology when they speak of the spiritual or transcendent. Our yearning to find whole-ness as holiness, and at-one-ment as atonement, fills a need ancient and essential as air. Because English vocabulary offers few ways to describe religious events, except in churchly terms, I often resort …
Continue reading "For The Love Of Wisdom – Diane Ackerman – All Life"
Heȟáka Sápa, commonly known as Black Elk (December 1, 1863 – August 19, 1950) I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as …
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Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11, 1884 – November 7, 1962) It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing …
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Alfred Russel Wallace (January 08, 1823‐November 07, 1913) The final and absolute test of good government is the well-being and contentment of the people — not the extent of empire or the abundance of the revenue and the trade.
Elizabeth Gilbert (July 18, 1969 -) Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.
Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in …
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Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic …
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Carol Ann Duffy (December 23, 1955 -) Poetry matters to people in this country; poetry is a place we can go to for comfort, celebration, when we’re in love, when we’re bereaved, and sometimes for events that happen to us as a nation. Poetry comes from the imagination, from memories, from experience, from events both …
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John Wood Campbell Jr (June 8, 1910 – July 11, 1971) If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown!
Lucretia Mott (January 3, 1793 – November 11, 1880) The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who …
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Helen MacDonald Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognise and love difference. The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world …
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Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926 -) When you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence. How can you love if you are not there? Come back to yourself, look into [their] eyes, and say, “Darling, you know something? I’m here for you.” You’re offering [them] your presence. You’re …
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George Bernard Shaw (July 26, 1856 – November 02, 1950) I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want …
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Sri Krishna There has never been a time when you and I have not existed, nor will there be a time when we cease to exist. As the same person inhabits the body through childhood, youth, and old age, so too at the time of death he attains another body. The wise are not deluded …
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Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) I should say: love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We …
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John Winslow Irving (March 02, 1942 -) I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand — in addition to how much it slows you down — is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, …
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David Whyte (November 02, 1955 -) Human beings do not find their essence through fulfillment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go. What makes the rainbow beautiful, …
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Michael Fader We all had a collective feeling like we’d had enough of this kind of shit. It wasn’t anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not …
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José Ortega y Gasset (May 9, 1883–October 18, 1955) “Falling in love” is a phenomenon of attention… Our spiritual and mental life is merely that which takes place in the zone of maximum illumination. The rest — the zone of conscious inattention and, beyond that, the subconscious — is only potential life, a preparation, an …
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DH Lawrence (September 11, 1885 – March 02, 1930) I am unwilling to leave this deck-chair; I refuse to swot; let me write to you then, me lounging here on the grass, where the still warm air is full of the scent of pinks, spicy and sweet, and a stack of big red lilies a …
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Barbara Lee (July 16, 1946 -) But we will only succeed if we reject the growing pressure to retreat into cynicism and hopelessness. … We have a moral obligation to "stay woke," take a stand and be active; challenging injustices and racism in our communities and fighting hatred and discrimination wherever it rises.
J. D. “Sandy” McClatchy (August 12, 1945 – April 10, 2018) To hide something is to conceal it; to disguise something is to reveal it but only to those who know how and where to look. The very conventions of poetry were devised to encode experience, to make it less obvious and thereby more true. …
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Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940 – January 28, 1996) The surest defense against evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even eccentricity. Evil is a sucker for solidarity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balance sheets.
Jack London (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) It was my pride that I was taken in as an equal, in spirit as well as in fact. From then on, everything was beautiful, and the voyage promised to be a happy one.
Olivia Laing Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That’s what art is, it’s the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together. The irrepressibility of the life in the works, regardless of the times, the histories, the life stories, it’s …
Continue reading "For The Love Of Wisdom – Olivia Laing – Art"
Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) Money itself is not evil, in fact it can actually be very effective for good if it is used properly. You have to be objective about money to use it fairly. It doesn’t make you any better or more useful than any other person. Even …
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Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) So, life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be “willed into being” as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness …
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WS Merwin (September 30, 1927 – March 15, 2019) When a poem is really finished, you can’t change anything. You can’t move words around. You can’t say, ‘In other words, you mean.’ No, that’s not it. There are no other words in which you mean it. This is it.
