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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – David Attenborough – The Natural World
For The Love Of Wisdom – Katherine J Boo – Journalism
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Milan Kundera – The Novel
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock – Eating
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Constantine Peter Cavafy – Poetry
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – George Dyson – Universal Mind
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – James Baldwin – The Artist’s Task
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Ms Kim Phúc – War And Life
Ms 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 …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin – Life
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Rebecca Solnit – Guns
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Emil Mihai Cioran – Worry
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Simone Weil – Friendship
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Roger Angell – Death
(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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Claudia Hammond – Time And Memory
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Joseph Campbell – Fate
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!
For The Love Of Wisdom – Anna Kamieńska – Conversations
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Muriel Rukeyser – War
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Karel Čapek – Communism
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Ada Limón – Poetry
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Thich Nhat Hanh – Inner Experience
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
For The Love Of Wisdom – William Sidney Porter (O’Henry) – Writing
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – John Coltrane – Creativity And Jazz
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Willa Cather – Art
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Janna Levin – The Infinite
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Eckhart Tolle – Inner Experiences
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – CS Lewis – Miracles
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Woody Guthrie – Music
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Anne Frank – Despair
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Charles M Blow – Life
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Hannah Arendt – Forgiveness
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Hermann Hesse – Joy
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – James Baldwin – Advice
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Ajahn Chah – Letting Go
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Naomi Shihab Nye – Writing
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Maria Popova – Choice
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Václav Havel – Humanism
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Léon Bloy – The Self
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Françoise Sagan – Love
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Mary Oliver – Poems And Poetry
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Aldous Huxley – Being Human
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Eckhart Tolle – Spiritual Awakening
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Margaret Higgins Sanger – Freedom And Motherhood
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – David Whyte – Withdraw
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Roger Angell – Caring
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Erin Westgate – The Good Life
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – William Wordsworth – Poetry
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Thich Nhat Hanh – Expanding Heart
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Steve Jobs – Life
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Rebecca Solnit – Abortion
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Rob Brezsny – Being Real
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Ernest Hemingway – Writing
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Milan Kundera – Life
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Maria Popova – Reading And Love
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – New York Times Editorial Board December 31, 1999 – Existence
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 This prediction has proven to …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Clare of Assisi – Spiritual Balance
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – David Suzuki – Concentration
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Muriel Rukeyser – Poetry
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Willa Cather – Art
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Peter Russell – Letting Go
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Adyashanti – The Universe As A Mirror
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Carl G Jung – Premonitions
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Brenda Ueland – Living
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.
Wise Poets – Apple – To The Crazy Ones
Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) Apple Here’s to the crazy ones.The misfits.The rebels.The troublemakers.The round pegs in square holes.The ones who see things differently.There’re not fond or rules.And they have no respect for the status quo.You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,disbelieve them, glorify them or vilify them.About …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Alexandra Tempus – Climate Change
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.
For the Love Of Wisdom – Michael Talbot – Electrons
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Eckhart Tolle – The Unobserved Mind
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Marvin Bell – Art
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.
For The Love of Wisdom – Valerie Andrews – The Eternal Child
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Ezra Klein – Mandates
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Kim Addonizio – Creativity
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – James Baldwin – Black Writers
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – Night
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Czesław Miłosz – Rivers
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Jane Hirshfield – Metaphors
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Rebecca Solnit – Climate Change
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Ida B Wells – Racism
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Émile Zola – Truth
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Jean-Luc Picard – The Prime Directive
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Audre Lorde – Fear
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Charles M Blow – Race
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.
For The Love of Wisdom – Maria Popova – What Is
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Hannah Arendt – Love
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Roland Barthes – Love
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Alain de Botton – Charity
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Adam Zagajewski – Poets
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 On Destiny
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 …
Henrik Johan Ibsen On Ghosts
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 …
Archilochus On Fear And Beliefs
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 On Soul
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Jack Kerouac – Writing
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 On Death
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 …
Keith Allen Haring On Art
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 Coltrane On Creativity
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 …
Audre Lorde – Parts Of The Self
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 Lee On Militarism
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 …
Edward R Murrow On Communication
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 On A Second Chance
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Emile Zola – Passion
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 On Life
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Eckhart Tolle – Life
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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CS Lewis On Tyranny
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – David Whyte – Poets And Poetry
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Augustine of Hippo – Love
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 On Art
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Muriel Rukeyser – In Time Of Crises
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 Chekhov On The Holy
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 On Neighbors
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 …
EE Cummings On Love
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 On Zen Life
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 …
Aung San Suu Kyi On Corruption And Fear
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.
