Wise Poets, Personal Writings, Clouds And Wisdom
From The Archives - Originally Published January 24, 2020 Justice Harry Blackmun (November 12, 1908 – March 4, 1999) We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in …
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(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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Clare of Assisi, born Chiara Offreduccio (July 16, 1194 – August 11, 1253) There are some who do not pray nor make sacrifices; there are many who live solely for the idolatry of their senses. There should be compensation. There should be someone who prays and makes sacrifices for those who do not do so. …
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David Suzuki (March 24, 1936 -) Concentration is not to try hard to watch something. In zazen if you try to look at one spot you will be tired in about five minutes. This is not concentration. Concentration means freedom. So your effort should be directed at nothing. You should concentrate on nothing.
Willa Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Most of our young authors start to write a story and make a few observations from …
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Peter Russell The call to let go lies at the heart of the world’s spiritual traditions. Not being attached to outcomes, surrendering desires, accepting the present, opening to a higher power, relinquishing the ego, practicing forgiveness — all entail letting go. Why is letting go deemed so important? Holding on, these teachings repeatedly affirm, limits …
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Adyashanti (October 26, 1962 -) This whole universe is indeed a mirror. So if you are resisting something, what you get back is your experience of resisting something. . . . It's like you walk up to God's vending machine and you say, 'I really don't want to have this experience.' And you put that …
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Carl Gustav Jung ( July 26, 1875 – June 06, 1961) It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects …
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Brenda Ueland (October 24, 1891 – March 5, 1985) Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers… Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.
Eckhart Tolle (February 16, 1948 -) Many narratives, especially the repetitive ones, generate anxiety, anger, hatred, and other negative emotions. These narratives constitute what we might call the unobserved mind. This unobserved mind is responsible for most of the human-made suffering on the planet, both personal and collective.
Marvin Hartley Bell (August 3, 1937 – December 14, 2020) Much of our lives involves the word 'no.' In school we are mostly told, 'Don't do it this way. Do it that way.' But art is the big yes. In art, you get a chance to make something where there was nothing.
Valerie Andrews Children have a magical capacity to see the land as an animal does; to experience the sky from the perspective of a flower or a bee; to feel the earth quiver and breathe beneath us; to know a hundred different smells of mud and listen unselfconsciously to the soughing of the trees.
Ezra Klein (May 09, 1984 -) The conventional wisdom is that there is some argument, yet unmade and perhaps undiscovered, that will change the minds of the roughly 30 percent of American adults who haven’t gotten at least one dose. There probably isn’t … Polio and measles were murderous, but their near elimination required vaccine …
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Kim Addonizio (July 31, 1954 -) What I've learned is simple: if you nurture it, it will expand, and it will nurture you in return. I have also learned that it is a kind of salvation. Sometimes it's more than enough and sometimes it's not enough — by that I mean one's own creativity. If …
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James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) Given the conditions in this country to be a black writer was impossible. … My father didn't think it was possible — he thought I'd get killed, get murdered. He said I was contesting the white man's definitions, which was quite right.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (June 29, 1900–July 31, 1944) Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of the trees… I longed for night and for …
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Czesław Miłosz (June 30, 1911 – August 14, 2004) “So lasting they are, the rivers!” Only think. Sources somewhere in the mountains pulsate and springs seep from a rock, join in a stream, in the current of a river, and the river flows through centuries, millennia. Tribes, nations pass, and the river is still there, …
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Jane Hirshfield (February 24, 1953 -) Metaphors give words a way to go beyond their own meaning. They are handles on the door of what we can know and of what we can imagine. Each door leads to some new house and some new world that only that one handle can open… What’s amazing is …
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Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) People are dying. Aquatic animals are baking in their shells. Fruit is being cooked on the tree. It’s time to act… Human beings crave clarity, immediacy, landmark events. We seek turning points, because our minds are good at recognizing the specific – this time, this place, this sudden event, …
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Ida Bell Wells (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931) I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching, and I have told it so often that I know it by heart. I do not have to embellish; it makes its own way.
Émile Zola (April 02, 1840 – September 29, 1902) I repeat with the most vehement conviction: truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it. Today is only the beginning, for it is only today that the positions have become clear: on one side, those who are guilty, who do not want the light …
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Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart - Star Trek: The Next Generation) The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proved again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less-developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are …
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Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.
Charles M Blow (August 11, 1970 -) Black people are targeted by the criminal justice system and that is used to target them by the electoral system. Either way, if you are Black in America, you are a target.
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Here I am, and here you are, and here is the robin’s egg in its near-life collision with chance. To ask for its meaning is as meaningless a question as to demand the meaning of a color or the meaning of a bird. On this particular day, at this …
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Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 04, 1975) For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequaled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved …
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Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915–March 26, 1980) I decide that (the declaration of love), though I repeat and rehearse it day by day through the course of time, will somehow recover, each time I utter it, a new state. Like the Argonaut renewing his ship during his voyage without changing its name, the subject in …
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Alain de Botton (December 20, 1969 -) At its most basic, charity means offering someone something they need but can’t get for themselves. This is normally and logically understood to mean something material. We overwhelmingly associate charity with giving money. But, in its widest sense, charity stretches far beyond financial donations. Charity involves offering someone …
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Adam Zagajewski (June 21, 1945 – March 21, 2021) Poets must have firm opinions about life and death, but not political opinions: I don’t think that tax reform legislation is any business of poets.