Jane Hirshfield (February 24, 1953 -) I don’t think poetry is based just on poetry; it is based on a thoroughly lived life. And so I couldn’t just decide I was going to write no matter what; I first had to find out what it means to live.
William Vogt (May 15, 1902–July 11, 1968) Drastic measures are inescapable. Above everything else, we must reorganize our thinking. If we are to escape the crash we must abandon all thought of living unto ourselves. We form an earth-company, and the lot of the Indiana farmer can no longer be isolated from that of the …
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Alan Wilson Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) If you do not get it from yourself, where will you go for it?
Romain Rolland (January 29, 1866 – December 30, 1944) Music develops in its own elect that power of concentration on an idea, that form of yoga, that is purely European, having the traits of action and domination that are characteristic of the West: for music is an edifice in motion, all the parts of which …
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William De Witt Snodgrass (January 5, 1926 – January 13, 2009) The only reality which [a poet] can ever surely know is that self he cannot help being. … If he pretties it up, if he changes its meaning, if he gives it the voice of any borrowed authority, if in short he rejects this …
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Samin Nosrat (November 7, 1979 -) There is so little joy to be had these days. I’m learning that we have to take it where we can get it, even if it’s just in a pot of beans. So if you prefer to cook yours in an Instant Pot or with any other tool, then …
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Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) The skull quadruples in size in the first few years, and if the bones knit together too soon, they restrict the growth of the brain; and if they don’t knit at all the brain remains unprotected. Open enough to grow and closed enough to hold together is what a …
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Anna Deavere Smith (September 18, 1950 -) We who work in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair, you should probably pick another profession. Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship to these chaotic and unfair realities. …
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Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) I want to write down everything I know about being afraid, but I’d probably never have enough time to write anything else. Afraid is a country where they issue us passports at birth and hope we never seek citizenship in any other country. The face of …
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Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) When I walk — which I do every day, as basic sanity-maintenance, whether in the forest or the cemetery or the city street — I walk the same routes, walk along loops, loops I often retrace multiple times in a single walk. This puzzles people. Some simply don’t get …
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Louisa Elizabeth Miller Lulu Miller Picture the person you love the most. Picture them sitting on the couch, eating cereal, ranting about something totally charming, like how it bothers them when people sign their emails with a single initial instead of taking those four extra keystrokes to just finish the job — Chaos will get …
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Stephen William Hawking (January 08, 1942 – March 14, 2018) For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen.
JRR Tolkien (January 03, 1892 – September 02, 1973) There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off. They are …
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Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) I cannot but hate it. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world… A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently …
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Freeman John Dyson (December 15, 1923 – February 28, 2020) You sit quietly gestating them, for nine months or whatever the required time may be, and then one day they are out on their own, not belonging to you any more but to the whole community of scientists. Whatever it is that you produce, a …
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Howard Nemerov (February 29, 1920 – July 5, 1991) Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Alfred Russel Wallace (January 08, 1823‐November 07, 1913) One of the most prominent features of our century has been the enormous and continuous growth of wealth, without any corresponding increase in the well-being of the whole people; while there is ample evidence to show that the number of the very poor — of those existing …
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Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America — this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as …
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Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Try to will yourself into — or out of — loving someone, try to will someone into loving you, and you collide with the fundamental fact that we do not choose whom we love. We could not choose, because we do not choose who and what we are, and …
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Doris Kearns Goodwin (January 04, 1943 -) Even when you’ve lived through an era, you’re only seeing a part of it, understandably. It’s been a wonderful feeling to hear from them that I’ve given them an understanding of what was happening in the home front as a whole so that they feel their sense of …
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Maria Konnikova Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events — smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better… The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and …
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William Vogt (May 15, 1902–July 11, 1968) We must — all of us, men, women, and children — reorient ourselves with relation to the world in which we live… We must come to understand our past, our history, in terms of the soil and water and forests and grasses that have made it what it …
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Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790) ...I believe I shall, in some shape or another, always exist; and, with all the inconveniences human life is liable to, I shall not object to a new edition of mine; hoping, however, that the errata of the last may be corrected.
