Journal XXXV

STRONG AND SOFT

All too often our so-called strength comes from fear, not love. Instead of having a strong back, many of us have a defended front, shielding a weak spine. In other words, we walk around brittle and defensive, trying to conceal our lack of confidence. If we strengthen our backs, metaphorically speaking, and develop a spine that’s flexible but sturdy, then we can risk having a front that’s soft and open.

How can we give and accept care with strong back, soft front, compassion, moving past fear to a place of genuine tenderness? I believe it comes when we can be truly transparent, seeing the world clearly and letting the world see into us.

– Joan Halifax

EARLY SPRING

We began as mineral.
We emerged into plant life and
into the animal state,
then to being human.

And always we have
forgotten our former states,
except in early spring,
when we dimly recall
being green again.

– Rumi

I emphasise the teaching that the Dhamma is opanayiko – to be brought inside oneself – so that the mind knows, understands and experiences the results of the training within itself. If people say you are meditating correctly, don’t be too quick to believe them, and similarly, if they say you’re doing it wrong, don’t just accept what they say until you’ve really practised and found out for yourself. Even if they instruct you in the correct way that leads to enlightenment, this is still just other people’s words; you have to take their teachings and apply them until you experience results for yourself right here in the present. That means you must become your own witness, able to confirm the results from within your own mind.

It’s like the example of the sour fruit. Imagine I told you that a certain fruit tasted sour and invited you to try some of it. You would have to take a bite from it to taste the sourness. Some people would willingly take my word for it if I told them the fruit was sour, but if they simply believed that it was sour without ever tasting it, that belief would be useless (mogha), it wouldn’t have any real value or meaning. If you described the fruit as sour, it would be merely going by my perception of it. Only that. The Buddha didn’t praise such belief. But then you shouldn’t just dismiss it either: investigate it. You must try tasting the fruit for yourself, and by actually experiencing the sour taste, you become your own internal witness. Somebody says it’s sour, so you take it away and, by eating it, find out that it really is sour. It’s like you’re making double sure – relying on your own experience as well as what other people say. This way you can really have confidence in the authenticity of its sour taste; you have a witness who attests to the truth.

– Ajahn Chah

Your Blinded Hand

Suppose that
everything that greens and grows
should blacken in one moment, flower and branch.
I think that I would find your blinded hand.
Suppose that your hand and mine were lost among numberless cries
in a city of fire when the earth is afire,
I must still believe that I would find your blinded hand.
Through flames everywhere
consuming earth and air
I must believe that somehow, if only one moment were offered,
I would find your hand.
I know as, of course, you know
the immeasurable wilderness that would exist
in the moment of fire.
But I would hear your cry and you’d hear mine
and each of us
would find
the other’s hand.
We know
that it might not be so.
But for this quiet moment, if only for this
moment
and against all reason
let us believe, and believe in our hearts,
that somehow it would be so.
I’d hear your cry, you mine –
And each of us would find a blinded hand.

– Tennessee Williams

Everything has a hidden face. Hidden, not in the sense that it is intentionally concealed, but in that it can only be seen with different eyes than the physical. A different mode of perception must be used. The hidden face of Nature can only be seen with the heart. …

Everything we encounter in the wildness of the world gives off its own electromagnetic pulse of communication. These waveforms are filled with meanings, living communications that touch us and that we experience as feelings.

– Stephen Harrod Buhner

We cannot control our life. If we are set upon doing so, we have abdicated from peace, which must balance what is desired with what is possible. As Hokusai shows so memorably, the great wave is in waiting for any boat. It is unpredictable, as uncontrollable now as it was at the dawn of time. Will the slender boats survive or will they be overwhelmed? The risk is a human constant; it has to be accepted — and laid aside. What we can do, we do. Beyond that, we endure, our endurance framed by a sense of what matters and what does not. The worst is not that we may be overwhelmed by disaster, but to fail to live by principle. Yet we are fallible, and so the real worst, the antithesis of peace, is to refuse to recognize failure and humbly begin again.

– Sister Wendy Beckett

Sometimes I realize that if writing isn’t, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing.
– Marguerite Duras

What I know at sixty, I knew just as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous labor of verification…
– Emil Cioran

Oblivion is not to be hired: The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the Register of God, not in the record of man.
– Sir Thomas Browne

Like any bad woman,
I only like the beginning of things.
– Eloise Amezcua

…on Christianity and the Judaic… [Nietzsche] was very original. He saw the truth. But he was hostile to it… If you read Nietzsche, you cannot deny that he preached violence. … Nietzsche is both very great and very dreadful.
– René Girard

All individuals seeking Reality go toward the heart, and from the heart, toward the stars.
– Manly P. Hall

I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
– J.D. Salinger

You are reborn
With the roses, in every spring.
– Juan Ramón Jiménez

I have survived, but I have not been spared.
– Catherynne M. Valente

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
– Kahlil Gibran

That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul.
– Wassily Kandinsky

Nothing will beautify your life and the life of others like establishing kindness as a habit.
– Leo Tolstoy

Inside, we are ageless and when we talk to ourselves, it’s the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little. It’s the body that is changing around that ageless center.
– David Lynch

Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.
– Jules Verne

To end something completely —
a belief, attachment, image
without residue, is to
discover extraordinary freedom.

– Jiddu Krishnamurti

The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one’s intellect to know it better.
– Emile Zola

Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

It is regrettable that people think about our monetary system, and of our economic structure, only in times of depression.
– Henry Ford

How many men crowd toward the light not to see better, but to shine better.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

In my childhood home in Iowa, there was a strong belief that the core of Judaism lay in empathy with the suffering of the oppressed and the enslaved. For me that also meant solidarity with Palestinians living under occupation.
– David Shulman

Silence is the conversation of people who love each other. What matters is not what is said, but what doesn’t need to be said.
– Albert Camus

The same people who stir up popular hatred for Job used to elbow their way to the front of the flatterers. We think they have changed, but the change is part of their mimetic nature. It is the opposite of freedom. They are merely particles of the crowd.

Job says: ‘My brothers have been fickle as a torrent’ (6:15). … Today it is raining, and the friends are some many drops of water among countless others. If tomorrow the sun is shining, they will be the grains of sand in the burning desert.”

– René Girard

There is nothing more difficult than detecting the structuring mechanism at work in a text. It is like looking for depth on a two-dimensional surface, the written text.
– René Girard

As one of the masters has said: ‘The heart cannot live while the ego is alive.’
– Muhammad al-Darqawi

I never pay attention to anything by “experts”. I calculate everything myself.
– Richard Feynman

The flight path of the poem
It should be sensitive to each one.

– René Char

There’s a point in everybody’s life where they need a major transformation. And when that time comes you have to grab it by the tail. Grab it hard, and never let go.
– Haruki Murakami

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
– Anthony Burgess

If one’s mind has peace, the whole world will appear peaceful.
– Bulleh Shah

When we analyze our thoughts or ideas, however compounded or sublime, we always find that they resolve themselves into such simple ideas as were copied from a precedent feeling or sentiment.
– David Hume

Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.
– A. J. P. Taylor

The Yang power, the creative masculine, moves ahead with steadfast perseverance toward a goal until it becomes too strong, begins to break—and then the Yin, the receptive feminine, enters from below and gradually moves toward the top. Life is a continual attempt to balance these two forces.
– Marion Woodman

The prime purpose of eloquence is to keep other people from speaking.
– Louis Vermeil

It’s really important to be willing to expose your ideas to the possibility that you are wrong.
– Vernon Smith

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
– Carl Sagan

Do not think that life is a kind of theatrical show.
– Marcus Aurelius

A holy person is someone who is whole; who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.
– Alan Watts

I feel ugly, like I’m a bad person, and yet I’d like to be loved.
– Elena Ferrante

We are in a time of universal orphanage – of nature, of each other, of our own hearts. Take refuge in the fact that we all share this core wound and dilemma. What are you starving for?
– Kim Krans

Look at the present: the harmony, the ease.
– Marcus Aurelius

The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad, because you never know what will be the consequence of misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
– Alan Watts, Chinese Farmer Story

Words are harbingers, messengers of our time. They come into the world one way, and as the world turns, they evolve.
– Carol Edgarian

Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
– Eugene V. Debs

I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.
– Emma Goldman

Some suffering in this life cannot be healed in this life. There are wounds – spiritual, physical, emotional – that only eternity can restore.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Any writer who knows what he’s doing isn’t doing very much.
– Nelson Algren

Bring me a wave separate from the ocean and I will show you a person separate from the Universe.
– Alan Watts

They say that the system devours everything, that it assimilates everything. That is not true. There are things the system cannot assimilate, cannot digest. One of them, for example, is precisely poetry. In my view, it is unconsumable.
– Pier Paolo Pasolini

I reached heaven and it was syrupy.

It was oppressively sweet.

Croaking substances stuck to my knees.

Of all substances St. Michael was stickiest.

I grabbed him and pasted him on my head.

I found God a gigantic fly paper.

I stayed out of his way.

– Gregory Corso

Writing touches the unconscious in a way that talking does not. It gets beyond the old, to the truth of the real stories within.
– Pete Walker

Trust is the soul’s greatest lesson.
It’s easy to trust when life moves in harmony…
but the deeper initiation begins when the path feels uncertain,
when clarity fades,
and yet your spirit still whispers, “Keep going.”

– Bill Philipps

In the old days, the earth used to be round. Houses had doors. Bodies led out to gardens that were mostly sunny. When we raised curtains, scenes used to appear. Space was full of spaces and sights. There was some future. People used to write to each other.
– Cixous; tr. Lewis

Know that in your struggle, you are with all beings, because our true struggle is the same—to find our way to oneness, to nonseparation, in this fragile human form.
– Sallie Jiko Tisdale

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.
– Voltaire

If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn’t be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Two people can live in the same reality…
and experience two completely different worlds.

Not because life is different…
but because their perception is.

Your inner state shapes your outer experience.

– LaRoy Dobbins

Never cease loving a person, and never give up hope for him, for even the prodigal son who had fallen most low, could still be saved; the bitterest enemy and also he who was your friend could again be your friend; love that has grown cold can kindle.
– Søren Kierkegaard

Christians still haven’t understood that God is further from people than people from him. I imagine a God bored beyond the edges of these people who only know how to ask, a God who are exasperated by the triviality of his creation, a disgust of earth and heaven.
– Emil Cioran

Recognizing that we are not separate from the rest of the biosphere brings a deep sense that the whole earth is our body and an aspiration to live out the implications of such realization.
– David Loy

I can’t start anything until I have a first sentence. That doesn’t mean I’ll keep it, but until I have a sentence that I think is the right one, I can’t write another word.
– Percival Everett

Mountains breed learned men and shepherds’ huts house philosophers.
– Miguel de Cervantes

Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.
– Eckhart Tolle

For many survivors, authority figures are the ultimate triggers. I have known several survivors, who have never gotten so much as a parking ticket, who cringe in anxiety whenever they come across a policeman or a police car.
– Pete Walker

Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive.
– Tennessee Williams

Emotionally regulated people move different. They don’t rage in the comment section of the internet. They’re not offended by reality. They’re not a ticking time bomb of unfelt emotions. They know themself and have cleared the pathway within.
– Nika Solé

Suff’ring is not always loss;
Often underneath the cross—
Heavy, crushing, wearing, slow,
Causing us in dread to go—
All unsuspected lieth gain,
Like sunshine in vernal rain.
– Richard Crashaw

Great deeds, without a noble people to heed them, are no more than a hefty blow to a numb skull, and lofty words that find no lofty hearts in which to echo are like a dying leaf rustling down into the dung.
– Friedrich Hölderlin

Revolution is an article of consumption. … Indeed nothing seems more conformist or more servile to me than the hackneyed mythology of ‘revolt.’
– René Girard

In my opinion, the new can only emerge within a tradition. You can’t subvert tradition except from within. Once you are exterior to everything, you’re in the void and there you stay. That’s where I think we are today. The more we condemn imitation, the more we surrender to it.
– René Girard

Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.
– Annie Ernaux

Writing is difficult; it is like jumping into the void.
– Nathalie Sarraute

I do not ask to walk smooth paths
nor bear an easy load.
I pray for strength and fortitude
to climb the rock strewn road.

Give me such courage and I can scale
the headiest peaks alone,
and transform every stumbling block
into a stepping stone.

– Gail Brook Burket

This mundus tenebrosus, this shadowy world of mankind, is sunk into night; there is not a field without its spirits, nor a city without its daemons …
– Peter Ackroyd

There were so many complex emotions for which poems did not exist. I had to find a secret way to express my feelings. I used to memorize poems. I would say them out; I didn’t use to write them down. I had this long fund of poetry in my head.
– Audre Lorde

The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.
– Victor Hugo

A poem often asks us to dwell there, and it’s unbearable, especially if you have no practice, if you don’t read or if you don’t go off by yourself and sit alone for a while. Even those of us who write, we’re often rushing around. So this dwelling, not fully comprehending something instantly, is very difficult. Anything that pushes us into the depths of our being is very hard to bear. I find it hard to bear. Sometimes I open a book that’s so beautiful I have to shut it because it hurts me. I can’t stand it. It’s like, Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! This is going to drive me into my own heart. A day or two days later I’m saying, All right, and I just surrender to it: Do it to me. Go ahead. I want it. I don’t want it. I want it. I don’t want it.
– Marie Howe

In my best moments I think “Life has passed me by” and I am content.
– Agnes Martin

There are my sanctuaries: music that stirs, nature that heals, poetry that whispers, and solitude that understand.
– Marina Tsvetaeva

While expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it’s a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness…Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That’s good medicine for land and people alike.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

Our natural responses to media, and to technology, are irrelevant. We cannot trust our instincts or our natural physical responses to our new things. They will destroy us.
– Marshall McLuhan

on forever’s very now we stand
– e. e cummings

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with, we cease to see.
– Anias Nin

I want to feel that I am thoroughly and completely understood so that now and then I can take my guard down and look out around me and not feel that I will be destroyed with my defenses down.

I want to feel completely vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed and absolutely secure.

This is what you look for in your children when you have them. This is what you look for in your [mate] if you get one.

That I can run the risk of radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my vulnerability will not step on me. That I can fell secure in my awareness of the active presence of my own idiom in me.

So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill. It doesn’t matter whether I become a doctor, lawyer, housewife . . .

I’m secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself, and having learned to listen to that, I can become quiet enough, still enough to hear the sound of the genuine in you.