Romain Rolland (January 29, 1866 – December 30, 1944) The hammer is not all: the anvil also is necessary. Had destiny descended only upon some weakling, or on an imitation great man, and bent his back under this burden, there would have been no tragedy in it, only an everyday affair. But here destiny meets …
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Henrik Johan Ibsen (March 20, 1828 – May 23, 1906) I almost think we're all of us Ghosts … It's not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling …
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Archilochus (680–645 BC) Nothing can be surprising any more or impossible or miraculous, now that Zeus, father of the Olympians has made night out of noonday, hiding the bright sunlight, and . . . fear has come upon mankind. After this, men can believe anything, expect anything...
Sy Montgomery (February 7, 1958 -) What is the soul? Some say it is the self, the “I” that inhabits the body; without the soul, the body is like a lightbulb with no electricity. But it is more than the engine of life, say others; it is what gives life meaning and purpose. Soul is …
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Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) You think out what actually happened, you tell friends long stories about it, you mull it over in your mind, you connect it together at leisure, then when the time comes to pay the rent again you force yourself to sit at the typewriter, or at …
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Alejandra Pizarnik (April 29, 1936 – September 25, 1972) But, who is Death? A figure that harrows and wastes wherever and however it pleases. This is also a possible description of the Countess Bathory. Never did anyone wish so hard not to grow old; I mean, to die. That is why, perhaps, she acted and …
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Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) I don’t think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.
John William Coltrane (September 23, 1926–July 17, 1967) History shows that the innovator is more often than not met with some degree of condemnation; usually according to the degree of his departure from the prevailing modes of expression or what have you. Change is always so hard to accept… Innovators always seek to revitalize, extend …
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Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
Barbara Jean Lee (July 16, 1946 -) I was the sole member of Congress to vote against the war in Afghanistan. Congress has yet to stand up against endless militarism On 11 September 2001, the world witnessed a terrible attack against our nation that took thousands of lives and changed millions more lives forever. The …
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Edward Roscoe Murrow (April 25, 1908 – April 27, 1965) The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.
Henry James (April 15, 1843 – February 28, 1916)A second chance - that is the delusion. There was never to be but one. We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the …
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Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola (April 02, 1840 – September 29, 1902) I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.
Francis Bacon (January 22, 1561 – April 09, 1626), also known as Lord Verulam There it is. I don't believe in anything, but I'm always glad to wake up in the morning. It doesn't depress me. I'm never depressed. My basic nervous system is filled with this optimism. It's mad, I know, because it's optimism …
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Clive Staples Lewis (November 29, 1898 – November 22, 1963) Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point …
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David Whyte (November 02, 1955 -) The poet lives and writes at the frontier between deep internal experience and the revelations of the outer world. There is no going back for the poet once this frontier has been reached; a new territory is visible and what has been said cannot be unsaid. The discipline of …
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Augustine of Hippo (November 13, 354 – August 28, 430) also known as Saint Augustine Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; …
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Olivia Laing Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That’s what art is, it’s the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together. The irrepressibility of the life in the works, regardless of the times, the histories, the life stories, it’s …
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Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913–February 12, 1980) In times of crisis, we summon up our strength.Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: …
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Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (January 29, 1860 – July 15, 1904) My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take.
Benjamin Disraeli (December 21, 1804 – April 19, 1881) In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbors. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbor …
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EE Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962) …love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness; the truth more first than sun more last than star…
David Suzuki (March 24, 1936 -) I raise my hand; I take a book from the other side of the desk; I hear boys playing ball outside my window; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighboring woods - in all these I am practicing Zen, I am living Zen. No worldly discussion is …
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Aung San Suu Kyi (June 19, 1945 -) It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.
John Anthony Burgess Wilson (February 25, 1917 – November 22, 1993) That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. …
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Lucy Schildkret Dawidowicz (June 16, 1915 – December 5, 1990) Some people think that the professional historian's personal commitments — to his people, his country, his religion, his language — undermine his professional objectivity. Not so. Not so, as long as historians respect the integrity of their sources and adhere strictly to the principles of …
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Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983) known by his pen name Tennessee Williams I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people.
Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.
Mary Cennamo Robison (January 14, 1949 -) For about 10 years I didn't publish much of anything, and I didn't have anything. I had nothing, and I really didn't know if I ever would again. … It's about pride, really; feeling the words on the page can never represent you. It's the worst thing you …
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Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887 – April 21, 1948) Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing — I suppose that’s what a vocation means — at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction.
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) To be a complete human being is to befriend the fear of fragility, intimate and menacing as it is — the work of a lifetime that begins in those most formative and fragile years when we first become aware of a world separate from ourselves, a world we must …
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Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931) You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts; And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime. And in much of your talking, thinking is …
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Ben Okri (March 15, 1959 -) We are a people who are massaged by fictions; we grow up in a sea of narratives and myths, the perpetual invention of stories. … Your mother would tell you stories to illustrate a hundred different points, lessons, morals she wanted to get across to you. Or you'd tell …
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Theodor Seuss Geisel aka Dr Seuss (March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991) I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living; it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.
Richard Purdy Wilbur (March 1, 1921 – October 14, 2017) As embarrassing as that word is — ‘inspiration’ — I do think it corresponds to my experience. A poem comes looking for me rather than I hunting after it.