Anthony Burgess On Martyrdom
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. …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Lucy Schildkret Dawidowicz – Historical Writing
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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Tennessee Williams On Magic
Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983) I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people.
Anaïs Nin On Art
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Mary Robison – Writing
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 On Conservation
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 On Writing
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.
For The Love of Wisdom – Maria Popova – Being Human
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 On Silence And Talking
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 …
Ben Okri On Stories
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 …
Theodor Seuss Geisel On NonSense
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 On Inspiration
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 On Water
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Mo Yan – Reading
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 On Imagination
Martin Seligman (August 12, 1942 -) The important thing about imagination is that it gives you optimism.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Toni Morrison – Self Love
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 On Awareness
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 …
Mary Ruefle On Love
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 On Generosity
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 …
Johnny Cash On Failure
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 …
Zora Neale Hurston On Self Observation
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 On All Life
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 …
Black Elk On Wounded Knee
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 …
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt On Love And Pain
Anna 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 …
Alfred Russel Wallace On Good Government
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 On Grief
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.
Tennessee Williams On Truth
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Audre Lorde – Poetry As Illumination
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Carol Ann Duffy – Poetry
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. On God
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 On The Degradation Of Women
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 On The Art Of Walking
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 On Differences
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Thich Nhat Hanh – Love
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 On Life
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Sri Krishna – Death
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 On Love
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 …
John Irving On Writing
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, …
For The Love Of Wisdom – David Whyte – Fulfillment
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Michael Fader – The Stonewall Inn
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 On Love
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – DH Lawrence – A Midsummer Day
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 On Staying Woke
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – JD McClatchy – Poetry
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 On Individualism
Iosif Aleksandrovich 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 On Acceptance
John Griffith (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 On Art
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 …
Keith Allen Haring On Money
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 …
Viktor Frankl on Fulfillment
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – WS Merwin – Poetry
William Stanley 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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Jane Hirshfield – Poetry
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 On Interconnectness
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Alan Wilson Watts – Yourself
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 On Beethoven
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – William De Witt Snodgrass – Personal Poetry
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 On Joy, Cooking And Beans
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Rebecca Solnit – Life
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 On Artists
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. …
Audre Lorde On Fear
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 …
For The Love of Wisdom – Maria Popova – Walking And Love
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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Lulu Miller On Chaos
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 …
Stephen William Hawking On Mankind
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 On Hobbits
John Ronald Reuel 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. …
Abraham Lincoln On Slavery
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 …
Freeman Dyson On Scientific Theories
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Howard Nemerov – Poetry
Howard Nemerov (February 29, 1920 – July 5, 1991) Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Alfred Russel Wallace On Wealth
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Langston Hughes – Negro Art
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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For The Love of Wisdom – Maria Popova – Love
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Martha Nussbaum – Being Human
Martha Nussbaum (May 06, 1047 -) 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.
Doris Kearns Goodwin On History
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 …
Maria Konnikova On Control And Chance
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 …
William Vogt On The Environment
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 …
Benjamin Franklin On Death
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 On Writing
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 …
Jeannette Napolitano On Fear
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.
Anaïs Nin On Relationship
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Mary Wollstonecraft – Hoary Establishments
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Keith Allen Haring On Success
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Marc Pietrzykowski – Being
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Lou Andreas-Salomé – Despair
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Jane Goodall – Nature
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Maria Konnikova – Chance
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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For The Love of Wisdom – Maria Popova – Grief
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Alan Wilson Watts – Egos
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Ludwig van Beethoven – Defective Hearing And Solitude
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Edward Said – Empires
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Brian Greene – Laws
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – James Maxwell Anderson – Biography
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Noam Chomsky – Freedom Of Speech
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Henry David Thoreau – Unjust Laws
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?
For The Love Of Wisdom – Angela Yvonne Davis – Freedom
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – John Dewey – Open Mindedness
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Keith Allen Haring – Art
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Barack Obama – Writing
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Thich Nhat Hahn – Fear
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Albert Einstein – Imagination
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) Imagination is more important than knowledge.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Seneca – Death
Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65) You ask where you will lie after your death? Where lie the souls unborn?