– Howard Thurman

I was falling. Falling through time and space and stars and sky and everything in between. I fell for days and weeks and what felt like lifetime across lifetimes. I fell until I forgot I was falling.
– Jess Rothenberg

So of course, this isn’t just about jukeboxes or dancing, this is about longing for a place that both no longer exists and never did. This is an ode to an imaginary place, torn down. I am from a part of a city that might as well be an imaginary place. I cannot show people all of the things that made me. The basketball courts I played on are cracked now, and no one hangs nets on the rims. The hill I rode my bike down has been leveled and the church that sat at the bottom is gone. The Dairy Queen that I’d pop into at the end of those bike rides was a chicken shack for a while, then a check-cashing place for a while, and now it’s just another empty building.

A sign with nothing on it. Even the streetlights have been taken from the blocks I once ran down, attempting to get home before the beams of streetlights flickered and coughed some fractured brightness along the pavement.

The streetlight people were another marker of that pop song I’d push into the juke at South Detroit in Windsor, where everyone knew all of the words. I am finding the distance between memory and belief to grow shorter by the year. I am constantly using memory to convince myself that I’ve lived and experienced something. That my belief in the world has been shaped by some magic I’ve been a part of, even if I can’t go back to all of the places that magic sprung from. If the old bar is a new bar, or nothing at all. If the pool hall is an organic juice shop. A singer names an imaginary place in a song, and I can’t help but think of all of the places I once touched that are no longer real.

– Hanif Abdurraqib, On Believing

At certain periods a nation may be oppressed by such insupportable evils as to conceive the design of effecting a total change in its political constitution; at other times the mischief lies still deeper, and the existence of society itself is endangered. Such are the times of great revolutions […]. But between these epochs of misery and of confusion there are periods during which human society seems to rest, and mankind to make a pause. This pause is, indeed, only apparent, for time does not stop its course for nations any more than for men; they are all advancing towards a goal with which they are unacquainted.

– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places—retreated to most often when we are most remote from them—are among the most important landscapes we possess. Adam Nicolson has written of the ‘powerful absence[s]’ that remembered landscapes exert upon us, but they exist as powerful presences too, with which we maintain deep and abiding attachments. [These] landscapes, to borrow George Eliot’s phrase, can ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’.
– Robert Macfarlane

On the whole, it was not the crudest, the simplest, the most animalistic and primitive aspects of the human species that were reflected in the natural phenomena. It was, rather, the more complex, the aesthetic, the intricate, and the elegant aspects of people that reflected nature. It was not my greed, my purposiveness, my so-called ‘animal,’ so-called ‘instincts,’ and so forth that I was recognizing on the other side of that mirror, over there in ‘nature.’ Rather, I was seeing there the roots of human symmetry, beauty and ugliness, aesthetics, the human being’s very aliveness and little bit of wisdom. His wisdom, his bodily grace, and even his habit of making beautiful objects are just as ‘animal’ as his cruelty.
– Gregory Bateson

Turn anything that seems problematic over to your higher self, trusting that the “problem” is not what it seems to be. Rewrite your agreement about who you are and what you’re capable of achieving.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer

“It’s one big club and you ain’t in it.”

Thank God.

– Nika Solé

Finding time is the main problem. That’s why I want to retire—so I can really get to work.
– Samuel R. Delany

It is hard to let go of things, harder to let go of ideas, and even harder to let go of spiritual pretensions.
– Judy Lief

Words are the small change of thought.
– Jules Renard

Your sense of inner peace depends on spending some of your life energy in silence to recharge your battery, remove tension and anxiety, and feel closer to all of humanity. Going into the quiet and listening will heal and inspire you.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer

Once you have tasted meditation it is impossible for you to be in any misery. Bliss becomes inevitable, a natural showering, and it goes on showering like flowers showering from the sky.
– Osho

The chrysanthemum is of a deep happiness. It speaks through its color and its unruly shock of hair
– Clarice Lispector

It’s not external enemies that ruin societies; it’s the unlimited ambitions, the unbridled competitions, that divide human beings rather than unite them.
– René Girard

The Truth about Art

Every poem or novel you write
Every painting you paint
Every song you compose
is a stray dog looking for a home.

– john zbigniew guzlowski

The sole advantage in possessing great works of literature lies in what they can help us to become. In themselves, as feats performed by their authors, they would have forfeited none of their truth or greatness if they had perished before our day. We can neither take away nor add to their past value or inherent dignity. It is only they, in so far as they are appropriate food and not poison for us, that can add to the present value and dignity of our minds. Foreign classics have to be retranslated and reinterpreted for each generation, to render their old naturalness in a natural way, and keep their perennial humanity living and capable of assimilation. Even native classics have to be reapprehended by every reader. It is this continual digestion of the substance supplied by the past that alone renders the insights of the past still potent in the present and for the future. Living criticism, genuine appreciation, is the interest we draw from year to year on the unrecoverable capital of human genius.
– George Santayana

tea
is a quiet agreement
to begin again

– @BashoSociety

If we fail to look after others when they need help, who will look after us?
– Buddha

So far from it being self-evident to the modern that men are created equal, it is not self-evident that men are created, or even that men are men.
– G. K. Chesterton

In order to make people equal, you have to treat them differently. If you treat people alike, the result is necessarily inequality.
– Friedrich Hayek

The lights will blaze before they dim.
– Wendy Videlock

In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.
– George Orwell

As soon as you believe that a label you’ve put on yourself is true, you’ve limited something that is literally limitless, you’ve limited who you are into nothing but a thought.
– Adyashanti

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.
– Marcel Proust

The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
– Frank Herbert

A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.
– Kahlil Gibran

The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.
– Giordano Bruno

All Buddhas and ordinary people are just one mind. This mind is beyond all measurements, names, oppositions.
– Huang Po

Something’s off-key in my mind.
Whatever it is, it bothers me all the time.

– Charles Wright

Your beliefs are clouds
That obscure
The radiance
Of your sky nature.

– @KavijiPoet

Solitude Tanka
by Chen-ou Liu

English Original:

I close
the valves of my heart
to this red-dust world:
solitude and I
of the same race now

Japanese Translation by Hidenori Hiruta

塵の世に心臓弁を我閉じる孤独と我は今同種なり

(Note: Red dust is a Buddhist set-phrase for the world and its passions)

When the mind becomes quiet, if you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light and love you have never known, and yet you recognize it at once as your own nature.

– Nisargadatta Maharaj

The aesthetics of modernism, with its denial of the past, its vandalization of the landscape and townscape, and its attempt to purge the world of history, was also a denial of community, home, and settlement.
– Sir Roger Scruton

It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

O Man, help thyself!

– Ludwig van Beethoven

The psalms are not used in a vacuum, but in a history where we are dying and rising, and in a history where God is at work, ending our lives and making gracious new beginnings for us.
– Walter Bruegggemann

The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.
– Søren Kierkegaard

It’s amazing what one ray of the sun can do with the soul of a man!
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

at the height
of the argument
the old couple
pour each other tea

– George Swede

happy or not
just to be as I am …
patches of fog

– Chen-ou Liu

In my picture of the world there is a vast outer realm and an equally vast inner realm; between these two stands man.
– Carl Jung

Lock yourself in a room and study until you collapse. True brilliance comes from obsession.
– Isaac Newton

What assistance can we find in the fight against habit? Try the opposite!
– Epictetus

A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.
– Larry McMurtry

The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

All of my work is authentically generated with a squishy brain and a creaky left hand.
– Jon Carling

The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action secretly, and to have it found out by accident.
– Charles Lamb

They want you and your kids to be dumber, less competent, less able to think on your own. They want citizens who don’t question them or the power structures they create which benefit only themselves. They don’t believe in democracy. They think democracy has run its course.
– Maureen Langloss

If you look for holes
Then it’s holes you’ll find
Look for gold.

– O. C. Haynes

Confusion is chaotic only when it can give rise to a new world.
– Friedrich Schlegel

To suffer and to know what it is that you suffer: how can that be measured against its much-prized opposite, the ability to be happy without knowing why?
– Rachel Cusk

Whether or not you can change the world with a song, you’ve still got to write the song. You still have to try.
– Anaïs Mitchell

Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don’t know why people shouldn’t write poetry. That’s brave.
– Robert Frost

But only poets, since they must excavate and recreate history, have ever learned anything from it.
– James Baldwin

A good many will admit that self-knowledge and reflection are needed, but very few indeed will consider such necessities binding upon themselves.
– CG Jung

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.
– Michael Chabon

Everything was so beautiful that I wanted to find a way to make it stay that way forever.
– Ryū Murakami

It is the utter simplicity of life which defeats man. He has turned the earth inside out in a frantic effort to attain security, to arrive at wisdom. But he has never really attached himself to the earth, never sufficiently venerated it. He has tried to subjugate when he has had only to observe and enjoy.
– Henry Miller

I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic.
– Raymond Chandler

God moves in sympathy with those seeking the spirit, destroying the darkness of their ignorance with the bright lamp of wisdom.
– Bhagavad Gita 10:11

Don’t wait for old age to seek the Truth. The fire can start at any time.
– Kabir

Scientists today announced they have discovered a cure for apathy. Unfortunately, no one cares.
– George Carlin

Break a pact. Accept forgiveness. Make a bet.
– Paulo Coelho

You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.
– Susan Orlean

Death steals everything except our stories.
– Jim Harrison

A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
– Alexander Pope

Don’t confuse the fall of the colonial empire for the end of the world.
– @dr.rosalesmeza

Every relationship is like its own country with its own set of rules, and you don’t know it unless you live there.
– Amy Poehler

For you, a thousand times over
– Khaled Hosseini

My existence is realized only as permanent contact with the border of the unpredictable.
– Leszek Kolakowski

I have a remarkable restlessness…
do you have a remarkable restlessness…
– Albert Hoffman

the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
get away
from
them

– Charles Bukowski

Reading poetry is a technique of meditation; we must keep reading and rereading the same poem for quite a while before its real intensity will emerge.
– Northrop Frye

The soul is not upgraded by books or by thinking or by wanting to be better, the soul is upgraded by pressure that kills everything fake in you. the way fire does. gold is not purified by being admired, it is thrown into heat until everything that is not gold burns away. and what is left is not beautiful because someone made it beautiful, it is beautiful because there is nothing left to lie. war produces poets, peace produces advertisers. collapse produces saints, comfort produces consumers. this is not an opinion, this is history. read it, and the pattern is so blatant it is stupid how anyone misses it. the best human beings you have ever met were made in the worst times, and the emptiest human beings you have ever met were made in the times that should have been the best.
– @lichthauch

Each alone on the heart of the earth,
impaled upon a ray of sun:
and suddenly it’s evening.

– Salvatore Quasimodo (tr. Allen Mandelbaum)

Wood’s Edge
by Brenda Hillman

Infinity lifted:
a gasp of emeralds.


I thought I felt
the tall night trees
between them,

no exactitude,
a wait not even
known yet.

I held my violet up;
no smell.
It made a signal squeak
inside, bats,

lisps of pride;

ah, their little things,
their breath: lungs of a painting,

they swept me
in four ways, their square
plans, as I have made
a good square saying,

you I
you not-I
not-you I
not-you not-I,

ritual of hope
whose weight
has not been measured—

Our core is wisdom and compassion, and discipline is the way—through skill and carefulness—that we align our actions with our fundamental dignity.
– Phakchok Rinpoche

All of nature is bound together in a highly complex whole through an ongoing process of spontaneous self-organization.
– R. Aziz

What can be shown, cannot be said.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Isn’t that what life is, after all? Missing something that’s right there before you?
– William Gaddis

If your idea of success is just about being ahead of others, you will definitely not explore the full potential of who you are.
– Sadhguru

Every time I can take something that’s hurting, something that’s toxic, something that’s out of balance, and actively participate in its transformation, that act will help me to grow.
– Julia Butterfly Hill

The voice of conscience is not the voice of divinity; it is the voice of the individual’s own integrity.
– Manly P. Hall

What truly exists is consciousness. That’s the only thing I am directly acquainted with. I don’t know about atoms, galaxies, and neurons; all of that is inferred. The only thing I know is seeing, hearing, feeling.
– Christof Koch

A nation must ravage itself before foreigners can ravage it, a man must despise himself before others can despise him.
– Yukio Mishima

Higher than actuality stands possibility.
– Martin Heidegger

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
– Eudora Welty

There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.
– Haruki Murakami

“Listen!” said the White Spirit. “Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become that child again: even now.”
– C.S. Lewis

I do not need oppose, or deny, because it is clear to me that I cannot be the opposite or denial of anything. I am just beyond, in a different dimension altogether.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

…men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
– G.K. Chesterton

The prize is just the joy of writing, hearing the sounds, hearing those voices.
– Suzan-Lori Parks

A writer writes both consciously and subconsciously.
– Naguib Mahfouz

The noble man is chiefly concerned with wisdom and friendship; of these, the former is a mortal good, the latter and immortal one.
– Epicurus

At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
– James 4:7

Space is a form abstracted from matter and exists only in consciousness.
– Arabic physicist Ikhwan al-Sufa, 900 AD

In non-visual space both man and animal are hunters.
– Marshall McLuhan

Consider your origin. You were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.
– Dante Alighieri

When a sage engages in activity, his mind remains fixed in the Self and his activity does not distract him.
– Ramana Maharshi

In naturally occurring timeless awareness, the ultimate heart essence,
there is no causality, so the abyss of samsara is crossed.
There is no better or worse, so samsara and nirvana are an integrated mandala.
– Longchenpa

tea holds space
for feelings
without names

– @BashoSociety

Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they? That’s life, basically. It’s just more and more things to go through.
– Sally Rooney

It was the word beyond speech.
– Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil

This is no more than the ecstasy of chaos:
Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love
Which alone, as we know certainly, restores
Fragmentation into true being.

– Robert Graves, Ecstasy of Chaos

When we try to run from our suffering, to bury it beneath our business or brush it beneath the rug of trying to feel good—we lose out on the opportunity to feel, let go, transmute, and heal.
– Jack Kornfield

When we realize suffering is not a mistake, we finally begin to take our next steps on the road home to freedom.
– Jack Kornfield

As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.
– Eckhart Tolle

Great minds do not, for the most part, change … . The different works produced by great philosophers over a lifetime are usually variations on a theme, or themes.
– Glenn Alexander Magee

I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes.
– Gaston Bachelard

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
– Joan Didion

Recognize that your struggle and your suffering is the same as everyone else’s, I think that’s the beginning of a responsible life. Otherwise, we are in a continual savage battle with each other with no possible solution, political, social, or spiritual.
– Leonard Cohen

Irrationalism has effortlessly prevailed, but reason never triumphs on its own – it must be fought for.
– Heinrich Mann

Given my scientific training, no one thought it possible that I might dedicate myself seriously to literature … How was I to defend myself when my best antecedents were in the future?
– Ernesto Sabato

An empty vessel makes the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest babblers.
– Plato

In March I’ll be rested,
caught up, and human.