Alexander Popov (November 16, 1971 -) The water is your friend…..you don't have to fight with water, just share the same spirit as the water, and it will help you move.
Guan Moye (February 17, 1955) pen name Mo Yan For a writer, the best way to speak is by writing. You will find everything I need to say in my works. Speech is carried off by the wind; the written word can never be obliterated.
Martin Seligman (August 12, 1942 -) The important thing about imagination is that it gives you optimism.
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face… Love your mouth… This is flesh… Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest …
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Sir Isaac Newton (December 25, 1642 – March 20, 1727) I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst …
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Mary Ruefle (1952 -) We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love — a connection between things. This arcane bit of knowledge is respoken every day into the ears of readers of great books, and also appears to perpetually slip under a carpet, utterly forgotten.
Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) Usually the people who are the most generous are people who have the least to give. I learned this first-hand as a newspaper carrier when I was 12 years old. The biggest tips came from the poorest people. I was surprised by this, but I …
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Johnny Cash (February 26, 1932 – September 12, 2003) You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any …
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Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
Diane Ackerman (October 07, 1948 -) People often use religious terminology when they speak of the spiritual or transcendent. Our yearning to find whole-ness as holiness, and at-one-ment as atonement, fills a need ancient and essential as air. Because English vocabulary offers few ways to describe religious events, except in churchly terms, I often resort …
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Heȟáka Sápa, commonly known as Black Elk (December 1, 1863 – August 19, 1950) I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as …
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Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11, 1884 – November 7, 1962) It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing …
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Alfred Russel Wallace (January 08, 1823‐November 07, 1913) The final and absolute test of good government is the well-being and contentment of the people — not the extent of empire or the abundance of the revenue and the trade.
Elizabeth Gilbert (July 18, 1969 -) Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.
Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in …
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Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic …
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Carol Ann Duffy (December 23, 1955 -) Poetry matters to people in this country; poetry is a place we can go to for comfort, celebration, when we’re in love, when we’re bereaved, and sometimes for events that happen to us as a nation. Poetry comes from the imagination, from memories, from experience, from events both …
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John Wood Campbell Jr (June 8, 1910 – July 11, 1971) If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown!
Lucretia Mott (January 3, 1793 – November 11, 1880) The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who …
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Helen MacDonald Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognise and love difference. The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world …
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Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926 -) When you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence. How can you love if you are not there? Come back to yourself, look into [their] eyes, and say, “Darling, you know something? I’m here for you.” You’re offering [them] your presence. You’re …
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George Bernard Shaw (July 26, 1856 – November 02, 1950) I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want …
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Sri Krishna There has never been a time when you and I have not existed, nor will there be a time when we cease to exist. As the same person inhabits the body through childhood, youth, and old age, so too at the time of death he attains another body. The wise are not deluded …
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Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) I should say: love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We …
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John Winslow Irving (March 02, 1942 -) I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand — in addition to how much it slows you down — is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, …
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David Whyte (November 02, 1955 -) Human beings do not find their essence through fulfillment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go. What makes the rainbow beautiful, …
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Michael Fader We all had a collective feeling like we’d had enough of this kind of shit. It wasn’t anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not …
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José Ortega y Gasset (May 9, 1883–October 18, 1955) “Falling in love” is a phenomenon of attention… Our spiritual and mental life is merely that which takes place in the zone of maximum illumination. The rest — the zone of conscious inattention and, beyond that, the subconscious — is only potential life, a preparation, an …
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DH Lawrence (September 11, 1885 – March 02, 1930) I am unwilling to leave this deck-chair; I refuse to swot; let me write to you then, me lounging here on the grass, where the still warm air is full of the scent of pinks, spicy and sweet, and a stack of big red lilies a …
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Barbara Lee (July 16, 1946 -) But we will only succeed if we reject the growing pressure to retreat into cynicism and hopelessness. … We have a moral obligation to "stay woke," take a stand and be active; challenging injustices and racism in our communities and fighting hatred and discrimination wherever it rises.
J. D. “Sandy” McClatchy (August 12, 1945 – April 10, 2018) To hide something is to conceal it; to disguise something is to reveal it but only to those who know how and where to look. The very conventions of poetry were devised to encode experience, to make it less obvious and thereby more true. …
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Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940 – January 28, 1996) The surest defense against evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even eccentricity. Evil is a sucker for solidarity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balance sheets.
Jack London (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) It was my pride that I was taken in as an equal, in spirit as well as in fact. From then on, everything was beautiful, and the voyage promised to be a happy one.
Olivia Laing Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That’s what art is, it’s the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together. The irrepressibility of the life in the works, regardless of the times, the histories, the life stories, it’s …
Continue reading "For The Love Of Wisdom – Olivia Laing – Art"
Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) Money itself is not evil, in fact it can actually be very effective for good if it is used properly. You have to be objective about money to use it fairly. It doesn’t make you any better or more useful than any other person. Even …
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Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) So, life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be “willed into being” as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness …
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WS Merwin (September 30, 1927 – March 15, 2019) When a poem is really finished, you can’t change anything. You can’t move words around. You can’t say, ‘In other words, you mean.’ No, that’s not it. There are no other words in which you mean it. This is it.
Jane Hirshfield (February 24, 1953 -) I don’t think poetry is based just on poetry; it is based on a thoroughly lived life. And so I couldn’t just decide I was going to write no matter what; I first had to find out what it means to live.