Stephen J Dobyns (February 19, 1941 -) Writing is a job, a craft, and you learn it by trying to write every day and by facing the page with humility and gall. And you have to love to read books, all kinds of books, good books. You are not looking for anything in particular; you …
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Jeannette Napolitano I don’t want to look back in five years’ time and think, ‘We could have been magnificent, but I was afraid.’ In five years, I want to tell of how fear tried to cheat me out of the best thing in life, and I didn’t let it.
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell (February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977), known professionally as Anaïs Nin When we are in conflict we tend to make such sharp oppositions between ideas and attitudes and get caught and entangled in what seems to be a hopeless choice, but when the neurotic ambivalence …
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Mary Wollstonecraft (April 27, 1759 – September 10, 1797) The endeavor to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless.
Keith Allen Haring(May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) People keep asking me how success has changed me. I always say that success has changed people’s responses and behavior toward me and that has affected me, but it has not really changed me. I feel the same on the inside as I did 10 years …
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Marc Pietrzykowski I have been thinking lately about what it would be like to lose the compulsion to create, to make poems, or any kind of art. Would I miss it? My life would surely be less hectic, spiritually speaking. I am curious, but curious the way I am curious about what it is like …
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Lou Andreas-Salomé (February 12, 1861 – February 5, 1937) To Rilke: A great deal of poetic work has arisen from various despairs, certainly; but if it arose out of that despair, the despair of not being capable of just such poetic syntheses, there’d be a contradiction, don’t you think? To your consciousness of yourself it …
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Dame Jane Morris Goodall (April 03, 1934 -) The window is closing. Business as usual – using up natural resources faster and faster – can’t carry on. In some cases, we are already using resources faster than they can be replenished. And we can see the consequences. Look at climate change. It is not something …
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Maria Konnikova (1984 -) That’s the thing about life: You can do what you do but in the end, some things remain stubbornly outside your control. You can’t calculate for dumb bad luck… My reasons for getting into poker in the first place were to better understand that line between skill and luck, to learn …
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Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Like love, grief swells into an entire inner universe that comes to color the whole of the outside world. Like love — that rapturous raw material for most of the songs and poems and paintings our species has produced — grief lives itself through the grieving and can’t but …
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Alan Wilson Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a …
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Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770 – March 26, 1827) Born with a passionate and excitable temperament, keenly susceptible to the pleasures of society, I was yet obliged early in life to isolate myself, and to pass my existence in solitude. If I at any time resolved to surmount all this, oh! how cruelly was …
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Edward Wadie Said (November 1935 – 24 September 2003) Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder …
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Brian Greene (February 09, 1963 -) We emerge from laws that, as far as we can tell, are timeless, and yet we exist for the briefest moment of time. We are guided by laws that operate without concern for destination, and yet we constantly ask ourselves where we are headed. We are shaped by laws …
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James Maxwell Anderson (December 15, 1888 – February 28, 1959) This modern craze for biographical information leaves me cold for many reasons. For one thing, it's always inaccurate; for another, it's so bound up with publicity and other varieties of idiocy that it gags a person of any sensibility. For another, to be heralded is …
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Avram Noam Chomsky (December 7, 1928 -) If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom …
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Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?
Angela Yvonne Davis (January 26, 1944 -) There is this freedom movement and then there is an attempt to narrow the freedom movement so that it fits into a much smaller frame, the frame of civil rights. Not that civil rights is not immensely important, but freedom is more expansive that civil rights. And as …
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John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) Open-mindedness is not the same as empty-mindedness. To hang out a sign saying "Come right in; there is no one at home" is not the equivalent of hospitality. But there is a kind of passivity, willingness to let experiences accumulate and sink in and ripen, which …
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Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.
Barack Obama (August 04 1961 -) You just have to get started. You just put something down. Because nothing is more terrifying than the blank page.
Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926 -) We have a great, habitual fear inside ourselves. We’re afraid of many things — of our own death, of losing our loved ones, of change, of being alone. The practice of mindfulness helps us to touch nonfear. It’s only here and now that we can experience total relief, …
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Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65) You ask where you will lie after your death? Where lie the souls unborn?
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) Today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely. If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines what and how far something “progresses.” In …
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Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and, lastly, the solid cash.
Naguib Mahfouz (December 11, 1911 – August 30, 2006) She told him what had kept her away was Death. But he rejected that excuse—for Death, he said, can never come between lovers.
Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn like fabulous yellow …
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May Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) So much of my life here is precarious. I cannot always believe even in my work. But I have come in these last days to feel again the validity of my struggle here, that it is meaningful whether I ever “succeed” as a writer or not, …
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Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962) It is a sort of tradition in this country not to talk about religion for fear of offending — I am still a little subject to the tradition, and rather dislike stating my “attitudes” except in the course of a poem. However, they are simple. I believe that …
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Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850 – December 03, 1894) I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and to find the globe granite …
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Marvin Neil Simon (July 4, 1927 – August 26, 2018) If you can go through life without ever experiencing pain, you probably haven't been born yet. And if you've gone through pain and think you know exactly why, you haven't examined all the options.
Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) We’d be walking on these dark country roads at night and all of a sudden this music would seem to come out of nowhere, out of them spooky-looking trees that everybody said ghosts lived in. […] Somebody would be playing a guitar the way …
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Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) Half our holidays are punitive, at least for those left out of what the the holiday is supposed to celebrate. If you don’t have money for gifts and a thriving family life or just avoid events at the intersection of Jesus and shopping, Christmas can be unpleasant; Valentine’s Day …
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Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 04, 1975) Fearlessness is what love seeks. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.
Nigella Lucy Lawson (January 06, 1960 -) No, I never used to like solitude much. I went a bit too inward. It must be an age thing—over the past three years, I have found I have grown not just to enjoy solitude but to need it. Like many things, once you get used to it, …
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Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) When apparent stability disintegrates, As it must — God is Change — People tend to give in To fear and depression, To need and greed. When no influence is strong enough To unify people They divide. They struggle, One against one, Group against group, For survival, position, power. …
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Alan Wilson Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) Drift like a cloud and flow like the river. All we have to lose is our concept of who we believe we are.
Martha Nussbaum (May 06, 1047 -) The heart and mind of another are unknowable, even unapproachable, except in fantasies and projections that are really elements of the knower’s own life, not the other’s.
Vincent van Gogh (March 30, 1853–July 29, 1890) Since the beginning of this love I have felt that unless I gave myself up to it entirely, without any restriction, with all my heart, there was no chance for me whatever, and even so my chance is slight. But what is it to me whether my …
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Stéphane Mallarmé (March 18, 1942 - September 09, 1898) There is nothing but beauty — and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.
Steve Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in …
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Saint Augustine (November 13, 354 – August 28, 430 AD) I came to see that the greater was better than the lesser, but that the greater and the lesser, taken together, was greater than the greatest, alone.
MC Richards (July 13, 1916–September 10, 1999) Wisdom is a state of the total being, in which capacities for knowledge and for love, for survival and for death, for imagination, inspiration, intuition, for all the fabulous functioning of this human being who we are, come into a center with their forces, come into an experience …
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May Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) The value of solitude — one of its values — is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression. A few moments of desultory conversation … may …
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Michael Chabon (May 24, 1963 -) There have been plenty of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day. If you want to write novels, they take a long time, and they're big, and they have a lot of words in them…. …
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Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (April 22, 1899 – July 02, 1977) I don’t fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to analysis, or take part in any demonstrations. I’m a mild old gentleman, very kind.
Robin Wall Kimmerer Between takeoff and landing, we are each in suspended animation, a pause between chapters of our lives. When we stare out the window into the sun’s glare, the landscape is only a flat projection with mountain ranges reduced to wrinkles in the continental skin. Oblivious to our passage overhead, other stories are …
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Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855) When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.