– Sylvia Plath

The world is what it is
and not what a son-of-a-bitch named Einstein
says it is.

– Nicanor Parra

Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.
– Sally Rooney

Be the one who nurtures and builds. Be the one who has an understanding and a forgiving heart one who looks for the best in people. Leave people better than you found them.
– Marvin J. Ashton

But for me, the most awful thing would be to feel that I’d agree with the things I’ve already said and written — that is what would make me most uncomfortable because that would mean that I had stopped thinking.
– Susan Sontag

They were always at work revising the secret map.
– Robert Aickman

People talk a lot about the pleasures of the creative life. They’ve never tried it!
– W. D. Snodgrass

I respect people the most when they’re real. Not because they fit into any particular box. Not because they conform to what society says. But because they are themselves. That’s rare.
– Nika Solé

Our language did not evolve for scientific or metaphysical purposes, but just to help us make do and get along in the real world.
– Alexander Stern, Wittgenstein’s Apocalypse

Always let love guide
your every thought,
your every word
and your every action.

– Lynn Dailey

I’m scared
I’m scared of myself…
at daybreak
piece by piece I try
to put myself together

– Chen-ou Liu

Once we know how to have compassion, there may be times when we not only let go of ill-will but also let go into a sense of empathy. Letting go of fear, may then also be resting back into a sense of calm.
– Gil Fronsdal

But not all men seek rest and peace; some are born with the spirit of the storm in their blood.
– Robert E. Howard

If someone is a fake, but you can’t see it, there is nothing I would or could do to convince you. You’ll just have to keep learning like everyone else until you can tell the difference.
– Kenneth Folk

Memories are made of wondrous stuff—deceptive and yet compelling, powerful and shadowy. There is no relying on memory, and yet there is no reality outside of the one we carry in our recollection.
– Golo Mann

Art is only able to say what it says by not saying it.
– Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

As soon as we’re born, we’re sentenced to death — just that we don’t know when our turn will come. So you can’t be complacent. Start right in and develop all your good qualities to the full while you still have the chance.
– Ajahn Fuang

Avoid popularity; it has many snares, and no real benefit.
– William Penn

Theatre is a humble materialist enterprise which seeks to produce riches of the imagination, not the other way around.
– Charles Ludlam

Just let go. Let go of how you thought your life should be, and embrace the life that is trying to work its way into your consciousness.
– Caroline Myss

Like love, mourning affects the world – and the worldly – with unreality, with importunity. I suffer from what it demands of me. (…) The world depresses me.
– Roland Barthe

Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked.
– John Cheever

We who hear the gentle murmuring of the primal spring; should we fear the coming earthquake? Truly not! For we know that it will merely tear apart the rubble and carve out the riverbed for the stream, so that we may one day see its living waves flowing freely.

– Richard Wagner

wordless
in my borrowed tongue
plum blossoms
– Chen-ou Liu

The degree to which a person can grow is directly proportional to the amount of truth he can accept about himself without running away.
– Leland Val Van De Wall

this urge
(to know her name) …
blooming wildflowers
– Chen-ou Liu

Logic is a crutch for the weak; the strong walk on their own intuition.
– Osho

They say you proclaim the word of God, yet I hear only of good and evil — nothing of love or truth.
– Rumi

Are we right to hope that theorizing and debating will help us to act well? What if all this thinking distracts us from acting at all?

– Clare Carlisle, On Solvej Balle’s Philosophy of Time

Wishes can be your best avenue of getting what you want when you turn wishes into action. Action moves your wish to the forefront from thought to reality.
– Byron Pulsifer

There is something that is featureless yet complete,
Silent and void.
It stands alone and does not change,
Goes round and does not weary.

– Lao Tzu

My only relief is to sleep. When I’m sleeping, I’m not sad, I’m not angry, I’m not lonely, I’m nothing.
– Jillian Medoff

Best writing advice I ever heard was “a sentence isn’t a truck to carry data”
– Morow Jävis Kærdenax

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
– Søren Kierkegaard

A student was meditating in Ajaan Fuang’s presence when—in a spasm of mindlessness—she slapped a mosquito that was biting her arm.

Ajaan Fuang commented: “You charge a high price for your blood, don’t you? The mosquito asks for a drop, and you take its life in exchange.”

The unconscious can move in every possible direction, even in time it can go forward and backward, because it knows no space.
– Carl Jung

Deep feelings always mean more than they are capable of saying.
– Albert Camus

Man is free at the instant he wants to be.
– Voltaire

People aren’t jealous of material things anymore. they’re jealous of your aura, your personality, the way people love and support you.
– Nithya Shri

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Read everything… but remember: a book is only a book. You must learn to think for yourself.
– Maxim Gorky

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable.
– Walt Whitman

Mingle the starlight with your lives and you won’t be fretted by trifles.
– Maria Mitchell

We cannot be the ones to distribute good and evil: we do not know the proportions.
– Eduardo de Filippo

The old chivalry is dead. Wars from now on will be waged by technologists.
– Ernst Jünger

These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.
– Vernon Cooper

When someone is conquered by thoughts it is a sign that pride preceded them, and therefore, he must humble himself more.
– St. Macarius of Optina

Dreaming is the poetry of Life, and we must be forgiven if we indulge in it a little.
– John Galsworthy

The veil that clouds your eyes
shall be lifted
by the hands that wove it.

And the clay that fills your ears
shall be pierced
by those fingers that kneaded it.

And you shall see,
and you shall hear.

Yet you shall not regret
having known blindness,
nor sorrow
that you were once deaf.

For in that day
you shall know the hidden
purposes in all things—

and you shall bless the darkness
as you would bless the light.

– Kahlil Gibran

Stepping away from routine helps you see parts of yourself you might not notice in everyday life.
– Lama Elizabeth Monson

Don’t just look at the world
Through your mind
Look also through your heart
It will give you a more complete picture.
– @KavijiPoet

Be great in act, as you have been in thought.
– William Shakespeare

I spent years trying to improve myself before I noticed something odd.

The “me” I was trying to fix only existed when I thought about it.

Between thoughts?

Just open, quiet awareness.

No broken person in sight.

– @everyday_awaken

The star that bids the shepherd fold, now the top of heaven doth hold.
– John Milton

Time just seems to fly away for a boy. That, I s’pose, is why one day you wake up suddenly and you ain’t a boy any longer.
– Robert Ruark

It all boils down to the last person you think of at night—that’s where your heart is.
– Charles Bukowski

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
– Fredrick Douglass, 1852.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
– John Locke

Of all wit’s uses, the main one
Is to live well with who has none.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

​I have been the dupe of my heart, but I will no longer be the dupe of my eyes. I have seen the world, and I have seen it as it is. I have been a slave, but I will be a King.
– Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

If you would escape moral and physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing—court obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie.
– Elbert Hubbard

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
– William Somerset Maugham

The human heart is a perpetual idol factory.
– John Calvin

God is the source. God is the refuge of all beings, their beginning, middle and end.
– Bhagavad Gita 10:20

Because that is when you love somebody – when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.
– Philip Roth

Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.
– Brian Keene

Prevent the things you have been doing and you are half way home.
– Frederick M. Alexander

There are so many great books in the world ,
all of them islands in the infinity of man’s ignorance.

– George Whitman, owner of Shakespeare and
Company in Paris, 1938

History is a prophet who looks back; because of what was, and against what was, it announces what will be.
– Eduardo Galeano

The words of The Poet ring true for centuries to come, soothing the wounds of despair and violence that captivate our world.
– Kim Krans, The Wild Unknown Archetypes

When we compare ourselves with others, we always lose, because we either feel superior or inferior, and both are forms of being lost.
– Henri Nouwen

Only their efforts to make him talk failed. He would say one word at a time, if pressed, but seemed happier not to and could not be made to repeat a whole line.
– Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day

The Greek word for sin, hamartia, means “to miss the mark.” It is quite a different understanding than the conventional modern notion of sin as a violation of a written law or, more simply, “bad behavior”—however that behavior may be defined in any given cultural context.
– Heather Hamilton and Jim Palmer

The whiskey had its own mind. Or spirit, he said. A cunning spirit. Sometimes it fooled him. Sometimes it set him free.
– Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

With Jung, I am convinced that the “catastrophe of the modern” stems from one-sidedness, that is, from the dominance of particularity over wholeness and of rationality over intuition.
– Ursula Wirtz

If one attempted to look into the future one would see nothing; it was like peeping into a person’s earhole.
– Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen

To You

What is more beautiful than night
and someone in your arms
that’s what we love about art
it seems to prefer us and stays

if the moon or a gasping candle
sheds a little light or even dark
you become a landscape in a landscape
with rocks and craggy mountains

and valleys full of sweaty ferns
breathing and lifting into the clouds
which have actually come low
as a blanket of aspirations’ blue

for once not a melancholy color
because it is looking back at us
there’s no need for vistas we are one
in the complicated foreground of space

the architects are most courageous
because it stands for all to see
and for a long long time just as
the words “I’ll always love you”

impulsively appear in the dark sky
and we are happy and stick by them
like a couple of painters in neon allowing
the light to glow there over the river

– Frank O’Hara

The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn’t lessen but augments this love of life.
– Pier Paolo Pasolini

It is their relationship to time that divides the mythically oriented and the historically minded man … He who only measures and calculates finds no access to that which cannot be grasped by the space-time concept.
– Emma Brunner-Traut

The patient knows exactly what is going on in the analyst’s mind, and he feels the disharmony between the analyst’s words and his real feelings.
– Sándor Ferenczi

Our remedy, our safety, our protection, our dearest interests and the social well-being of our families, present and future–all depend on our unity and our regard for each other.
– Daniel Weaver

Considering that this body is frail like a jar, make your mind strong like a fortress.
– Dhammapada

riding on a wave of understanding
and like sunlight
arriving without a sound

– Joanne Kyger

A powerful way to help language pathways is through cross modal activation, which gently links movement, sound, and meaning. Begin with slow cross body movements, such as marching on the spot while tapping the opposite knee, to engage both sides of the brain. While moving, softly hum or repeat a single vowel sound to activate auditory and speech networks without pressure. Then pause, look at a nearby everyday object, and communicate its purpose using gestures rather than words, allowing meaning to form without forcing language. Finally, say the word aloud once or twice with a calm breath in between. This approach works because language is built through movement, sound, vision, and connection, helping the brain access communication pathways more safely and effectively, without correction or demand.
– Anthony Goldsmith

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data, which is often fragmentary and fleeting.
– V.S. Ramachandran

He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
– Gabriel García Márquez

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible.
– Thomas Merton

Co-regulation is where it all starts. Before a child can regulate themselves, they need to feel it through you first. Your nervous system becomes the anchor, your breathing, your tone, your presence is what their brain is reading in every moment. When a child is overwhelmed or dysregulated, it’s not a behaviour problem, it’s a nervous system asking for support. This is where you step in, not to fix or control, but to bring calm into the space, maybe that’s sitting close, slowing your breath, humming, using a steady voice or just being there without saying much. Over time, their nervous system begins to mirror yours, and that feeling of safety gets wired in. That’s how self-regulation is built. Connection first, always.
– Anthony Goldsmith

All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. Then the archetypes begin to function, as happens also in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways.
– CG Jung

One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter.
– Francoise Sagan

Jung, for instance, always liked to send people with the same blind spots to each other because, he said, if two idiots sit together and neither can think they will get into such trouble that at least one of them will begin to think!
– Marie-Louise von Franz

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
– Thoreau

Who betrays you once, will betray you a thousand times. There is no need to drink the whole sea to realize it’s salty.
– Brands of Billions

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty. Competing with each other and ungenerous about each other. Hemingway was ungenerous about other writers. Most writers are. Writers can be the stinkers of all time, can’t they?
– Lillian Hellman

Accept being unimportant.
– Tao Te Ching

Every man who is truly a man must learn to be alone in the midst of all others, and if need be against all others.
– Romain Rolland

There is enough poetry and enough cosmos and enough infinite in another human being or a rock and a waterfall or a half-smile.
– Leonardo daVinci

Love makes you want to be a better man—right, right. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.
– Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

Any ideological system which places a hierarchy on human life is a threat to all of us
– Simone Zimmerman

The older I grow; the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgement of others.
– Benjamin Franklin

Democratic power is the only voice most citizens have.
– José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation.
– James Madison

I am not sorrowful, but I am tired Of everything that I ever desired.
– Ernest Dowson

Never discuss a situation until you understand how it came to be.
– John Henry Clarke

Of course, writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future. But it does encourage me to use our past and present behaviors as guides to the kind of world we seem to be creating. The past, for example, is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes.
– Octavia Butler

The journey of life is not about being perfect; it’s about getting lost and finding your way again.
– Paulo Coelho

a genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone around him is losing his mind.
– Napoleon

In nature’s infinite book of secrecy, a little I can read.
– William Shakespeare

For it would seem—her case proved it—that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
– Virginia Woolf

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
– Thomas H. Huxley

One must speak for a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality
– Antonio Gramsci

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.
– Nelson Algren

The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

There’s a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.
– Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase filled with perfumes, with sounds, with projects, with climates.
– Marcel Proust

In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

We do things with language, produce effects with language, and we do things to language, but language is also the thing that we do. Language is a name for our doing: both “what” we do (the name for the action that we characteristically perform) and that which we effect, the act and its consequences.
– Judith Butler, Excitable Speech

There is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.
– Barbara Kingsolver

The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
– Daniel Boorstin

The relationship between information and the mechanisms for its control is fairly simple to describe: Technology increases the available supply of information… control mechanisms are strained… When additional control mechanisms are themselves technical, they in turn further increase the supply of information. When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquillity and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.
– Neil Postman

No difference without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now.
– Jacques Derrida

The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.
– Jacques Derrida

It is much easier to imagine ourselves
in the place of God the Creator than in
the place of Christ crucified.
– Simone Weil

When the world gives you power,
be humble; when it takes it away,
be patient.
– Saadi

Don’t be blinded by the theorists
and the lying press.

– Ezra Pound

Because of craving, suffering arises;
with the ending of craving, suffering
ceases.