William Vogt (May 15, 1902–July 11, 1968) Drastic measures are inescapable. Above everything else, we must reorganize our thinking. If we are to escape the crash we must abandon all thought of living unto ourselves. We form an earth-company, and the lot of the Indiana farmer can no longer be isolated from that of the …
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Alan Wilson Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) If you do not get it from yourself, where will you go for it?
Romain Rolland (January 29, 1866 – December 30, 1944) Music develops in its own elect that power of concentration on an idea, that form of yoga, that is purely European, having the traits of action and domination that are characteristic of the West: for music is an edifice in motion, all the parts of which …
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William De Witt Snodgrass (January 5, 1926 – January 13, 2009) The only reality which [a poet] can ever surely know is that self he cannot help being. … If he pretties it up, if he changes its meaning, if he gives it the voice of any borrowed authority, if in short he rejects this …
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Samin Nosrat (November 7, 1979 -) There is so little joy to be had these days. I’m learning that we have to take it where we can get it, even if it’s just in a pot of beans. So if you prefer to cook yours in an Instant Pot or with any other tool, then …
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Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) The skull quadruples in size in the first few years, and if the bones knit together too soon, they restrict the growth of the brain; and if they don’t knit at all the brain remains unprotected. Open enough to grow and closed enough to hold together is what a …
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Anna Deavere Smith (September 18, 1950 -) We who work in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair, you should probably pick another profession. Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship to these chaotic and unfair realities. …
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Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) I want to write down everything I know about being afraid, but I’d probably never have enough time to write anything else. Afraid is a country where they issue us passports at birth and hope we never seek citizenship in any other country. The face of …
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Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) When I walk — which I do every day, as basic sanity-maintenance, whether in the forest or the cemetery or the city street — I walk the same routes, walk along loops, loops I often retrace multiple times in a single walk. This puzzles people. Some simply don’t get …
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Louisa Elizabeth Miller Lulu Miller Picture the person you love the most. Picture them sitting on the couch, eating cereal, ranting about something totally charming, like how it bothers them when people sign their emails with a single initial instead of taking those four extra keystrokes to just finish the job — Chaos will get …
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Stephen William Hawking (January 08, 1942 – March 14, 2018) For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen.
JRR Tolkien (January 03, 1892 – September 02, 1973) There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off. They are …
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Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) I cannot but hate it. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world… A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently …
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Freeman John Dyson (December 15, 1923 – February 28, 2020) You sit quietly gestating them, for nine months or whatever the required time may be, and then one day they are out on their own, not belonging to you any more but to the whole community of scientists. Whatever it is that you produce, a …
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Howard Nemerov (February 29, 1920 – July 5, 1991) Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Alfred Russel Wallace (January 08, 1823‐November 07, 1913) One of the most prominent features of our century has been the enormous and continuous growth of wealth, without any corresponding increase in the well-being of the whole people; while there is ample evidence to show that the number of the very poor — of those existing …
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Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America — this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as …
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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 (January 04, 1943 -) Even when you’ve lived through an era, you’re only seeing a part of it, understandably. It’s been a wonderful feeling to hear from them that I’ve given them an understanding of what was happening in the home front as a whole so that they feel their sense of …
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Maria Konnikova Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events — smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better… The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and …
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William Vogt (May 15, 1902–July 11, 1968) We must — all of us, men, women, and children — reorient ourselves with relation to the world in which we live… We must come to understand our past, our history, in terms of the soil and water and forests and grasses that have made it what it …
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Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790) ...I believe I shall, in some shape or another, always exist; and, with all the inconveniences human life is liable to, I shall not object to a new edition of mine; hoping, however, that the errata of the last may be corrected.
Stephen J Dobyns (February 19, 1941 -) Writing is a job, a craft, and you learn it by trying to write every day and by facing the page with humility and gall. And you have to love to read books, all kinds of books, good books. You are not looking for anything in particular; you …
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Jeannette Napolitano I don’t want to look back in five years’ time and think, ‘We could have been magnificent, but I was afraid.’ In five years, I want to tell of how fear tried to cheat me out of the best thing in life, and I didn’t let it.
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell (February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977), known professionally as Anaïs Nin When we are in conflict we tend to make such sharp oppositions between ideas and attitudes and get caught and entangled in what seems to be a hopeless choice, but when the neurotic ambivalence …
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Mary Wollstonecraft (April 27, 1759 – September 10, 1797) The endeavor to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless.