Bantu Stephen Biko (December 18, 1946 – September 12, 1977) It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die.
WS Merwin (September 30, 1927 – March 15, 2019) I think a poem begins out of what you don’t know, and you begin not by having a good idea but by hearing something in the language.
Martin L King (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) There are two types of laws: there are just laws and there are unjust laws… What is the difference between the two?…An unjust law is a man-made code that is out of harmony with the moral law.
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997)Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being.
May Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) If I were in solitary confinement, I'd never write another novel, and probably not keep a journal, but I'd write poetry, because poems, you see, are between God and me.
Alejandra Pizarnik (April 29, 1936 – September 25, 1972) Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio of drops of water falling from time to tired time. For this reason …
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Martin L King (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and for justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, …
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Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (April 26, 1889 – April 29, 1951) The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.
John Muir (April 21, 1838–December 24, 1914) Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal, or heaven cannot heal, for the earth as seen in the clean wilds of the mountains is about as divine as anything the heart of man can conceive!
Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926 -) Your presence is a miracle, your understanding of his or her pain is a miracle, and you are able to offer this aspect of your love immediately. Really try to be there, for yourself, for life, for the people you love. Recognize the presence of those who live …
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Susan Minot (December 07, 1956 -) The word dysfunction has, I think, served its purpose and now has lost its meaning. Every family, like every person, is imperfect, after all. The idea that there is a Family somewhere who functions is an odd concept. In my youth I was running from my family to try …
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Barack Obama (August 04 1961 -) I think whether you’re talking about art or politics or just getting up in the morning and trying to live your life, it’s useful to be able to seek out that joy where you can find it and operate on the basis of hope rather than despair.
Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973) I grew up in a double world, the small white clean Presbyterian American world of my parents and the big, loving, merry, not too clean Chinese world, and there was no communication between them. When I was in the Chinese world, I was Chinese. I …
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Martha Nussbaum (May 06, 1047 -) The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart. In suffering we know only suffering. We call our rationalizations false and delusive, and we do not see to what extent they express a …
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Albert Schweitzer (January 14, 1875 – September 04, 1965) To the question whether I am a pessimist of an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.
Jeremy Bentham (February 15, 1748 - February 04, 1747) Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty: And I repeat that government has but a choice of evils.
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) And yet one of the most damning paradoxes of our condition is that, again and again, we withhold from others the loving sympathy and empathic understanding we demand for ourselves. When we lose the reins of our own character, when we lash out or sulk or act from a …
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Nelson Mandela (July 18, 1918 – December 05, 2013) The factors which necessitated the armed struggle still exist today. We have no option but to continue… We have waited too long for our freedom. We can no longer wait. Now is the time to intensify the struggle on all fronts… I have fought against white …
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Primo Levi (July 31, 1919–April 11, 1987) Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are [those] ready to believe and act without asking questions.
Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931) There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone. The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape. And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves …
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James Augustine Joyce (February 02, 1882 – January 13, 1941) Opening Paragraph of Ulysses "O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the fig trees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rose gardens and …
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Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) That was the whole intention of the art: to affect and enter the culture by understanding and reflecting it; to contribute to and broaden the concept of art and the artist as much as possible.
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Lucy Stone (August 13, 1818 – October 18, 1893) We want to be something more than the appendages of Society; we want that Woman should be the coequal and help-meet of Man in all the interest and perils and enjoyments of human life. We want that she should attain to the development of her nature …
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George Bernard Shaw (July 26, 1856 – November 02, 1950) I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want …
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Meshell Ndegeocello (August 29, 1968 -) You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever …
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Megan Rapinoe (July 05, 1985 -) But you have a choice of what you do in the world. You just have to be prepared to wear the consequences of your actions.