– Buddha

A Lesser Triumph

Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est.
– Ludwig van Beethoven

Yesterday I remembered applause. Whole rooms
would erupt with it, the people holding all that energy
inside their liquid bodies like geysers ready to burst.
It would start with the smack of one hand against
another, the expulsion of air between the flatness
of palm and palm so sudden that the shock would
travel briefly faster than sound, the kinetic energy
of that singular impulse reaching the drum
of a neighbor’s ear and through the ossicles,
rippling around the little hairs of the cochlea
and all the canals vibrating the vestibular nerve,
sparking electrochemical waves over axon and synapse
and down to the hands, which too would clap
in confirmation, relieved at the release, each
neighbor’s two neighbors of neighboring hands
expanding the blast like the neutron burst
in a fission reactor until the whole body of bodies
would explode, lifting their backs by their limbs
and out of their seats, the lungs pushed through
the lips and the teeth into whistles and hoots,
their caps sometimes blown clear to the ceiling
as humanity shook, and then settled down finally
like the smoke that settles in the valley late at night,
lingering among the silent trunks of the trees.

– Timothy Green

Is war a more important
human endeavor than love?
And if not, then why does
the history that is told focus
on war?

– Carol P. Christ

Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear … You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.
– Harold Bloom

That which endures is not one or another association of living forms, but the process of which the cosmos is the product, and of which these are among the transitory expressions.
– T. H. Huxley

In all of your relationships, if you can love someone enough to allow them to be exactly what they chose to be—without any expectations or attachments from you—you’ll know true peace in your lifetime.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer

Villainy wears many masks; none so dangerous as the mask of virtue.
– Washington Irving

In the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time…You pour yourself into it, care so much, & see up close so much birth & growth & beauty & danger & triumph—& then everything dies anyway, right? But u just keep doing it. What a great metaphor!
– Anne Lamott

Effortless mindfulness empowers us with the natural capability to be with our thoughts and emotions, without obsessive monitoring.
– Loch Kelly

One of Jung’s basic beliefs . . . is that the purpose of human life is to become conscious. Part and parcel of this is achieving a balance between spirit and instinct. Go too far one way or the other and we get into trouble.
– Daryl Sharp

When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
– Rollo May

The difficulty of translation from a language that doesn’t yet exist is considerable, but there is no need to exaggerate it. The past, after all, can be quite as obscure as the future.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

Nothing can save us—not all our money, nor all our bombs, nor all our guns—if we cannot achieve that long, long, long-delayed maturity.
– James Baldwin

a quiet cup of tea
reveals more truth
than loud advice
– @BashoSociety

But if we do revive and pursue the pagan ideal of a simple and rational self-completion we shall end – where Paganism ended. I do not mean that we shall end in destruction. I mean that we shall end in Christianity.
– G.K. Chesterton

Everyone has unique gifts and talents. What you love is what you’re gifted at. To be completely happy, to live a completely fulfilled life, you have to do what you love.
– Barbara Sher

You practice forgiveness for two reasons: to let others know that you no longer wish to be in a state of hostility with them and to free yourself from the self-defeating energy of resentment.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer

Doubt is the beacon that lights the way to discovery; it is the courage to question that frees us from the prison of unexamined beliefs.
– Karl Popper

For me, the ideas come when I’m in the bathtub or when I’m swimming. Water, it does something.
– Ishmael Reed

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

The genius of the Buddha—the Indian prince Siddhartha—and many who followed him was the realization that the mind is not static. It is living, breathing, evolving.
– Lawrence Levy

Sometimes a man must fight so hard for life that he has no time to enjoy it.
– Charles Bukowski

What we analysts have well and truly advanced about love, is that it is the source of all evil.
– Lacan

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There’s a corpse in the middle of every great poem.
– Sandra Simonds

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and, above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.
– Marie Curie

Next time you have to make a decision, be sure to breathe in and out first.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

Good people strengthen themselves ceaselessly.
– Confucius

I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn’t. But I don’t sit back waiting for it. I work every day.
– Alberto Moravia

Romantic pride willingly denounces the presence of the mediator in Others in order to found its own autonomy on the ruins of rival pretensions.
– René Girard

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor. In order to uncover his true shape, he must shatter his own substance with heavy blows of the hammer.
– Alexis Carrel

I call you ‘comrades’ rather than ‘brothers and sisters’ because if we are brothers and sisters it’s not from choice, it’s no commitment; but if you are my comrade, I am your comrade too, and that’s a commitment and a responsibility.
– Amilcar Cabral

It is good to love the unknown.
– Charles Lamb

The refusal of the real is the number one dogma of our time. … The famous linguistic methods are much appreciated nowadays because they replace the search for truth with structuralist word games.
– René Girard

Practice the pause. Pause before judging. Pause before assuming. Pause before accusing. Pause whenever you’re about to react harshly and you’ll avoid doing and saying things you’ll later regret.
– Lori Deschene

Nourish your soul, and the universe responds in bloom.

When you take time to care for your inner world, everything in your outer world begins to shift.
Self-care isn’t selfish — it’s sacred.

– Bill Philipps

I am not alone. I am surrounded by perplexities.

– King Arthur (John Steinbeck, The Acts of
King Arthur and His Noble Knights)

Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering.
– Epicurus

The trap that catches the mouse is baited with what the mouse likes best.
– African Proverb

But man doesn’t exist.
He has never existed, never.
But man doesn’t live, as the day doesn’t live.
But the moon invents his furious metals.

– Vicente Aleixandre (tr. Lewis Hyde)

Blake was … so conscious of the shape of his central myth that” he created “a dialectic, an anatomy of poetry, a rigorously unified vision of the essential forms of the creative mind, piercing through its features to its articulate bones.
– Northrop Frye

Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune.

– Charles Lamb

To walk alone along a lonely street is part of the philosopher’s nature. His gift is the rarest gift of all, the most unnatural one in a certain sense, exclusive and hostile even toward others with similar gifts.
– Nietzsche

True listening
Is not a practice of the ears
But an openness
Of the being.

– @KavijiPoet

The king who saves us is not a ruler with power, but a servant with love.
– Henri Nouwen

It is much more necessary for man to discover himself than to find out if other worlds are inhabited.
– Manly P. Hall

We gazed at each other, and looked at the green meadow o’er which the cool evening was just passing, and we wept. Right then, Life was dearer to me than all my wisdom had ever been.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

A Call
by Seamus Heaney

“Hold on,” she said, “I’ll just run out and get him.
The weather here’s so good, he took the chance
To do a bit of weeding.”

So I saw him
Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig,
Touching, inspecting, separating one
Stalk from the other, gently pulling up
Everything not tapered, frail and leafless,
Pleased to feel each little weed-root break,
But rueful also…

Then found myself listening to
The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks
Where the phone lay unattended in a calm
Of mirror glass and sun struck pendulums…

And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays,
This is how Death would summon Everyman.

Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him.

Virginia Woolf on how to read The Faerie Queene:

The first essential is, of course, not to read The Faery Queen. Put it off as long as possible. Grind out politics; absorb science; wallow in fiction; walk about London; observe the crowds; calculate the loss of life and limb; rub shoulders with the poor in markets; buy and sell; fix the mind firmly on the financial columns of the newspapers, weather; on the crops; on the fashions. At the mere mention of chivalry shiver and snigger; detest allegory; revel in direct speech; adore all the virtues of the robust, the plain spoken; and then, when the whole being is red and brittle as sandstone in the sun, make a dash for The Faery Queen and give yourself up to it.

Nothing, not a cracker, not a crumb. Still
a vague intimation shadows the memory of this place, and others,
that somewhere down the pike these landscapes are waiting again,
or are, perhaps, the only things we take with us—
our psychic terrain—
as though through memory we create our own afterlives—
which can’t be the entire breadth of it all,
… but in some way a homeland,
a landscape out of which we might ramble into the afterlives, yes,
the memories, of one another…

– David Bottoms

Missing the Boat
by Naomi Shihab-Nye

It is not so much that the boat passed
and you failed to notice it.
It is more like the boat stopping
directly outside your bedroom window,
the captain blowing the signal-horn,
the band playing a rousing march.
The boat shouted, waving bright flags,
its silver hull blinding in the sunlight.
But you had this idea you were going by train.
You kept checking the time-table,
digging for tracks.
And the boat got tired of you,
so tired it pulled up the anchor
and raised the ramp.
The boat bobbed into the distance,
shrinking like a toy—
at which point you probably realized

you had always loved the sea.

America does not know how to exist in a world it does not control.
– Lydia Polgreen

Take the
selfishness out
of anger and
you’re left with
determination

– Bernie Glassman

…faith for is a way of situating yourself in front of reality, starting with your own self. It is a judgment, a position, a stand that you take, with respect to everything. If you fail to take that stand then, at best, you are superficial. You have no depth. Therefore you are at the mercy of whatever power comes along to move you. Because you do not have this firm stand, you are vulnerable to power.
– Lorenzo Albacete

There are then, in short, diverse tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life. Here we have one of the ruling ideas of this book-the idea, indeed, which served as the starting-point of our inquiry.

That which is usually held to be a greater complexity of the psychical state appears to us, from our point of view, to be a greater dilatation of the whole personality, which, normally narrowed down by action, expands with the unscrewing of the vice in which it has allowed itself to be squeezed, and, always whole and undivided, spreads itself over a wider and wider surface.

That which is commonly held to be a disturbance of the psychic life itself, an inward disorder, a disease of the personality, appears to us, from our point of view, to be an unloosing or a breaking of the tie which binds this psychic life to its motor accompaniment, a weakening or an impairing of our attention to outward life.

– H. Bergson

I had one trip that I really loved. I was convinced that I was a minor character in someone else’s dream. The feeling was intensely relaxing. I didn’t have to do anything, because everything I did was just a metaphor. And since it wasn’t my dream, I didn’t have to decode the signs. Nothing made sense but nothing had to. It was the greatest experience I’ve ever had; for an entire afternoon I didn’t have to exist. And I came back.
– Season Butler, Cygnet

Every moment is like a gift. And since it is, relax, get into the moment and do all you can to listen to it. I mean, really, really listen. Be present to the moment with everything you. It takes practice. After you’ve listened for a while, you start responding. You give back because you begin to see how everything is on loan — a gift from God… Try listening, looking. Looking and listening lead into everything else. Real listening means you don’t project yourself into the situation. You simply are receptive, seeing things as they are, not as you might wish them to be. Listen!
– S. T. Georgiou

Zuly
by John Gorka

And the good earth shook the day that Jesus was reborn
In Anchorage, March the 27th, 1964
When He came back this time though it was as a baby girl
Her parents said Her mission was the same, to save the world

God looked down and said, oh the times they are a changing
I will send My only daughter as soon as I complete the staging
All the land shook and rolled and split, there was no warning
Except Gabriel had told the mom She’d arrive Good Friday morning

And so it came to pass that Her parents named Her Zuly
A bright and happy child, also willful and unruly
The birds would come and visit Her, they wished they could take Her with them
When they left their roosts for winter, She would always miss them

Zuly won a scholarship though the classes mostly bored Her
She loved the other students though and the teachers all adored Her
We learned more from Her, they said than we could ever teach Her
But there were times when we just could not reach Her

She said we are here to love each other that is all
And organized religion that’s comparatively small
Not that I don’t love all those so-called holy ones
But why are there so few daughters among the leaders with My sons?

Now She runs a charter boat on Resurrection Bay
She takes tourists to see the wild creatures every summers day
In fall She teaches bush kids at the boarding school in Sitka
On those long December nights She is the light of winter

The thing about freedom, though, is that you can’t just want it for yourself only, or your own kind. Freedom means everybody… Freedom means justice.
– Mab Segrest

Difficulties seem to come in packs like feral dogs. Blessings gather like flocks of geese and spread their wings over us. Since neither is permanent, we simply find ourselves in life’s river doing the best swimming we can. I’m checking on my backstroke. How about you?
– Gunilla Norris

Once in a lifetime every person encounters a staircase which can take them to a special place; but only some of them grasp this and use the stairs!
– Mehmet Murat Ildan

I’m curious. Period. I find everything interesting. Real life. Fake life. Objects. Flowers. Cats. But mostly people. If you keep your eyes open, everything can be interesting. The secret is that there is no secret.
– Agnès Varda

Since love came over and knocked me down,
Then kicked me in the side and fled,
I have suffered from a prolonged perplexity.
God is the object of my wonder and the closest to me.
Especially near sleep. My sheets are like the wings of a guardian angel.
There is no other fabric so near to my feelings.
– Fanny Howe

Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at its melancholy rim, green in its envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in its greatest rages, black.
– Salman Rushdie

I don’t know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I’m some sort of Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.

I would like to recapture that freshness of vision which is characteristic of extreme youth when all the world is new to it.

I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have a light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.

– Henri Matisse

And what if there is nothing else? What if all life ends in the silent void of death? Then is it all in vain? I think not, for love, for the sake of love, will always be enough. And if our lives are but a single flash in the dark hollow of eternity, then if, but for the briefest of moments, we shine – then how brilliantly our light has burned. And as starlight knows no boundary of space or time, so too, our illumination will shine forth throughout all eternity, for darkness has no power to quell such light. And this is a lesson we must all learn and take to heart – that all light is eternal and all love is light. And it must forever be so.
– Richard Paul Evans

Crying was my most constant companion. One day, while walking on the beach, I saw the reflection of the sun on the water. Inexplicably, I felt a sense of a Presence larger than life itself after seeing a patch of light differently than ever before. The light image kept me alive … I was suffused with love. I had sensations of warmth from the light coming into my body and entering each cell, having awareness of my whole body in a startling way. It felt comforting, life-changing and dramatic, yet peaceful. I was able to function again. My most important focus became to deepen my experience of being suffused by the light.
– Virginia Swain

… is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines. It is not to lead our neighbor into a corner where there are no alternatives left, but to open wide a spectrum of options for choice and commitment. It is not an educated intimidation with good books, good stories and good works, but liberation of fearful hearts so that words can find roots and bear ample fruit …

The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves created free; free to sing their own songs, speak their own languages, dance their own dances; free also to leave and follow their own vocations. Hospitality is not a subtle invitation to adopt the lifestyle of the host, but the gift of a chance for the guest to find his own …

To convert hostility to hospitality requires the creation of the friendly empty space where we can reach out to our fellow human beings and invite them to a new relationship. This conversion is an inner event that cannot be manipulated but must develop from within. Just as we cannot force a plant to grow but can take away the weeds and stones which prevent its development, so we cannot force anyone to such a personal and intimate change of heart, but can offer a space where such a change can take place.

– Henri Nouwen

Every act of love is a new beginning, a new creation. To live compassionately is to believe in a love greater than ourselves yet intimately present to us, a love visible in the trees, the streams, the clouds, the poor, nonbelievers, and all who share the life that is our life—a love binding us together without constraints. We must believe that each person is capable of being transformed by love, that each tree, flower, animal, living creature, the stones, the sand, the sky—everything is capable of being transformed by love. And that when all is united by a luminous thread of love, Christ will be visible in the universe.
– Ilia Delio

FLEXIBLE MIND


In some sense, it’s all a question of
developing a flexible mind –
developing a flexible identity even –
that is capable of fluid transformation.