Lou Andreas-Salomé (February 12, 1861 – February 5, 1937) To Rilke: A great deal of poetic work has arisen from various despairs, certainly; but if it arose out of that despair, the despair of not being capable of just such poetic syntheses, there’d be a contradiction, don’t you think? To your consciousness of yourself it …
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Dame Jane Morris Goodall (April 03, 1934 -) The window is closing. Business as usual – using up natural resources faster and faster – can’t carry on. In some cases, we are already using resources faster than they can be replenished. And we can see the consequences. Look at climate change. It is not something …
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Maria Konnikova (1984 -) That’s the thing about life: You can do what you do but in the end, some things remain stubbornly outside your control. You can’t calculate for dumb bad luck… My reasons for getting into poker in the first place were to better understand that line between skill and luck, to learn …
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Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Like love, grief swells into an entire inner universe that comes to color the whole of the outside world. Like love — that rapturous raw material for most of the songs and poems and paintings our species has produced — grief lives itself through the grieving and can’t but …
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Alan Wilson Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a …
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Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770 – March 26, 1827) Born with a passionate and excitable temperament, keenly susceptible to the pleasures of society, I was yet obliged early in life to isolate myself, and to pass my existence in solitude. If I at any time resolved to surmount all this, oh! how cruelly was …
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Edward Wadie Said (November 1935 – 24 September 2003) Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder …
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Brian Greene (February 09, 1963 -) We emerge from laws that, as far as we can tell, are timeless, and yet we exist for the briefest moment of time. We are guided by laws that operate without concern for destination, and yet we constantly ask ourselves where we are headed. We are shaped by laws …
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James Maxwell Anderson (December 15, 1888 – February 28, 1959) This modern craze for biographical information leaves me cold for many reasons. For one thing, it's always inaccurate; for another, it's so bound up with publicity and other varieties of idiocy that it gags a person of any sensibility. For another, to be heralded is …
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Avram Noam Chomsky (December 7, 1928 -) If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom …
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Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?
Angela Yvonne Davis (January 26, 1944 -) There is this freedom movement and then there is an attempt to narrow the freedom movement so that it fits into a much smaller frame, the frame of civil rights. Not that civil rights is not immensely important, but freedom is more expansive that civil rights. And as …
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Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.
Barack Obama (August 04 1961 -) You just have to get started. You just put something down. Because nothing is more terrifying than the blank page.
Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926 -) We have a great, habitual fear inside ourselves. We’re afraid of many things — of our own death, of losing our loved ones, of change, of being alone. The practice of mindfulness helps us to touch nonfear. It’s only here and now that we can experience total relief, …
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Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65) You ask where you will lie after your death? Where lie the souls unborn?
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) Today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely. If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines what and how far something “progresses.” In …
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Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and, lastly, the solid cash.
Naguib Mahfouz (December 11, 1911 – August 30, 2006) She told him what had kept her away was Death. But he rejected that excuse—for Death, he said, can never come between lovers.
Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn like fabulous yellow …
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May Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) So much of my life here is precarious. I cannot always believe even in my work. But I have come in these last days to feel again the validity of my struggle here, that it is meaningful whether I ever “succeed” as a writer or not, …
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Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962) It is a sort of tradition in this country not to talk about religion for fear of offending — I am still a little subject to the tradition, and rather dislike stating my “attitudes” except in the course of a poem. However, they are simple. I believe that …
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Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850 – December 03, 1894) I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and to find the globe granite …
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Marvin Neil Simon (July 4, 1927 – August 26, 2018) If you can go through life without ever experiencing pain, you probably haven't been born yet. And if you've gone through pain and think you know exactly why, you haven't examined all the options.
Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) We’d be walking on these dark country roads at night and all of a sudden this music would seem to come out of nowhere, out of them spooky-looking trees that everybody said ghosts lived in. […] Somebody would be playing a guitar the way …
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Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) Half our holidays are punitive, at least for those left out of what the the holiday is supposed to celebrate. If you don’t have money for gifts and a thriving family life or just avoid events at the intersection of Jesus and shopping, Christmas can be unpleasant; Valentine’s Day …
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Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 04, 1975) Fearlessness is what love seeks. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.
Nigella Lucy Lawson (January 06, 1960 -) No, I never used to like solitude much. I went a bit too inward. It must be an age thing—over the past three years, I have found I have grown not just to enjoy solitude but to need it. Like many things, once you get used to it, …
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Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) When apparent stability disintegrates, As it must — God is Change — People tend to give in To fear and depression, To need and greed. When no influence is strong enough To unify people They divide. They struggle, One against one, Group against group, For survival, position, power. …
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Alan Wilson Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) Drift like a cloud and flow like the river. All we have to lose is our concept of who we believe we are.
Martha Nussbaum (May 06, 1047 -) The heart and mind of another are unknowable, even unapproachable, except in fantasies and projections that are really elements of the knower’s own life, not the other’s.
Vincent van Gogh (March 30, 1853–July 29, 1890) Since the beginning of this love I have felt that unless I gave myself up to it entirely, without any restriction, with all my heart, there was no chance for me whatever, and even so my chance is slight. But what is it to me whether my …
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Stéphane Mallarmé (March 18, 1942 - September 09, 1898) There is nothing but beauty — and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.
Saint Augustine (November 13, 354 – August 28, 430 AD) I came to see that the greater was better than the lesser, but that the greater and the lesser, taken together, was greater than the greatest, alone.
MC Richards (July 13, 1916–September 10, 1999) Wisdom is a state of the total being, in which capacities for knowledge and for love, for survival and for death, for imagination, inspiration, intuition, for all the fabulous functioning of this human being who we are, come into a center with their forces, come into an experience …
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May Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) The value of solitude — one of its values — is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression. A few moments of desultory conversation … may …
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Michael Chabon (May 24, 1963 -) There have been plenty of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day. If you want to write novels, they take a long time, and they're big, and they have a lot of words in them…. …
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Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (April 22, 1899 – July 02, 1977) I don’t fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to analysis, or take part in any demonstrations. I’m a mild old gentleman, very kind.
Robin Wall Kimmerer Between takeoff and landing, we are each in suspended animation, a pause between chapters of our lives. When we stare out the window into the sun’s glare, the landscape is only a flat projection with mountain ranges reduced to wrinkles in the continental skin. Oblivious to our passage overhead, other stories are …
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Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855) When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.