Oscar-Claude Monet (November 14, 1840 – December 05, 1926) I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf… To think I was getting on so well, more absorbed than I've ever been and expecting to achieve something, but I was forced to change my tune and give up a lot of promising beginnings and …
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Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986) We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible. There have been war, plague, scandal, and treason, and there is no way of our preventing their having taken place; the executioner became an executioner and …
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Andrew Carnegie (November 25, 1835 – August 11, 1919) The amassing of wealth is one of the worse species of idolatry. No idol more debasing than the worship of money.
William Vogt (May 15, 1902–July 11, 1968) If we ourselves do not govern our destiny, firmly and courageously, no one is going to do it for us. To regain ecological freedom for our civilization will be a heavy task. It will frequently require arduous and uncomfortable measures. It will cost considerable sums of money. Democratic …
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Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social …
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Alan Wilson Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) Time is an artificial concept… Our concept of time is the hairline second hand of a watch. We believe that the hairline is now. The now is eternal. Time is the eternal now. It is not a journey. It is NOW!
Anne Lamott (April 10, 1954 -) Most of us have figured out that we have to do what’s in front of us and keep doing it… Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice…When you love something like …
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Abbott Joseph “A. J.” Liebling (October 18, 1904 – December 28, 1963) The times were full of certainties: we could be certain we were right — and we were — and that certainty made us certain that anything we did was right, too. I have seldom been sure I was right since. … I know …
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Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a …
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Milton Glaser (June 26, 1929 – June 26, 2020) If you perceive the universe as being a universe of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as one of scarcity, then it will be… I always thought that there was enough of everything to go around - that there are enough …
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Franz Kafka (July 03, 1883 – June 03, 1924) I want to write and there's a constant trembling in my forehead. I'm sitting in my room which is the noise headquarters of the whole apartment, doors are slamming everywhere. … Father breaks down the door of my room and marches through with the bottom of …
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M.C. Richards (July 13, 1916–September 10, 1999) The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch. We are not craftsmen only during studio hours. Any more than a man is wise only in …
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William Bolcom (May 26, 1938 -) I’ve been looking at these texts since I fell in love with them at 17. I thought that maybe they would make more sense sung than spoken. Singing spreads them out. When I read these poems aloud, they make a weird kind of sense. But people have gotten all …
Continue reading "For The Love Of Wisdom – William Bolcom – Songs Of Innocence"
Teresa of Ávila (March 28, 1515 – October 04, 1582) The important thing is not to think much, but to love much, and so to do whatever best awakens you to love.
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else — preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. …
Continue reading "For The Love Of Wisdom – Viktor Frankl – Pleasure"
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Ted Chiang (1967 -) Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then …
Continue reading "For The Love Of Wisdom – Ted Chiang – Timelines"
Steve Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is …
Continue reading "For The Love Of Wisdom – Steve Jobs – Death"
Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) Today, Cajuns from the Gulf Coast have never met a black person from Chicago. Kids from the ghetto don't know a middle-class white. Mexican-Americans have no contact with Jews. Muslim Americans have few Christian acquaintances … But during World War II and the Cold War, …
Continue reading "For The Love Of Wisdom – Stephen Edward Ambrose – Patriotism"
Oliver Sacks (July 09, 1933 - August 30, 2015) I would like it to be thought that I had listened carefully to what patients and others have told me, that I’ve tried to imagine what it was like for them, and that I tried to convey this. And, to use a biblical term, bear witness.
Mustafa Santiago Ali To be a person of color in America often means to be unseen and unheard. It means taking on the burdens of disproportionate impacts from pollution, wealth disparities, lack of healthcare and much more. In many cases these burdens begin at your birth and never fully end until you take your last …
Continue reading "For The Love Of Wisdom – Mustafa Santiago Ali – Race"
John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020) Anchor the eternity of love in your own soul and embed this planet with goodness. Lean toward the whispers of your own heart, discover the universal truth, and follow its dictates. Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release …
Continue reading "For The Love Of Wisdom – John Robert Lewis – Love"
Nizar Tawfiq Qabbani(March 21, 1923 – April 30, 1998) Don’t love deeply, till you make sure that the other part loves you with the same depth, because the depth of your love today, is the depth of your wound tomorrow.</