– Pema Chodron

In the minds of thinking men the present is always under attack from the past and future simultaneously.
– John Berger

I’m afraid to write. It’s so dangerous. Anyone who’s tried, knows. The danger of stirring up hidden things-and the world is not on the surface, it’s hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it’s a terribly dangerous void: it’s where I wring out blood. I’m a writer who fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others- Which? maybe I’ll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well.
– Clarice Lispector

“It wasn’t what you said”, he told her. “It was how I felt when you said it”.
– Anne Tyler

I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.
– Anne Carson

Between the universe that can be apprehended by pure intellectual perception (the universe of the Cherubic Intelligences) and the universe perceptible to the senses, there is an intermediate world, the world of Idea-Images, of archetypal figures, of subtile substances, of “immaterial matter.” This world is as real and objective, as consistent and subsistent as the intelligible and sensible worlds; it is an intermediate universe “where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual,” a world consisting of real matter and real extension, though by comparison to sensible, corruptible matter these are subtile and immaterial.

The organ of this universe is the active Imagination; it is the place of theophanic visions, the scene on which visionary events and symbolic histories appear in their true reality. Here we shall have a good deal to say of this universe, but the word imaginary will never be used, because with its present ambiguity this word, by prejudging the reality attained or to be attained, betrays an inability to deal with this at once intermediate and intermediary world.

– Henry Corbin

The grief of time passing, of life moving on half-finished, of empty spaces that were once bursting with the laughter and energy of people we loved.

As long as there is love there will be grief because grief is love’s natural continuation.

It shows up in the aisles of stores we once frequented, in the half-finished bottle of wine we pour out, in the whiff of cologne we get two years after they’ve been gone.

Grief is a giant neon sign, protruding through everything, pointing everywhere, broadcasting loudly, “Love was here.”

In the finer print, quietly, “Love still is.”

– Heidi Priebe

MAYBE VERY HAPPY

After she died he was seized
by a great curiosity about what
it was like for her. Not that he
doubted how much she loved him.
But he knew there must have been
some things she had not liked.
So he went to her closest friend
and asked what she complained of.
“It’s all right,” he had to keep
saying, “I really won’t mind.”
Until the friend finally gave in.
“She said sometimes you made a noise
drinking your tea if it was very hot.”

– Jack Gilbert

My advice is, don’t be a Buddhist.
In the end, it’s all about personal gain, fame, and business.
Just be a person with a good heart,
That’s the meaning of a true Dharma practitioner.
We live in the illusion and appearance of things.
There is reality. We are this reality.
When you understand this,
you will see that you are nothing,
and by being nothing, you are everything.
That’s all.

– Kalu Rinpoche

It’s spring, you’re young, you’re lovely, you have a right to be happy. Come back into the world.
– Shirley Jackson

He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past.
– Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

Every word has a history. Every word has an image locked into its roots.
– John Ciardi

What are we doing, we psychotherapists? We are trying to heal the suffering of the human mind, of the human psyche or the human soul, and religions deal with the same problem.
– CG Jung

I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw some things back.
– Maya Angelou

If plan A isn’t working, you stop. That’s what I learned from mules and donkeys.
– Percival Everett

When students are searching for their voice, they are searching for poetry. When they find their voice, they will have found poetry. When they find poetry, they will live to regret it.
– Mary Ruefle

You should show encouragement whenever you can. People try harder when they know that someone cares about them.
– Stephanie Perkins

You write the beginning and then you go back and rewrite the beginning, and you never got off page one. It’s kind of a syndrome, and I have a rash piece of advice which is — Go on, page two, page three, and never look back. Get something finished, no matter how lousy it is. […] Perfectionists cannot get going unless they kind of do violence to their own instincts, and just blast ahead.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

Living life as an artist is a practice. You are either engaging in the practice or you’re not. It makes no sense to say you’re not good at it. It’s like saying, “I’m not good at being a monk.” You are either living as a monk or you’re not. We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.
– Rick Rubin

A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.
– Andrei Tarkovsky

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
– George Bernard Shaw

If I tell these private thoughts of mine, it is because I know they are not mine alone, and that practically everyone is trying to say the same things and that the writer is only a man who says out loud what other people think or whisper.
– Eugène Ionesco

In order to act, an operational notion of the object is required; but a poetic notion is required in order to understand.
– Nicolás Gómez Davila

…you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon …
– Wallace Stevens

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
– James Joyce

Fails e’en thy faith, rooted in earth of stars!
Perchance the wind is writing the Lost Word.
– A. E. Waite

Empire functions best when crisis is ubiquitous. Crisis is Empire’s regular mode of existence, in the same way that an insurance company comes into being only when there’s an accident. The temporality of Empire is the temporality of emergency and catastrophe.
– Tiqqun

Often prisoners were sent to penalty compounds for refusal to become informers. The majority died there and naturally cannot speak about themselves. And the murderers from State Security are even less likely to speak of them.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

People are confused and unsure, they seek answers to guide them to joy, tranquillity, self-knowledge, salvation―but they also demand that it be easy to learn, that it require little or no effort, that results be quickly obtained.
– Erich Fromm

If only we can create a sufficient number of people in this world whose Experience of Life goes beyond the physical and the mental, this world will be a very different place.
– Sadhguru

Humanism is the only – I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.
– Edward W. Said

A map is just a piece of paper until someone bleeds for it.
– Mouin Bseiso

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.
– Albert Einstein

You don’t have to enter a monastery to be a mystic…
Living as a mystic means orienting the whole of yourself toward the sacred.
It’s a matter of purposely looking through the lens of love.
– Mirabai Starr

We think that we have to know who we are in order to bloom, but that is not true. It is our nature to bloom, but we don’t have to know who or what we are in order to do so. . . . We can only do the practice and let it shape us.
– Ken McLeod

Anybody can run away and survive, the trick was to stay and survive.
– Philip Roth

Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.
– Carlos Fuentes

There’s a part of me that wants to let problems go for a while, let a piece of writing simmer and percolate, in the hope that my unconscious will take care of it. That the solution will come. And I think that’s useful up to a point…
– Robert Hass

The characters are the main entrance into the work because they’re shaped like humans and they’re lit more brightly than their surroundings.
– Dennis Cooper

If you go to the thinking, take your heart with you. If you go to the love, take your head with you. Love is empty without the thinking, the thinking hollow without the love.
– C.G. Jung

A tragedy, when a mature mind and a romantic heart are in the same body.
– Nizar Qabbani

We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine.
– Philip K. Dick

Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Maybe all we can do is to make our remaining time here full of gentleness and good humor.
– Anne Lamott

They fear the poem because it travels without a passport.
– Mouin Bseiso

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy.
– Karl Marx

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.
– Paulo Coelho

He who has peace of mind disturbs neither himself nor another.
– Epicurus

You have to get dirty with your emotions. Meditation allows us to feel them, live them, and taste them completely.
– Pema Chödrön

Therapists need the courage to be creatively insane.
– Carl Whitaker

The world does not give us very much now; it often seems to consist of nothing but noise and fear, and yet grass and trees still grow.
– Hermann Hesse

Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

For most of its history and prehistory, the human race has lived in various states of ignorance and wonder. Even today most of us will accept the disenchantments of knowledge only with great reluctance.
– Robert Pogue Harrison

Understand this much:
whatever you love and look for, you are.
– Rumi

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
– James Baldwin

If anyone hurts you and you forgive him, you are leading yourself to the kingdom of God. If anyone is quarrelsome and you give understanding, you are taking yourself to the kingdom of God.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

If someone is suffering and you reach out with aid and compassion, you are moving into the presence of God.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

I write poetry to prove I can’t write poems.
– Percival Everett

The purpose of art actually is, in many cases, to make you feel quite uncomfortable. Or at least to go to that place that’s already of discomfort inside of you and tap into that.
– Michael Moore

Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself… and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.
– Donald Woods Winnicott

We always think in terms of share of mind versus share of market – because if the share of mind is there, the share of market will follow.
– Warren Buffett

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.
– Charlotte Brontë

Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
– Robertson Davies

Nothing new in my life, my dear old friend. I spend it uniformly amidst my books and in the company of my dog.
– Gustave Flaubert

The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.
– Paulo Coelho

A work survives its readers; after a hundred or two hundred years, it is read by new readers who impose on it new modes of reading and interpretation. The work survives because of these interpretations…
– Octavio Paz

The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
– Elena Ferrante

So manifold are our interests in life that it is not uncommon, on the self-same occasion, for the foundations of a happiness which does not yet exist to be laid down simultaneously with the aggravation of a grief from which we are still suffering.
– Proust

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.
– Joan Didion

When the world seems to be falling apart, stick to your own trajectory; hang onto your own ideals and find kindred spirits. That’s the rule of life.
– Joseph Campbell

I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.
– Ben Franklin

Thinking is the hardest work there is which is probably the reason so few engage in it.
– Henry Ford

Tell your own story, and you will be interesting.
– Louise Bourgeois

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.
– Frank Lloyd Wright

I am so hip even my errors are correct.
– Nikki Giovanni, Ego Tripping

I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn’t have loosened. A stitch come undone.
– Gillian Flynn

Better to be alone than in the company of a teacher who only wants your money.
– Kabir

I want to go everywhere, see everything, do everything. I want to find something. Yes, that’s it. I want to find something.
– Agatha Christie

The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.
– George Bernard Shaw

In the struggle for memory, the sharpest storyteller becomes the architect of truth.
– Kwahi izvoni

Evil cannot create anything new. It can only spoil and destroy what good forces have invented or created.
– J.R.R Tolkien

We are teaching the world the great truth, that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson: the Religion flourishes in greater purity without, than with the aid of Government.
– James Madison

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.
– John Coltrane

People love other people’s stories. Theories divide people, but stories unite people.
– James H. Billington

It is not daily increase but daily decrease; hack away at the unessential.
– Bruce Lee

Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.
– Anaïs Nin

In parallel with the development of my interests in technical gadgetry I began to acquire a profound love of and respect for the natural world which motivates my scientific thinking to this day.
– Robert B. Laughlin

Poetry is primarily about the sound; secondarily about the images; perhaps tertiarily about allusion, figures of speech, and all the deep resonances that literary people like to talk about; and at best quaternarily about meaning and substantive significance.
– Andy Harless

Be humble to the lowly, and gentle to weak. Be a dinosaur to the phony, and a stone wall to the critic.
– Abhijit Naskar

Forms of political resistance that champion forms of autonomy freed of all dependency perhaps make this mistake of understanding dependency as exploitation.
– Judith Butler

If the main pillar of a system is living a lie, then it is not surprising the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.
– Vaclav Havel

We lose the ability to be arrogant, once we reach a certain degree of intelligence.
– Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The Trinity answers the deepest needs of the human heart, offering a depth of spirituality unknown in any other religion.
– C. Colson

Love is the most vital and necessary tool we have for our future, for our bettering.
– Aja Monet

Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed their leaders and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient well the jails are full of petty thieves, and the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.
– Howard Zinn

Vulnerability is an expensive gift, not to be opened because people you’re familiar with are present.
– April Lashon

I was like a man in a bog.
The more he struggles, the more he sinks.
No good can result from efforts made apart from faith in Jesus.
– Charles Spurgeon

To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them.
– René Descartes

Art looks like a lottery from out there.
– Eileen Myles

When we realize who we are, we no longer have this endless confusion, this eternal battle with ourselves. Therefore we tend to not struggle with others or the world.
– Adyashanti

Every man is an abolitionist; every man is selfish enough to be an abolitionist for himself, but every man is not unselfish enough to be an abolitionist for others.
– Gerrit Smith

You’ll meet a hundred different people who will describe you in a hundred different ways, don’t dwell too much on the kind of impression you make. Remember, there are a thousand paintings of the sun, but only one that rises and sets each day.
– Ekta Somera

Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.
– Constantin Stanislavsky

His thoughts are high, his love is wise,
His wounds a cure intend;
And though he does not always smile,
He loves unto the end.

– C.H. Spurgeon

It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.
– Eckhart Tolle

People who intentionally or unintentionally hurt other people: I have come to the conclusion that they cannot help themselves, and they cannot be helped.
– Yiyun Li

Happiness isn’t something you experience; it’s something you remember.
– Oscar Levant

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy.
– Winston Churchill

There are essentially two things that will make us wiser: the books we read and the people we meet.
– Charles Jones

The first species to know that it can bring about its own extinction is also the first species aware that it can generate its own evolution toward more freedom, more complexity, and more consciousness and love.
– Barbara Marx Hubbard

I study myself more than any other subject.
That is my physics. That is my metaphysics
– Michel de Montaigne

Maybe we’ve been looking for the wrong thing. Maybe the visitors are not arriving as spaceships at all.
– Paul Davies

Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.
– Malcolm X

You’ve got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend

When I was down you just stood there grinnin’

You’ve got a lotta nerve to say you got a helping hand to lend

You just want to be on the side that’s winnin’

– Bobby Dylan

We are masters of the unsaid words but slaves of those, we let slip out!
– Winston Churchill

The majority of religions are complicated systems of preparation for death, so much so that life actually has no significance except as a preparation for the ultimate goal of death.

In both the greatest living religions, Christianity and Buddhism, the meaning of existence is consummated in its end.

– Carl Jung

The truth is, I have a great deal to do; and I have made up my mind not to die till it is done.
– Edgar Allan Poe

There is but one religion, and that is the progress of the soul toward God. The prophets are as different lamps, but the Light is the same.
– Basha’u’llah

A little stupid is like a little forest fire. If you happen upon some stupid, please stomp it out before it spreads.

– Quentin R. Bufogle

Ask yourself whether our language is complete – whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Eternal Life

Half a century.
The weight of that word used to send me straight to bed.
No more. I’m gathering wisdom.
Alchemists aren’t law-breakers –
sure, they’re naive sometimes, like the saints,
believing in stones, fish seen in dreams,
signs written on the sky.
Where is God?
April is reborn out in the cosmos,
in the most perfect silence.
Inside and outside of me.