Bantu Stephen Biko (December 18, 1946 – September 12, 1977) It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die.
WS Merwin (September 30, 1927 – March 15, 2019) I think a poem begins out of what you don’t know, and you begin not by having a good idea but by hearing something in the language.
Martin L King (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) There are two types of laws: there are just laws and there are unjust laws… What is the difference between the two?…An unjust law is a man-made code that is out of harmony with the moral law.
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997)Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being.
May Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) If I were in solitary confinement, I'd never write another novel, and probably not keep a journal, but I'd write poetry, because poems, you see, are between God and me.
Alejandra Pizarnik (April 29, 1936 – September 25, 1972) Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio of drops of water falling from time to tired time. For this reason …
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Martin L King (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and for justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, …
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Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (April 26, 1889 – April 29, 1951) The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.
John Muir (April 21, 1838–December 24, 1914) Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal, or heaven cannot heal, for the earth as seen in the clean wilds of the mountains is about as divine as anything the heart of man can conceive!
Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926 -) Your presence is a miracle, your understanding of his or her pain is a miracle, and you are able to offer this aspect of your love immediately. Really try to be there, for yourself, for life, for the people you love. Recognize the presence of those who live …
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Susan Minot (December 07, 1956 -) The word dysfunction has, I think, served its purpose and now has lost its meaning. Every family, like every person, is imperfect, after all. The idea that there is a Family somewhere who functions is an odd concept. In my youth I was running from my family to try …
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Barack Obama (August 04 1961 -) I think whether you’re talking about art or politics or just getting up in the morning and trying to live your life, it’s useful to be able to seek out that joy where you can find it and operate on the basis of hope rather than despair.
Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973) I grew up in a double world, the small white clean Presbyterian American world of my parents and the big, loving, merry, not too clean Chinese world, and there was no communication between them. When I was in the Chinese world, I was Chinese. I …
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Martha Nussbaum (May 06, 1047 -) The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart. In suffering we know only suffering. We call our rationalizations false and delusive, and we do not see to what extent they express a …
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Albert Schweitzer (January 14, 1875 – September 04, 1965) To the question whether I am a pessimist of an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.
Jeremy Bentham (February 15, 1748 - February 04, 1747) Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty: And I repeat that government has but a choice of evils.
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) And yet one of the most damning paradoxes of our condition is that, again and again, we withhold from others the loving sympathy and empathic understanding we demand for ourselves. When we lose the reins of our own character, when we lash out or sulk or act from a …
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Nelson Mandela (July 18, 1918 – December 05, 2013) The factors which necessitated the armed struggle still exist today. We have no option but to continue… We have waited too long for our freedom. We can no longer wait. Now is the time to intensify the struggle on all fronts… I have fought against white …
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Primo Levi (July 31, 1919–April 11, 1987) Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are [those] ready to believe and act without asking questions.
Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931) There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone. The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape. And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves …
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James Augustine Joyce (February 02, 1882 – January 13, 1941) Opening Paragraph of Ulysses "O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the fig trees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rose gardens and …
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Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) That was the whole intention of the art: to affect and enter the culture by understanding and reflecting it; to contribute to and broaden the concept of art and the artist as much as possible.
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Lucy Stone (August 13, 1818 – October 18, 1893) We want to be something more than the appendages of Society; we want that Woman should be the coequal and help-meet of Man in all the interest and perils and enjoyments of human life. We want that she should attain to the development of her nature …
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George Bernard Shaw (July 26, 1856 – November 02, 1950) I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want …
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Meshell Ndegeocello (August 29, 1968 -) You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever …
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Megan Rapinoe (July 05, 1985 -) But you have a choice of what you do in the world. You just have to be prepared to wear the consequences of your actions.
Oscar-Claude Monet (November 14, 1840 – December 05, 1926) I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf… To think I was getting on so well, more absorbed than I've ever been and expecting to achieve something, but I was forced to change my tune and give up a lot of promising beginnings and …
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Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986) We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible. There have been war, plague, scandal, and treason, and there is no way of our preventing their having taken place; the executioner became an executioner and …
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Andrew Carnegie (November 25, 1835 – August 11, 1919) The amassing of wealth is one of the worse species of idolatry. No idol more debasing than the worship of money.
William Vogt (May 15, 1902–July 11, 1968) If we ourselves do not govern our destiny, firmly and courageously, no one is going to do it for us. To regain ecological freedom for our civilization will be a heavy task. It will frequently require arduous and uncomfortable measures. It will cost considerable sums of money. Democratic …
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Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social …
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Alan Wilson Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) Time is an artificial concept… Our concept of time is the hairline second hand of a watch. We believe that the hairline is now. The now is eternal. Time is the eternal now. It is not a journey. It is NOW!