For The Love Of Wisdom – Viktor Frankl – Progress
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Nathaniel Hawthorne – Literature
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Naguib Mahdouz – Death
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Jack Kerouac – Friendships
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – May Sarton – Success And Failure
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Robinson Jeffers – Religion
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Robert Louis Stevenson – Travel
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Neil Simon – Life And Pain
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Miles Davis – The Origin Of Music
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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For The Love Of Wisdom- Rebecca Solnit – Holidays
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Hannah Arendt – Fearlessness
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Albert Einstein – Creation
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Nigella Lucy Lawson – Solitude
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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For The Love of Wisdom – Octavia Butler – Leadership And Fear
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Alan Wilson Watts – The Self
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Martha Nussbaum – The Heart And Mind
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Vincent van Gogh – Love
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Stéphane Mallarmé – Poetry
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Steve Jobs -Death
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Saint Augustine – The Greater and The Lesser
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – MC Richards – Wisdom
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – May Sarton – Solitude
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Michael Chabon – Writing And Life
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov – Life
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Robin Wall Kimmerer – Stories
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Søren Kierkegaard – Love
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Stephen Biko – Death
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – WS Merwin – Poetry
William Stanley 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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Martin L King – Laws
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Viktor Frankl – Being Human
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – May Sarton – Poetry
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Alejandra Pizarnik – Melancholia
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Martin L King – Viet Nam
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein – Language
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – John Muir – The Earth
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!
For The Love Of Wisdom – Thich Nhat Hahn -Love And Presence
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Susan Minot – Dysfunction
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Barack Obama – Hope And Joy
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Pearl S Buck – Living In A Double World
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Martha Nussbaum – Love And Suffering
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Albert Schweitzer – The Question
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Jeremy Bentham – Laws
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.
For The Love of Wisdom – Maria Popova – Emotional Generosity
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Nelson Mandela – Freedom
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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For The Love Of Wisdom- Primo Levi – Monsters
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Kahlil Gibran – Solitude And Silence
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – James Joyce – Ulysses
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Keith Allen Haring – Art
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Albert Einstein – Intuitive Mind
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Lucy Stone – Women Liberationist
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – George Bernard Shaw – Life
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Meshell Ndegeocello – Books And Reading
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Megan Rapinoe – Choice
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Oscar-Claude Monet – Unhappiness
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Simone de Beauvoir- The Past And The Present
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Andrew Carnegie – Wealth
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – William Vogt – Environmental Destiny
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Bertrand Russell – Critical Thinking
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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For The Love Of Wisdom -Alan Wilson Watts – Time
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!
For The Love Of Wisdom – Anne Lamott – Connection
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Abbott Joseph “A. J.” Liebling – War
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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For The Love of Wisdom – Maria Popova – Shoreless Seeds And Stardust
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Milton Glaser – Enough
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – Franz Kafka – Noise
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – MC Richards – The Creative Spirit
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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For The Love Of Wisdom – William Bolcom – Songs Of Innocence
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 …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Teresa of Ávila – Love
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Viktor Frankl – Pleasure
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. …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Sylvia Plath – Self Doubt
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 – Timelines
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 …
For The Love Of Wisdom – Steve Jobs – Death
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 …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Stephen Edward Ambrose – Patriotism
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, …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Oliver Sacks – Bearing Witness
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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Mustafa Santiago Ali – Race
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 …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – John Robert Lewis – Love
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 …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Nizar Qabbani – 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.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Nathaniel Hawthorne – Intermediate Space
Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; tomorrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Mark Strand – Visual Sense
Mark Strand (April 11, 1934 – November 29, 2014) I started collaging as an escape from making meaning. I got tired of writing poems, of trying to make sense — verbal sense. It is a relief to make a different kind of sense — visual sense. One must think, of course, but it is an …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Walt Whitman – Nature
Walt Whitman(May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains.
For The Love Of Wisdom – John Updike – Writing
John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) No amount of learned skills can substitute for the feeling of having a lot to say, of bringing news. Memories, impressions, and emotions from your first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Alan Wilson Watts – Trouble
Alan Wilson Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) We create trouble by doing good for other people. We wage wars for people's benefit and educate the poor for their benefit so they desire more things which they can't afford.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Anne Lamott – Beauty And Meaning
Anne Lamott (April 10, 1954 -) When you love something like reading — or drawing or music or nature — it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great. If you are lucky enough to know this, then your search for meaning involves whatever that Something is. It’s an alchemical blend of affinity …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Joseph Goldstein – Being
Joseph Goldstein (May 20, 1944 -) The rumors and teachings are true: We are luminous beings and awakening in our nature.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Pablo Neruda – Human Destiny
Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973), better known by Pablo Neruda There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Octavio Paz – Solitude
Octavio Paz (March 31, 1914–April 19, 1998) All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence. Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall — …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Martha Nussbaum – Anger
Martha Nussbaum (May 06, 1047 -) All too often, anger becomes an alluring substitute for grieving, promising agency and control when one’s real situation does not offer control… Anger is often well-grounded, but it is too easy for it to hijack the necessary mourning process.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Tyler Mortensen-Hayes – Active Shooter Drills
Tyler Mortensen-Hayes I read recently that 39 U.S. states require their schools to hold regular active shooter drills. Imagine that. A country where we have to prepare our children for mass violence as if it were a fire, or an earthquake—unpredictable, unfathomable, yet entirely feasible. As if it comes from out of the very ground …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Viktor Frankl – The Moment
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming …
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For The Love OfWisdom – Paulo Coelho – Risks
Paulo Coelho de Souza (August 24, 1947 - ) You have to take risks,” he said. “We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen. Every day God gives us the sun - and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes …
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Marilynne Robinson On Sundays
Marilynne Summers Robinson (November 26, 1943 -) Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it.