– Adélia Prado

You say you see no hope
You say you see no reason we should dream
That the world would ever change
You say the love is foolish to believe
‘Cause they’ll always be some crazy
With an army or a knife
To wake you from your daydream
Put the fear back in your life

Look
If someone wrote a play
To just to glorify what’s stronger than hate
Would they not arrange the stage
To look as if the hero came too late?
He’s almost in defeat
It’s looking like the evil side will when
So on the edge of every seat
From the moment that the whole thing begins

It is love who mixed the mortar
And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love who made the stage here
Although it looks like we’re alone
In this scene, set in shadows,
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love can show the way

Now the stage is set
You can feel your own heart beating in your chest
This life’s not over yet
So we get up on our feet and do our best
We play against the fear
We play against the reasons not to try
We’re playing for the tears
Burning in the happy angel’s eyes

For it’s love who mixed the mortar
And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love who made the stage here
Though it looks like we’re alone
In this scene, set in shadows,
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love will show the way

– David Wilcox

I don’t want to read any more about narcissism and alienation and the futility of relationships between the sexes. I don’t want to read any more about human, in particular male, hideousness. Whatever happened to Faulkner’s idea that a writer’s job was to lift people up?
– Sigrid Nunez

While words take time to utter and hear, and require attention to parse their meaning, the impact of the image is instantaneous, its influence decadent. Before the primacy of the image, a salesman or an advertisement would have to describe the attributes of a product in a rational appeal to the intellect. Afterward, it was the mythology of the brand, usually concocted by psychologists, that would sway a consumer’s heart. Likewise, with the rise of the image in politics, the policy platform of a presidential candidate would come to matter less than the ability of his image to convey ineffable or irrelevant values.
– Daniel J. Boorstin

Some men never discover the divine presence within because they can’t bring themselves to face their demons. Don’t try to engineer this process or manufacture any angels. It will be done to you; just do not hate or fear the falling.
– Richard Rohr

We are born with a mind, open to everything, no fear, no known boundaries, but with each new rule, restriction the mind divides.
– Patti Smith

Lying still and thinking little is the cheapest medicine for all sicknesses of the soul and, if persisted with, grows more pleasant hour by hour.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims

If we have identified too closely with the light, have too idealized an image of ourselves, then our shadow will surely come up and hit us on the backside. The same is true if we have identified with our negative side. Either position is a denial of our wholeness.
– Marion Woodman

The shortest, surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to be.
– Marcus Aurelius

The friend in my adversity I shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity.
– Ulysses S. Grant

One must not talk to a man unless he is willing to listen.
– Seneca

All the world loves you
but you are nowhere to be found.
Hidden, and yet completely obvious.
– Rumi

It’s frightening to be free, to have to take responsibility for your decisions.
– Azar Nafisi

I didn’t aspire to be a member of the adult world, with its endless responsibilities.
– Patti Smith

It is really a thought that built this portentous war establishment, and a thought shall also melt it away.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Ode to the Hebrew Letter ‘Chet’

you come hot,
scratching at the throat,
marching between
one blazing Arab &
one crazy Jew.

– Maya Pindyck

That which men call virtue is usually no more than a phantom formed by our passions, to which one gives an honest name in order to do with impunity whatever one wishes.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

It is a great art to saunter.
– H.D. Thoreau

The spirit blows where it will; one sees it blow on fools, and it whispers to them what they are able to hear.
– Paul Valéry

The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man’s life; and until he has realized it, he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of all his powers.
– Evelyn Underhill

You don’t need to dream of heaven, if you haven’t been through hell.
– Britt Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality

Mother I never knew,
every time I see the ocean,
every time-

– Kobayashi Issa, (tr. Robert Hass)

The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
– Rebecca Solnit

Acceptance is the universal currency of real friendship. . . . It does not warp or shape or wrench a person to be anything other than what they are.
– Joan Chittister

The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without: to follow one’s own path, not that of the crowd.
– Nicholas Tharcher

War
by Edwin Starr

War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, uhh
War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it again, y’all
War, huh (good God)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, listen to me, oh

War, I despise
‘Cause it means destruction of innocent lives
War means tears to thousands of mother’s eyes
When their sons go off to fight
And lose their lives

I said, war, huh (good God, y’all)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, just say it again
War (whoa), huh (oh Lord)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, listen to me

It ain’t nothing but a heart-breaker
(War) Friend only to The Undertaker
Oh, war it’s an enemy to all mankind
The thought of war blows my mind
War has caused unrest
Within the younger generation
Induction then destruction
Who wants to die? Oh

War, huh (good God y’all)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it, say it, say it
War (uh-huh), huh (yeah, huh)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, listen to me

It ain’t nothing but a heart-breaker
(War) It’s got one friend that’s The Undertaker
Oh, war, has shattered many a young man’s dreams
Made him disabled, bitter and mean
Life is much too short and precious
To spend fighting wars each day
War can’t give life
It can only take it away, oh

War, huh (good God y’all)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, say it again

War (whoa), huh (oh Lord)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, listen to me

It ain’t nothing but a heart breaker
(War) Friend only to The Undertaker, woo
Peace, love and understanding, tell me
Is there no place for them today?
They say we must fight to keep our freedom
But Lord knows there’s got to be a better way, oh

War, huh (God y’all)
What is it good for? You tell me (nothing)
Say it, say it, say it, say it

War (good God), huh (now, huh)
What is it good for?
Stand up and shout it (nothing)

A straightforward mind is the place of awakening.
– Vimalakirti Sutra

My entire life flashed before my eyes in the worst way possible, my mind refilling itself with all my lame memories, every little thing that had brought me to where I was. I’d try to remember something else — a better version, a happy story, maybe, or just an equally lame but different life that would at least be refreshing in its digressions — but it never worked. I was always still me.
– Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

The loss of symbolic connection to self or cosmos, Jung suggests, is the chief source of our illness. As he so often asserted, neurosis is suffering without meaning and the flight from authentic being.
– James Hollis

“Inconceivable!” You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
– William Goldman

The more restrictions and prohibitions there are,
The poorer the people will be.
The more sharp weapons people have in a country,
The bigger the disorder will be.
The more clever and cunning people are,
The stranger the events will be.
The more laws and commands there are,
The more thieves and robbers there will be.
– Lao Tzo, Tao Te Ching

A capitalist politician will never emancipate you from capitalism. Thinking that one will is like thinking a slave owner would abolish slavery.
– Rory Alexander

On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.
– Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Matisse said, “I believe in God when I’m working.” If our creative energy is blocked, it will find an outlet in some kind of distorted religion, or addiction. An addiction to me is a distorted religion.
– Marion Woodman

The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.
– Jacques Derrida

Caregiving

This half-fallen pine, propped up
by the other still-standing maples,
keeps a line of snow on its trunk
glowing against black branches
and the bruise-blue coming of day.

It points the way to some truth
we need, of how to hold each other up
beyond all reason, how we can
bear the weight of something so long
the burden turns into a blessing.

– James Crews

The way to paradise is an uphill climb whereas hell is downhill. Hence, there
is a struggle to get to paradise and not to hell.
– Al-Ghazali

Portion of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew,
Bosomed here at its foot:
This branch may be his wife,
A ruddy human life
Now turned to a green shoot.
These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.
So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
And they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!

– Thomas Hardy, Transformations

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining,
but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
– Mark Twain

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist,
and the less the artist does the better.
– Andre Gide

I felt that I was a justified person… but I was a solitary one. I had no person to whom I could reveal the strange experiences of my spirit, or the mysterious shadows that followed me through the damp, airless lanes of the town.
– James Hogg

I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellect of hackney-coachmen.
– Thomas De Quincey

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually
passes for it.
– Wendell Berry

True illusion, material error, does not exist in the heightened field of the imagination, but the illusions of knowledge exist all the more.
– Antonin Artaud (tr. Victor Corti)

The mind is here to keep you earthbound. When you stop thinking, the mind becomes the infinite, becomes God, becomes boundless space, nirvana, pure awareness. It really doesn’t become that. You’ve always been that.
– Robert Adams

I realize that if I were stable, prudent and static; I’d live in death. Therefore I accept confusion, uncertainty, fear and emotional ups and downs; because that’s the price I’m willing to pay for a fluid, perplexed and exciting life.
– Carl Rogers

Some of the loneliest, most miserable, neurotic, despicable people we know have been the most successful in the world.
– Anne Lamott

Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

However, the truest solitude is not something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you; it is an abyss opening up in the center of your own soul.
– Thomas Merton

Art is the antidote

halfway
through the cubism art class
I stare at a window
and see myself
differently (^_~)

– Chen-ou Liu

There is infinity within you… if only you don’t think of the end.
– Ilarie Voronca

Two human beings who are sexually and emotionally involved cause pain to each other, and it takes more skill than most writers and directors have to deal with that pain.
– Pauline Kael

Our ability to wish well impartially is connected to our ability to let go of the fixed views that cause distress to arise in the mind.
– Sylvia Boorstein

Fast Speaking Woman, Part 1
by Anne Waldman

I’m a rock woman
I’m a horse woman
I’m a monkey woman
I’m a chipmunk woman
I’m a mountain woman
I’m a blue mountain woman
I’m a marsh woman
I’m a jungle woman
I’m a tundra woman
I’m the lady in the lake
I’m the lady in the sand

water that cleans
flowers that clean
water that cleans as I go

I’m a bird woman
I’m a book woman
I’m a devilish clown woman
I’m a holy-clown woman
I’m a whirling-dervish woman
I’m a whirling-foam woman
I’m a playful-light woman
I’m a tidal-pool woman
I’m a fast speaking woman

Perhaps at the end of this century, two classes of men will be distinguished: some formed by television and others by reading.
– Ernst Jünger

I reached my very edge. I was about to break down. I was about to break through.
– Talismanist Giebra

Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now.
– Eckhart Tolle

The poor man’s wisdom is ignored, But the rich man’s joke is taken as advice.
– African Proverb

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.
– Gilles Deleuze

But for power truly to feel itself menaced, it must somehow sense itself in the presence of another power or, more accurately, an energy which it has not known how to define and therefore does not really know how to control.
– James Baldwin

If you are dissatisfied with yourself, use it as an incentive to improve and aim higher. If your dissatisfaction is directed at other people, however, recognize that it originates from your own ego.
– Joanna Grochocka

Direct experience is no foundation for Solipsism.
– F. H. Bradley

I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.
– Yohji Yamamoto

A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?
– George Eliot

One of the clearest signs of intelligent and strong people is that, even at their lowest, they are never haters.
– @_Chemist1

Most people think life is happening to them.

That’s why they stay stuck.

When you realize you’re creating through
your thoughts, choices, and patterns…

everything changes.

Accountability feels heavy
until it sets you free.

– LaRoy Dobbins

To lead uninstructed people to war is to throw them away.
– Confucius

there are days, even a week when all is warm and cool and easy. This is when we mend for the next assault.
– Charles Bukowski

LAUGHING SONG

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;

when the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene,
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing “Ha, ha he!”

When the painted birds laugh in the shade,
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread:
Come live, and be merry, and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of “Ha, ha, he!”

– William Blake

I don’t use a crap camera, I don’t eat junk, and I’m not going to a dance where the boys are bores
– Adriana Trigiani

Have you felt it? The loss of autonomy. The sense of being virtualized. The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room, minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed? All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room that are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that makes you uneasy? Do you think about the technovirus, all systems down, global implosion? Or is it more personal? Do you feel steeped in some horrific digital panic that’s everywhere and nowhere?
– Don DeLillo

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
– A. Hamilton

…We talk
Ceaselessly to things that can’t respond
Or won’t respond. What are we talking for?
We’re talking to coax hope and love from zero.
We’re talking so the brain of the geode
Will listen like a garden heliotrope
And open its quartz flowers. We are talking
Because speech is a sun, a kind of making.

– Mark Jarman

Above all, tell them to practice an intimate presence to the beauty and wonder of the natural world through their intuitive awareness that recognizes the oneness of all life; tell them to stop and enlarge moments throughout their days to become aware of the mysteries and miracles of creation all around them – the movement of a squirrel, the sound of a bird, the pattern of a leaf, changing patterns of light, the sun, the rain, the stars, dawn and sunset. Tell them we are not ourselves without everything and everyone else.
– Thomas Berry

The Present

I wanted to give you something —
no stone, clay, bracelet,
no edible leaf could pass through.
Even a molecule’s fragrance by then too large.
Giving had been taken, as you soon would be.
Still, I offered the puffs of air shaped to meaning.
They remained air.
I offered memory on memory,
but what is memory that dies with the fallible inks?
I offered apology, sorrow, longing. I offered anger.
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
I stood on one side of the present, you stood on the other.

– Jane Hirshfield

People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.
– Richard Powers

To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.
– Diane Ackerman

Every calendar page also contains the anniversaries of everything that has not yet happened.
– Richard Powers

Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.
– Richard Powers

It’s a question of attitude. If you really work at something you can do it up to a point. If you really work at being happy you can do it up to a point. But anything more than that you can’t. Anything more than that is luck.
– Haruki Murakami

There are no therapists in private practice specializing in helping
straight kids be gay.

There are no hetero conversion camps turning straight kids gay.

There are no priests or pastors who will help you overcome your
heterosexual impulses.

“Doctor, oh Doctor, I’m worried I’m straight.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“Scared. Alienated from my entire family. My church. My God, who
wanted me born in his likeness, but I keep feeling straight!”

And the therapist is all, “Let’s think of creative ways for you to imagine a homosexual life. Your feelings maybe cannot be changed, but they can be managed. Thousands of people have found their way to happy homosexual lifestyles, despite their never-ending feelings of heterosexual desire.”

This has never happened.

Never.

And that’s why the Supreme Court’s case, which pretends to safeguard free speech, is at its core, illegitimate, damaged and damaging.

Because: sure, talk. But to “help” a child (and Colorado’s anti-conversion therapy law applied to children under age 18) to deny who they are is not “talk,” it’s abuse.

The underlying assumption, which the Court has validated, is that homosexuality and trans identity are problems to recover from. The ruling takes for granted that “helping” a queer child, against their will, to live heterosexually, or as the gender they were designated at birth, is not abuse, but a cure: reparative therapy.

And every major medical organization in the US has classified reparative therapy as malpractice and abuse and tending to increase the risk of teen suicide.

The Court should never have heard this case, and never would have, if there were not still the widespread feeling that LGBTQ+ people are sick, are at some level perverted, are in need of “help,” specifically because of their gender performance or their emotional or romantic or sexual desire.

Despite, you know, how hot it is to watch two actors with hockey sticks get naked with each other.

Despite your Pet Gays, your confidantes and queer buddies who will tell you you’re pretty when your hetero spouse won’t.

Despite the fact that We *ARE* Your Children, to quote a slogan in defiance of Anita Bryant’s 1977 anti-gay campaign.

The culture still thinks we’re diseased pariahs.