Anne Lamott (April 10, 1954 -) Most of us have figured out that we have to do what’s in front of us and keep doing it… Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice…When you love something like …
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Abbott Joseph “A. J.” Liebling (October 18, 1904 – December 28, 1963) The times were full of certainties: we could be certain we were right — and we were — and that certainty made us certain that anything we did was right, too. I have seldom been sure I was right since. … I know …
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Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a …
Continue reading "For The Love of Wisdom – Maria Popova – Shoreless Seeds And Stardust"
Milton Glaser (June 26, 1929 – June 26, 2020) If you perceive the universe as being a universe of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as one of scarcity, then it will be… I always thought that there was enough of everything to go around - that there are enough …
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Franz Kafka (July 03, 1883 – June 03, 1924) I want to write and there's a constant trembling in my forehead. I'm sitting in my room which is the noise headquarters of the whole apartment, doors are slamming everywhere. … Father breaks down the door of my room and marches through with the bottom of …
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M.C. Richards (July 13, 1916–September 10, 1999) The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch. We are not craftsmen only during studio hours. Any more than a man is wise only in …
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William Bolcom (May 26, 1938 -) I’ve been looking at these texts since I fell in love with them at 17. I thought that maybe they would make more sense sung than spoken. Singing spreads them out. When I read these poems aloud, they make a weird kind of sense. But people have gotten all …
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Teresa of Ávila (March 28, 1515 – October 04, 1582) The important thing is not to think much, but to love much, and so to do whatever best awakens you to love.
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else — preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. …
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Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Ted Chiang (1967 -) Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then …
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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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Oliver Sacks (July 09, 1933 - August 30, 2015) I would like it to be thought that I had listened carefully to what patients and others have told me, that I’ve tried to imagine what it was like for them, and that I tried to convey this. And, to use a biblical term, bear witness.
Mustafa Santiago Ali To be a person of color in America often means to be unseen and unheard. It means taking on the burdens of disproportionate impacts from pollution, wealth disparities, lack of healthcare and much more. In many cases these burdens begin at your birth and never fully end until you take your last …
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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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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.
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.
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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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.
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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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.
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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Joseph Goldstein (May 20, 1944 -) The rumors and teachings are true: We are luminous beings and awakening in our nature.
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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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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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.
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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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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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 (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.
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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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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Françoise Giroud (September 21, 1916 – January 19, 2003) To live several lives, you have to die several deaths.
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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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.
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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Siddhārtha Gautama (c. 563/480 – c. 483/400) All things that are born must die. Work hard for your own freedom from suffering.
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.
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.
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.
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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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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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.
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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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.
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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Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) It is not the failed relationships which influence our life — they influence our death.
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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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
Leonardo Da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 02, 1519) Once you have flown, you will walk the Earth with your eyes turned skyward; for there you have been, there you long to return.
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (April 26, 1889 – April 29, 1951) Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Great loves, like great works of art, live at the crossing point of the improbable and the inevitable. That, at least, has been my experience, both as a scholar of history and as a private participant in the lives of the heart. Such loves come unbidden, without warning or …
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Samantha Heintzelman But it’s mundane routines that give us structure to help us pare things down and better navigate the world, which helps us make sense of things and feel that life has meaning.
Martin L King (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) The ultimate test of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and moments of convenience, but where he stands in moments of challenge and moments of controversy.
Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913–December 3,1993) The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning.
Alfred Adler (February 07, 1870 – May 28, 1937) It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Alan Wilson Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) All religious beliefs are obstacles to our own transcendence as every form of belief is an attempt to cling… Religious beliefs are merely fantasies designed to prevent our own mortality. The highest religion is non-religion.
Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) The pandemic is a spotlight that illuminates underlying problems – economic inequality, racism, patriarchy. Taking care of each other begins with understanding the differences. And when the virus has slowed or stopped, all these problems will still need to be addressed. They are the chronic illnesses that weaken us …
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Olivia Laing (April 14, 1977 -) Loneliness isn’t the same thing as solitude, nor is it solitude’s inevitable consequence. As Hopper’s painting (Nighthawks) demonstrates, it can arise just as easily in situations of proximity. You can be lonely in a crowd, lonely in a marriage — or, on the other hand, content and at ease …
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John Berryman (October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.
Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940 – January 28, 1996) After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
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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Jean de La Fontaine (July 08, 1621 – April 13, 1695) Death never takes the wise man by surprise, he is always ready to go.
Kate Murphy The point is to find what works for you. It just needs to be regular and help you achieve your goals, whether intellectually, emotionally, socially or professionally. The best habits not only provide structure and order but also give you a sense of pleasure, accomplishment or confidence upon completion. It could be as …
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Kay Ryan (September 21, 1945 -) Poems should leave you feeling freer and not more burdened. I like to think of all good poetry as providing more oxygen into the atmosphere; it just makes it easier to breathe.
Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) Love the earth and the sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labors to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, re-examine all you have been told at school or …
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Maeve Binchy Snell (May 28, 1939 – July 30, 2012) We're nothing if we're not loved. When you meet somebody who is more important to you than yourself, that has to be the most important thing in life, really. And I think we are all striving for it in different ways.
George Orwell (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950) What is sinister is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. They do not see that any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought.
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (October 10, 1813 – January 27, 1901) I adored and adore this art; and when I am alone and wrestling with my notes, then my heart pounds, tears stream from my eyes, and the emotions and pleasures are beyond description.
Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.
Charles McRay Blow (August 11, 1970 -) There is a legitimate argument to be made that a spiral of recriminations will always descend into a hole of collective harm... There has to be some acknowledgment that children were taken from their parents, some locked in cages, and that many may never be reunited with their …
Continue reading "For The Love Of Wisdom – Charles M Blow – Move On, But Never Forget"
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905– September 02, 1997 We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: …
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Harriet Tubman (March 1822 – March 10, 1913) I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say — I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger.
Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919 – February 08, 1999) Art is truth as well as form, it is representational as well as autonomous. Of course the communication may be indirect, but the ambiguity of the great writer creates spaces which we can explore and enjoy because they are openings on to the real world and …
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Hermann Hesse (July 02, 1877 – August 09, 1962) When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do.
Huston Cummings Smith (May 31, 1919 – December 30, 2016) India never had the notion until our century of art for art’s sake. Art was a spiritual technology, and it is really very miraculous how art makes easy what otherwise would be difficult. Now, what is otherwise difficult? And the answer is to behave decently …
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James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) But if one can reach back, reach down — into oneself, into one’s life — and find there some witness, however unexpected or ambivalent, to one’s reality, one will be enabled, though perhaps not very spiritedly, to face another day… What one must be enabled to …
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Dame Jane Morris Goodall (April 03, 1934 -) I loved to read in bed, and after I had to put the lights out I would read under the bedclothes with a torch, always hoping my mother would not come in and find out! I used to read curled up in front of the fire on …
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Jane Hirshfield (February 24, 1953 -) The ability to stay in the moment, to investigate it through my own body and mind, was what I most needed to learn at that point in my life. To stay within my own experience more fearlessly. I think that’s why I needed to practice Zen, rather than go …
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Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going …
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John Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of …
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Teju Cole (June 27, 1975 -) Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs. … [Photography] is about retention: not only the ability to make an image directly out of the interaction between …
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Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) Democracy is a set of agreements to make decisions together and respect the outcome whether you like them or not. The kind of violence we saw on Capitol Hill (Jan 06, 2021) is authoritarian, a way to try to force other people to submit to the will of the …
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Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) We die. All of us — atoms to atoms, stardust to stardust, the mountain to the sea — you and I. The dual awareness of our improbable life and our inevitable death is what allows us to animate the interlude with love and beauty, with poems and fairy tales …
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Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) Suffering is a misunderstanding… It exists… It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You …
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Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (July 05, 1889 – October 11, 1963) Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
Helen Fisher (May 31, 1945 -) If the love object breaks off the relationship, the lover experiences signs of drug withdrawal, including protest, crying spells, lethargy, anxiety, insomnia or hyper-somnia, loss of appetite or binge eating, irritability, and loneliness. Lovers, like addicts, also often go to extremes, sometimes doing degrading or physically dangerous things to …
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Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (April 10, 1899 – July 02, 1977) This, then, is it: not the crude anguish of physical death, but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.
Vita Sackville-West (March 09, 1892 – June 02, 1962) I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia (Woolf). I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb …
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John Uzoma Ekwugha Amaechi (November 26, 1970) The most unlikely of people in the most improbable circumstances can be extraordinary. Not that nonsense that ‘If you believe, it will come true’ – that’s bollocks – but if you set a plan, are willing to work, endure extreme mundanity, really embrace some discomfort, I think you …
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William Strunk Jr. (July 1, 1869 – September 26, 1946) Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, …
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Andrew Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) The brain must not interfere. You're painting so constantly that your brain disappears, and your subconscious goes into your fingers, and it just flows. If you think you're painting a good watercolor you can be sure it's lousy. It is important to forget what you are …
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Bill Brandt (May 02, 1904 – December 20, 1983) He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time, or the traveller who enters a strange country. Most photographers would feel a sense of embarrassment in admitting publicly that they carried within …
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Anne Lamott (April 10, 1954 -) If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.
Jose Alberto Gutierrez I realized that people were throwing books away in the rubbish. I started to rescue them. There was a lack of them in our neighborhood, so we started to help. The more books we give away, the more come to us. Books transformed me, so I think books are a symbol of …
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Chris Van Allsburg (June 18, 1949 -) At one time most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed, it fell silent for all of them. Even Sarah found one Christmas that she could no longer hear its sweet sound. Though I've grown old, the bell still rings for me as it …
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John Keats (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821) I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness - I look not for it if it be not in the present hour - nothing startles me beyond the Moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights - or if a sparrow come before my window …
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Ralph Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget …
Continue reading "For The Love Of Wisdom – Ralph Ellison – Writing"
Jean Cocteau (July 05, 1889 – October 11, 1963) The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force.
Rainer Maria Rilke (December 04, 1875 – December 29, 1926) For the things whose essential life you want to express, begin by asking, "Are you free? Are you prepared to devote all your love to me? And if the thing sees that you are preoccupied, with even a mere particle of your interest, it shuts …
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Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD65) Let those people go on weeping and wailing whose self-indulgent minds have been weakened by long prosperity, let them collapse at the threat of the most trivial injuries; but let those who have spent all their years suffering disasters endure the worst afflictions with a brave and resolute staunchness. …
Nadine Gordimer (November 20, 1923 – July 13, 2014) All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
Alan Bennett (May 09, 1934 -) The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even …
Continue reading "For The Love Of Wisdom – Alan Bennett – Reading"
George Orwell (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950) In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Sandra Hochman (1936 -) If only there were a perfect word I could give to you — a world like some artichoke that could sit on the table, dry, and become itself.
Cliff Joseph (June 23, 1922 - November 08, 2020) Those who are at the head of the oppressive system know well the power of art and fear it in the hands of the people. That is why power structures throughout man’s history have sought to suppress and control the creative artist. Mr. Joseph’s “Ancestral Affirmation” …
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