For The Love Of Wisdom -Keith Allen Haring – Individual Creativity
Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) It has been a long time since I have written anything down. A lot of things have happened. So many things I have been unable to write them. . . . In one year my art has taken me to Europe and propelled me into …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Moondog (Louis Thomas Hardin) – Originality
Louis Thomas Hardin (May 26, 1916 – September 8, 1999) I deny that there is such a thing as originality. All an artist can do is bring his personality to bear. If he is true to himself, he can't help but be different, even unique, for no two persons are alike. I do not strive …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Francoise Giroud – Death
Françoise Giroud (September 21, 1916 – January 19, 2003) To live several lives, you have to die several deaths.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Viktor Frankl – Living
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) Who can weigh the ballast of another’s woe, or another’s love? We live — with our woes and our loves, with our tremendous capacity for beauty and our tremendous capacity for suffering — counterbalancing the weight of existence with the irrepressible force of living. The question, always, is …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Eric Carle – Seeing
Eric Carle (June 25, 1929 -) We have eyes, and we're looking at stuff all the time, all day long. And I just think that whatever our eyes touch should be beautiful, tasteful, appealing, and important.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Chinua Achebe – Intrusions
Chinua Achebe (November 16, 1930 - March 21, 2013) The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Buddha – Death
Siddhārtha Gautama (c. 563/480 – c. 483/400) All things that are born must die. Work hard for your own freedom from suffering.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Barbara Kingsolver – Writers
Barbara Kingsolver (April 8, 1955 -) What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do, is re-engage people with their own humanity. Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Franz Kafka – Letter Writing
Franz Kafka (July 03, 1883 – June 03, 1924) Letter writing is an intercourse with ghosts, not only with the ghost of the receiver, but with one's own, which emerges between the lines of the letter being written. … Written kisses never reach their destination, but are drunk en route by these ghosts.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Bertrand Russell – Fanaticism
Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) Fanaticism is the danger of the world. It always has been and has done untold harm. I think fanaticism is the greatest danger there is. I might almost say that I was fanatical against fanaticism.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Anne Lamott – Perfectionism
Anne Lamott (April 10, 1954 -) There’s a whole chapter on perfectionism in Bird by Bird, because it is the great enemy of the writer, and of life, our sweet messy beautiful screwed up human lives. It is the voice of the oppressor. It will keep you very scared and restless your entire life if …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Hagai El-Ad – Israel’s Apartheid
Hagai El-Ad (October 01, 1969 -) One cannot live a single day in Israel-Palestine without the sense that this place is constantly being engineered to privilege one people, and one people only: the Jewish people. Yet half of those living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea are Palestinian. The chasm between these lived …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Lucile Aurore Dupin (George Sand) – Understanding
Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (George Sand) (July 01, 1804 – June 08, 1876) The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Manly Hall – The Secret Teachings
Manly Palmer Hall (March 18, 1901 – August 29, 1990) I felt strongly moved to explore the problems of humanity, its origin and destiny, and I spent a number of quiet hours in the New York Public Library tracing the confused course of civilization... Translations of classical authors could differ greatly, but in most cases …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Albert Einstein – Intuition
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) There is no logical way to the discovery of elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Alain Badiou – Love
Alain Badiou (January 17, 1937 -) Love cannot be reduced to the first encounter, because it is a construction. The enigma in thinking about love is the duration of time necessary for it to flourish. In fact, it isn’t the ecstasy of those beginnings that is remarkable. The latter are clearly ecstatic, but love is …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Anaïs Nin – Relationships
Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) It is not the failed relationships which influence our life — they influence our death.
For The Love Of Wisdom – Andrea Barrett – Writing And Science
Andrea Barrett (November 16, 1954 -) I think science and writing are utterly the same thing. They are completely rooted in passion and desire, if they’re any good at all. You can fall in love with the natural world in the same way you fall in love with a person. There’s that same sense of …
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For The Love Of Wisdom – Gabriel García Márquez – Memory
Gabriel García Márquez (March 06, 1927 – April 17, 2014) Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. Opening Line From One Hundred Years of Solitude