– John Weir

I realize that homosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is – but then, of course, heterosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is, too. And being a man is a serious problem and being a woman is, too. Lots of things are problems.
– Edward Gorey

My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.
– Sigmund Freud

Caught by our own thoughts, we worry about everything. But once we get drunk on Love whatever will be, will be.
– Rumi

Soul need no longer be captured by subjectivity, a mind owning its events and distinct from them.
– James Hillman

The Father’s heart is not one of judgment but of endless mercy, always waiting for you to come home.
– Henri Nouwen

a cargo ship
freed at last in the canal …
this passage
to a worry-free life
blocked by my skin color

– Chen-ou Liu

You are part of a system, a universe, that has perfectly well been able to take care of itself for at least 10,000 million years.
– Alan Watts

If they accuse you of something so far out of your
character, it’s a confession.

Pay attention to projections, they hold deep truths.

– Dr. Nicole LePera

They insulted me in seventy
lines and only the spelling
mistakes bothered me.

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Way down below the ocean
where I wanna be
she may be.

– Donovan, Atlantis

Because this life is short, and thought trembles at the high enterprise, I place little of my trust in either: but hope that the sorrow I cry silently might be accepted where I long for, and where it ought to be.
– Francesco Petrarch

The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.
– Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.
– Albert Einstein

Freedom needs human thinkers, sovereign, and unpredictable. Unfreedom needs yielding and predictable creatures, quaking from fear in self-built cages, dreaming of enemies they never met, and of friends and lovers they do not have.
– Timothy Snyder

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
– Lucille Clifton

There is no such thing as privacy. There is no experience or quality or thought or pain that has not been felt by all the billions of living and dead.
– Catherine Lacey

The Crone accepts everything in, devouring beauty and suffering with the same mouth, using their energy to reveal hidden secrets and knowledge.
– Kim Krans

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
– Mahatma Gandhi

No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.
– Aristotle

Philosophical questions are not abstract; they arise from the problems we face in our everyday lives.
– Hilary Putnam

The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere.
– Marcus Aurelius

We in ancient countries have our past—we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.
– Azar Nafisi

The mystery of one man is too immense and too profound to be explained by another man.
– Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer

I am not a “burn it all down” leftist.

I am a “we must carefully disassemble the current system and rebuild intentionally in the name of community care” person.

If our desire to eat the rich is louder than our desire to feed the poor, I fear we’ve missed the point.

– Benjamin Faye

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
– Oscar Wilde

A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it—it cures us.

– Carl Jung

Times of upheaval throw off orphans like sparks.
– Amor Towles, Table for Two

A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn’t have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.

– A Man In His Life, Yehuda Amichai

The world you see is seen by you alone. What entices you and what repels you, what strengthens you and what weakens you, is part of a pattern that no one else shares. Therefore, as Mr. Wilde said, no two people can perceive the same “truth,” because each person’s perspective is different.
– Marcus Buckingham

Knowledge cannot make man love another; it can create war and the instruments of destruction but cannot bring love to the heart, or peace to the mind.
– Krishnamurti

The lovers of sights and sounds…

are, as I conceive, only in the region of knowledge which is like dreaming

– Socrates

Have you ever seen dust
dancing in sunbeams?
How it glitters like flecks of gold?
Maybe that is the true alchemy.
Not changing what something is,
but seeing it in a new light.
– L.E. Bowman

Forgive yourself for not knowing earlier what only time could teach.
– Keanu Reeves

There are greater things than written words in this world, and that there is some difference between the intellectual and the intelligent.
– Will Durant

The painters of today are deprived of such serenity. Even if they have basically the heart the creator needs, I mean the closed heart, it is of no use; for everyone, including the saint himself, is mobilized.

This is perhaps what I have felt most deeply. At every form that miscarries in the trenches, at every outline, metaphor, or prayer crushed under steel, the eternal loses a round.

– Albert Camus

You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.
– Hermann Hesse

If you’re not abundant in love and self-esteem and self-respect and self-worth in your heart, you’re not going to draw somebody that’s the same way—or the money that reflects it.
– Iyanla Vanzant

The individual may strive after perfection but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness.
– Carl Jung

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he usually proves that he is one himself.
– H.L. Mencken

But in reality God is not an opinion. God is a
psychological fact that happens to people.
– Carl Jung

If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.
– Alfred Korzybski

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can
fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
– Seamus Heaney

Elsewhere there are no mobile phones. Elsewhere sleep is deep and the mornings are wonderful. Elsewhere art is endless, exhibitions are free and galleries are open twenty-four hours a day. Elsewhere alcohol is a joke that everybody finds funny. Elsewhere everybody is as welcoming as they’d be if you’d come home after a very long time away and they’d really missed you.
– Ali Smith, Public Library and Other Stories

I steep in the utter fullness
of not wanting to have
anyone else’s life but my own.

– Father Greg Boyle

(…) the mind moves ahead of the flow of life, and the heart hangs back, afraid, and the rhythm is wrong, and all you can trust is your body. And you do.
– Jeanette Winterson

…I’m in words, made of words, others’ words, what others, the place too, the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words, the whole world is here with me, I’m the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, I’m all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder, wherever I go I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray…
– Samuel Beckett

The hardest ground to plow was living fully without worry, not in the past gone on or future yet to come—but in the present hardpan now.
– J. Drew Lanham

It’s easy to identify with all the places we’ve been hurt and abandoned, but can we identify with the timeless wholeness that weathers every condition? If we can’t, we may spend this life protecting ourselves and never risk really living.
– Sensei Bonnie Myotai Treace

…It is the most important thing, to stay, silent mind, and just receive. There is nothing I have to do except stay quiet, in contact. Like sitting on the edge of a cliff overlooking the vast emptiness. Stay on that edge.
– Jean-Claude Lubtchansky

In this respect images are more precise and richer than literature. To say this is not to deny the expressive or imaginative quality of art, treating it as mere documentary evidence; the more imaginative the work, the more profoundly it allows us to share the artist’s experience of the visible.
– John Berger

In the minds of thinking men the present is always under attack from the past and future simultaneously.
– John Berger

You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It’s like I had the word “book,” and you put one in my hands. I had the world “game,” and you taught me how to play. I had the word “life,” and then you came along and said, “Oh! You mean this.”
– Richard Powers

…in that blurred state between awake and asleep when too many intake valves are open in the soul. Like the terestial crust of the earth which is proportionately 10 times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul is a miracle of mutual pressures. Millions of kilograms of force pounding up from earth’s core on the inside to meet the cold air of the world and stop as we do, just in time.
– Anne Carson

This body is yours. No one can ever take it from you, if only you will accept yourself, claim it again–your arms, your spine, your ribs, the small of your back. It’s all yours. All this bounty, all this beauty, all this strength and grace is yours. This garden is yours. Take it back. Take it back.
– Jean Hegland

All around us, to right and left, in front and behind, above and below we have only to go a little beyond the frontier of sensible appearances in order to see the divine welling up and showing through… By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and moulds us… We imagine it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in it.
– Teilhard de Chardin

When I have a problem that comes to me, I’m not looking for the solution in something other than the problem itself. Actually, the problem can be the solution.
– Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

There is now a single issue before us: survival.

Not merely physical survival, but survival in a world of fulfillment, survival in a living world, where the violets bloom in the springtime, where the stars shine down in all their mystery, survival in a world of meaning.

– Thomas Berry

Jesus was not killed by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and who are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God’s will from their own. Temple police are always a bad sign. When chaplains start wearing guns and hanging out at the sheriff’s office, watch out. Someone is about to have no king but Caesar.
– Barbara Brown Taylor

Why am I an artist and not a philosopher? Because I think according to words and not according to ideas.
– Albert Camus

People don’t realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
– Saul Bellow, Conversations

Love enlarges. What you put out into the world, you get back tenfold.
– Vanessa Hua

I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid.
– Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

They must find it difficult those who have taken authority as truth rather than truth as authority.
– Gerald Massey

Before the bullets were fired. Before millions of men died. All of this started with laws.
– Supreme Court Justice Robert H Jackson-Nuremberg

Whenever one goes through the deconstruction of the false self-one normally suffers a considerable period of wandering in the wasteland.
– James Hollis

How soon will time cover all things, and how many it has covered already.
– Marcus Aurelius

The tariff was pernicious in its operation. No system can be more efficient to rear up a moneyed aristocracy. Its tendency is to make the poor poor and the rich richer.
– John C Calhoun

What you should have been taught is how brave it is, to be vulnerable in a cruel world. How it is better to feel every ray and shadow, than to feel nothing at all.
– Imani Erriu

I’m so wearied by the ancient burden, of these faults of mine, and my sinful ways, that I’ve a deep fear of erring on the road, and falling into my enemy’s hands.
– Francesco Petrarch

Immortal one, you struggle to get out of bed in this life because you have no idea what story you’ve been written into.
– John Piper

The young neurotic shrinks back in terror from the expansion of life’s duties, the old one from the dwindling of the treasures he has attained.
– CG Jung

when you understand that under capitalism a forest has no ‘value’ until it’s cut down, you begin to understand the root of our ecological crises.
– @earthlyeducation

Now that is what saddens us more than anything, that perfect judgement is so rare, and we are blamed for another’s fault.
– Francesco Petrarch

There may be no encounter as difficult as direct spiritual experience which refutes important principles of a belief system.
– Robert Wang

We can only create realms of collective liberation through the excavating and shedding work of imagination. If we can’t imagine a new world, we wouldn’t even know how to begin conjuring one.
– Unknown

There is vast, limitless richness and wonder we could experience if we fully accustomed our nervous systems to the open-ended, uncertain reality of how things are.
– Pema Chödrön

Our shadow is the pain we’ve forgotten about. It is a complex within us, a split-off part of our consciousness loaded with emotional weight. Our persona is what we most want to be seen to be; shadow is what we least want to be.
– Gary Bobroff

All the movements of self-dislike, of dissatisfaction, of despair, of indignation against one’s own weakness, if accepted in the higher self, can be transmuted into energy of aspiration, courage, and the will to rise.
– Sri Aurobindo

Reading is about understanding the world and ourselves, not finishing as many books as possible. We aren’t reading to become faster, but to feel and understand more.
– Hwang Bo-Reum, Every Day I Read

A good beginning makes a good end.
– Louis L’Amour

At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self.
– Brendan Behan

“But how, indeed, my dear, could it be thus?” said he. “How could being be produced from non-being?”
– Chandogya Upanishad

Our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
– Alan Watts

The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.
– Albert Camus

If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.
– Carl Sagan

Between the scribe who has read and the prophet who has seen there is a difference as wide as the sea. We are overrun today with orthodox scribes, but the prophets, where are they?
– A.W. Tozer

Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.
– Fredrik Backman

Everything that you want exists on the side of losing something you’re not ready to lose yet.
– Sooraj Saxena

Every generation is invaded by Barbarians. They are called children.
– Irving Kristol

Welcome to all of us who have lost friends and family and every sense of belonging we ever had. It turned out that what we thought was love was actually mutually agreed upon like-mindedness.
– Sarah Bessey

Certainly, if you look at human behavior around the world, you have to admit that we can be very aggressive.
– Jane Goodall

I will notice the excuses I make for avoiding things that I dislike doing, and then I will do one of these things that I dislike.
– Joyce Rupp

The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed- to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforce the soul’s healing resources, the only resource that can help the sufferer make it through.
– Parker Palmer

Those who have read of everything are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.
– John Locke

What you’re hired for is to help us; not to fuck us up.
– Ricky Roma, Al Pacino’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross

Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.
– Niccolo Machiavelli

The man on the middle cross said I can come.
– Alastair Begg

A clever person takes notice of everything, a stupid one makes a comment about everything.
– Heinrich Heine

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
– John F Kennedy

Give your message, be calm, walk away.
– Vivekananda

My life has been some strange balance of miraculous and mundane.
– Sybil Van Antwerp, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

Instead of a commander-in-chief, we have a portrait of a delusional real-estate ghost haunting his own catastrophe: part vanity, part menace, part saliva.
– Mary Geddry

You may not be responsible for being down, but you must be responsible for getting up.
– Rev. Jesse Jackson

This generation drifts further from balance, masculinity fades into the shadows, men forget their strength, while women carry a weight that was never meant to be theirs.
– Nazarem

We always talk about finding our purpose. But maybe purpose is just the trail of gentleness you leave behind while doing ordinary things with extraordinary sincerity.
– Aarti Khurana

Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.
– Charles Lamb

When people do not dread authorities, Then a greater dread descends.
– Lao Tzo, Tao Te Ching

Wanting abundance isn’t shallow. It’s self-respect. Pursuing wealth isn’t selfish. It’s self-love.
– Iyanla Vanzant

People are difficult to rule Because of their knowledge.
– Lao Tzo

Reading a screenful of information is quite a different thing from looking. It is a digital form of exploration in which the eye moves along an endless broken line. The relationship to the interlocutor in communication, like the relationship to knowledge in data-handling, is similar: tactile and exploratory.
– Jean Baudrillard

They told you to “stay grounded.” But maybe you weren’t designed to stay on the ground. Maybe grounding was the cage and they just gave it a spiritual name.
– Natalia Ray

We are born for cooperation.
– Marcus Aurelius

Praise is like sunlight to the human spirit: we cannot flower and grow without it.
– Jess Lair

Getting used to a life of idleness is worse than all life’s disasters.
– Leo Tolstoy

We tend to consider ourselves powerful when we dominate, victorious when we destroy our equals, great when we are feared. God has given us an example — not of how to dominate, but of how to liberate; not of how to destroy life, but of how to give it.
– Pope Leo XIV

Not all psychopaths are in prison – some are in the boardroom and just about any other position in a company.
– Dr. Robert Hare

So we are, always weeping: we must mourn for another’s fault rather than our own.
– Francesco Petrarch

Living is a horizontal fall.
– Jean Cocteau

The wind rises or stops / and it means nothing. // I want to be circular; / a pond or a column of smoke/revolving, slowly, its ashes. // I want to turn back and go up / to myself at age 20, / and press five dollars into his hand.

– Larry Levis

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
– Alfred North Whitehead

Sometimes being honest means offering more than one draft.
– Elizabeth Acevedo

there should be more queer gods. i want a whole queer pantheon.
– @chenchenwrites

Love’s as hard as nails
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (with all that is)
Our cross, and His.
– C.S. Lewis

If we give as best we can without the feeling of needing compensation, we feel the wisdom of interconnection and interbeing.
– Joshua Bee Alafia

Worry has never created a real solution. It only creates imaginary problems. The moment you shift your attention to your breath, you step out of useless thinking and into presence. That is where clarity lives.
– Eckhart Tolle

That is what is indescribable, that is what makes all images too static, for no sooner has one said this was so, than it was past and altered.
– Virginia Woolf

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
– George Orwell

We must first directly comprehend the spiritual reason of things and then let us with this insight look upon things that are about us.
– Soyen Shaku

The Flower

How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev’n as the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasures bring.
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.

Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart
Could have recover’d greennesse? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

These are thy wonders, Lord of power,
Killing and quickning, bringing down to hell
And up to heaven in an hour;
Making a chiming of a passing-bell.
We say amisse,
This or that is:
Thy word is all, if we could spell.

O that I once past changing were,
Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!
Many a spring I shoot up fair,
Off’ring at heav’n, growing and groning thither:
Nor doth my flower
Want a spring-showre,
My sinnes and I joining together.

But while I grow in a straight line,
Still upwards bent, as if heav’n were mine own,
Thy anger comes, and I decline:
What frost to that? what pole is not the zone,
Where all things burn,
When thou dost turn,
And the least frown of thine is shown?

And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my onely light,
It cannot be
That I am he,
On whom thy tempests fell all night.

These are thy wonders, Lord of love,
To make us see we are but flowers that glide:
Which when we once can finde and prove,
Thou hast a garden for us, where to bide.
Who would be more,
Swelling through store,
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.

– George Herbert

The greatest discovery in life is to discover that our essential nature does not share the limits nor the destiny of the body and mind.
– Rupert Spira

It takes a fantastic will to unbelief to suppose that Jesus never really ‘happened’, and more to suppose that he did not say the things recorded of him…
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Good Friday is such a sad day, all loss and cruelty, and you have to go on faith that the light shines in the darkness, and nothing, not death, not disease, not even the government, can overcome it.
– Anne Lamott

His starless boat his wild home darkly seeks,
His eye at last the soulless beacon finds,
Thrills to his heart the ray of other years
Starred dimly in the dark by gathering tears.

– Sheridan Le Fanu

Inner renunciation is less about giving up worldly things than changing how we view and prioritize them.
– Susan Kaiser Greenland

Theory is good, but it does not prevent things from existing.
– Jean-Martin Charcot

We have every reason to suspect that we are not isolated creatures, and that this mysterious dimension in which we exist is not the only one.
– Manly P. Hall

I really love language. I love it for what it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and the delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit.
– Maya Angelou

Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them.

Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.

– C.S. Lewis

A man does not get old because he nears death; a man gets old because he can no longer see the false from the good.
– Charles Bukowski

Great is the man who has not lost his childlike heart.
– Mencius

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.
– Edwin H. Land

You must ask for God’s help… After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again.
– C.S. Lewis

full moon night. . .
all that is
and isn’t

– Johan Bergstad

Bucharest… the ruin of all things.
– Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

I could claim any number of high-flown reasons for writing, just as you can explain certain dogs behavior… But maybe, it’s that they’re dog, and that’s what dogs do.
– Amy Hempel

I’ve spent all my life trying,
trying not to lose my last hope.

– Mahmoud Darwish

If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.
– Epicurus

If we are to preserve our civilization it will be because of the flow of ideas, the capacity to make informed choices, the ability to criticize.
– JFK

It’s a weird world. Anchor yourself in what you know is real and leave the distortions to the distorted.
– Nika Solé

Drifting in a sultry day on the sluggish waters of the pond, I almost cease to live and begin to be. A boatman stretched on the deck of his craft and dallying with the noon would be as apt an emblem of eternity for me as the serpent with his tail in his mouth. I am never so prone to lose my identity. I am dissolved in the haze.
– Thoreau

Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.
– Thomas Merton

Ars Poetica

Let poetry be like a key
Opening a thousand doors
A leaf falls; something flies by;
Let all the eye sees be created
And the soul of the listener tremble.

– Vicente Huidobro

The real issue isn’t left versus
right. It’s critical thinking
versus a system that depends
on you never developing it.

– Sofo Archon

You get there
by realizing
you are already there.

– Eckhart Tolle

Listen For The Bell
by Tom Hirons

For all your faults,
somewhere, there is a bell
that chimes when you enter
the street and – somewhere –
an unknown lover who
swoons as you pass by.

For all the wrongs you’ve wrought
and the way the world’s so weary,
you are still worthy of love.
Somewhere, a feast has been prepared;
your work is to find it.

Listen for the bell today
and that soft sigh
in the city’s bleak streets.

Above all, trust in
the slow work of God.

– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

One body, three hearts
A mother carrying twins-
Yikes, yay, let us pray!

– Alyssa Charlow

What did the victims matter that the machine crushed in its course! Was it not bound for the future anyway, heedless of spilt blood? With no driver, through the dark night, like a blind, deaf beast let loose among the dead, it rolled on and on, loaded with this cannon-fodder, these soldiers, already stupid with fatigue, and drunk, who were singing.
– Emile Zola

Shadow work
is not detached witnessing.
Nor the crystalline clarity
of disembodied awareness.

It has weight.
It has blood.

The goddess who takes us there
has no interest in our explanations.
She asks for contact.

– Matt Licata

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
– James Baldwin

We are called as individuals …to learn the disciplines and skills that help us define ourselves, engage each other in nonanxious interaction, and maintain emotional contact even when we disagree.
– John Paul Lederach

for kim dorman

look in the eyes of a frog–

it knows “frog” was

the first call on earth

– Alec Finlay

Wanting Sumptuous Heavens
by Robert Bly

No one grumbles among the oyster clans,
And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer.
Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want
Heaven to be, and God to come, again.
There is no end to our grumbling; we want
Comfortable earth and sumptuous Heaven.
But the heron standing on one leg in the bog
Drinks his dark rum all day, and is content.

Mount Juliet

Neither snow nor rain nor heat
Nor gloom of night
Will stop these brave messengers
From delivering their parcels
And epistles
No matter where it is
Through the thunder storm
They keeps walking on

Over the hills and the mountains
Through valleys
To tower blocks in cities
Apartments in alleys
To find someone

From a father to a brother
From a soldier to a mother
To a friend
And there’s letters and there’s
Boxes and there’s kindness
And there’s bitter disappointment
Time keeps rolling on
Their work is never done

Over the hills and the mountains
Through valleys
To tower blocks in cities
Apartments in alleys
To find someone
From New York City to Stockholm
to Glasgow
From somebodys pen then the
Letter will end in mount Juliet

42 cents will buy you a stamp
Then you put it in the slot
It will go on a train and a big
Airplaine until it finds it’s spot

Over the hills and the mountains
Through the valleys
To tower blocks in cities
Apartments in alleys
To find someone
From New York City to Stockholm
to Glasgow
From somebody’s pen then the
Letter will end in mount Juliet

Neither snow nor rain nor heat
Nor gloom of night
Will stop these brave messengers

– McIntosh Ross, The Great Lakes

Reverse Egg Hunt

In this version
you hide
from the eggs.

This version requires
a new kind
of patience.

The eggs have no
intention of finding you.
They’re not even looking.

This is the game
you’ve been playing
all along, without knowing.

– Andrea Cohen

I Thought I Saw You

I thought I saw you on St Vincent street
Twenty nine years later and almost out of reach
And nothing had changed with your hair
And there’s nothing new that wasn’t there

I remember you only in beautiful blue
Bright summer skies, dark winter hues
And it’s taken me some years and days
And nothing’s left now but a space
(Where you were)

Oh oh

I thought I saw you on St Vincent street
Life moves on, loves incomplete
And nothing was ever the same
I never looked back again

– Ricky Ross

When you sit in meditation, you should not push up the hua-tou, for this will cause its dimness. You should not hold it in your chest, for it causes pain in the chest. Neither should you press it down, for it will expand the belly and will cause your fall into the realm of the five aggregates (skandhas), resulting in all kinds of defects.

With serenity and self-possession, only the word ‘who’ should be looked into with the same care with which a hen sits on her egg and a cat pounces on a mouse. When the hua-tou is efficiently held, the life-root will automatically be cut off.

This method is obviously not an easy one for beginners, but you must exert yourselves unceasingly. …

Although we know quite well that Mind is Buddha, we are still unable to accept this as a fact. For this reason, a sentence of the hua-tou has been used as the fire-starting-steel. …

Our fundamental self-nature and the Buddha do not differ from each other. It is only because of our perverted thinking that we are still not liberated. So the Buddha is still Buddha, and we are still ourselves. Now, as we know the method, if we could inquire into it, it would indeed be an unsurpassed, co-operating cause!

– Chan Master Xu Yun

We’re living in a world awash with sound; unfortunately, also in a world, now, in which noise prevails.
– Liam Heneghan

We as a species have spent over 99.9% of our evolutionary history outside of the built environment. All of a sudden, in this brief little blip of evolutionary time, we spend 93% of our lives indoors and in cars. And the majority of the remaining 7% we spend walking between our houses and our cars, our buildings and our cars.
– Lyanda Lynn Haupt

All I’m interested in right now is anything that has a great deal of love at its center or some major wisdom. The rest can go to hell.
– Martin Shaw

Nothing is more lethal to the effect that a ghost story should make than for the author to provide alternative materialist solution. This reduces a poem to a puzzle and confines the reader’s spirit instead of enlarging it.
– Robert Aickman

The kindest people are not born that way, they are made. They are the ones who have dug themselves out of the dark, who have fought to turn every loss into a lesson.
– Bianca Sparacino

The kindest people don’t just exist – they choose to soften where circumstance has tried to harden them, they choose to believe in goodness because they have seen firsthand why compassion is so necessary. ….
– Bianca Sparacino

We see vulnerability as weakness, whereas in actual fact, it is the source of the possibility of care.
– Malcolm Martin

Nothing is more beautiful than water.
– Andrei Tarkovsky

Everyone knows that time is water.
– Susan Stewart

Woe to those who have loved
only bodies, forms, appearances.
Death will take it all away.
Strive to love souls.
You will find them again.

– Victor Hugo

The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible.
– Mary Oliver

You will forget. You will forget that this is you.

– Marguerite Duras, L’homme atlantique

I hid in bars, because I didn’t want to hide in factories.
– Charles Bukowski

The sun is the width of a human foot.
– Heraclitus

Half of me is tired of existing, and the other half is terrified of disappearing.
– Aravind Adiga

At night, it comes alive:
A little moon. A myth. A continent of  leaves. At midnight: the tecolote
Transforms into a jaguar, into a python, into a dragon.

– Jose Hernandez Diaz

“Simplicity is no virtue,” writes the young Huxley, “unless you are potentially complicated.” He was surely writing of his future self.
– Pico Iyer

You can’t think decently if you’re not willing to hurt yourself.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

When one is not understood one should as a rule lower one’s voice, because when one really speaks loudly enough and is not heard, it is because people do not want to hear.

One had better begin to mutter to oneself, then they get curious.

– Carl Jung

There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.
– Michel de Montaigne

They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.
– Charles Bukowski

The sadder we are, the more things stand still.
– Lisa Russ Spaar

Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become a reality.
– Earl Nightingale

It happens that one pronounces
a few words just for oneself
alone on this strange earth
then the small white flower
the pebble like all those that went before
the sprig of stubble
find themselves re-united
at the foot of the gate
which one opens slowly
to enter the house of clay
while chairs, table, cupboard,
blaze in a sun of glory.

– Jean Follain, Speech Alone

Despite the best efforts of people…spring was still spring, even in the city.
– Tolstoy, (tr. Anthony Briggs)

The writer, you see, is not simply a journalist. He interweaves a story with his own doubts, questions, and values. That is art.
– Naguib Mahfouz

I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Civilized life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.
– J.G. Ballard

It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.
– Hermann Hesse

To walk out of His will is to walk into nowhere.
– C.S. Lewis

“I don’t do drugs.” Cool — your brain does.

Serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline, endogenous DMT.

You’ve been on drugs since birth. You just don’t have the self-awareness to notice.

– Taylor Sterling

If you start from the immediate facts of our psychological experience, as surely an empiricist should begin, you are at once led to the organic conception of nature.
– Alfred N. Whitehead

Siddhartha wandered into the forest, already far from the town, and knew only one thing – that he could not go back, that the life he had lived for many years was past, tasted and drained to a degree of nausea.
– Hermann Hesse

At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes …
– Charles Bukowski

With such a hell in your heart and your head,
how can you live? How can you love?

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

She saw that sadness was stretched worldwide across my face.
– Grace Paley

My father, I seek no crowns,
But unspoken praise from thee;
For thy people’s good, and thy renown,
I will die to set them free.

– George MacDonald, Phantastes

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

In order for the truth to be heard, it must be spoken with love. No matter how wise and true a spoken word is it will not be conveyed to someone if it’s spoken in anger.
– Leo Tolstoy

You know, if you talk all the time you will never hear what anybody else has to say, and therefore all you’ll have to talk about is your own conversation.

The same is true for people who think all the time.

– Alan Watts

A Shropshire Lad 2: Loveliest of
trees, the cherry now
by A. E. Housman

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.
– Bertrand Russell

I think of the soul as the rich, inner life of the psyche, the deepest impulse of which is to create wholeness.
– Sue Monk Kidd

Nature enough! Within thy glass
Too many and too stern the shadows pass.
In this delighted season, flaming
For thy resurrection-feast,
Ah, more I think the long ensepulture cold,
Than stony winter rolled
From the unsealed mouth of the holy East;
The snowdrop’s saintly stoles less heed
Than the snow-cloistered penance of the seed.
– Francis Thompson

Billionaires do not create jobs. Stop saying it.

Without billionaires, we would still build things, design things, teach things, sell things, buy things.

Billionaires capitalize profits. That’s it.

– Harry Eccles

God, let me think clearly and brightly; let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences, let me someday see who I am.
– Sylvia Plath

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.
– C.S. Lewis

It is a sound long after
Silence my little love sardine It is unticking
It is reeling out
It is laughing in high spirals
It is all over the place
It is homing in
Down familiar paths
Of breadcrumbs and blood

– Joseph Simas

The people who study the patterns of the universe move different.
– Nika Solé

Perhaps if I make
myself write I
shall find out what
is wrong with me.

– Dodie Smith

When you look
with your outer eyes,
you see trees and rocks
and animals and humans…
But there is so much
clarity when you look with your inners eyes –
you see God everywhere.
there is nothing else.

– Guthema Roba

Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?

A great Shadow has departed, said Gandalf…

– J.R.R. Tolkien

The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Love is everywhere when we are aligned with the energy of love, abundance, and peace.
– Rachael Wolff

If you seek Truth, you will not seek to gain a victory by every possible means; and when you have found Truth, you need not fear being defeated.
– Epictetus

The mind attending to other things is called bondage. The mind when not attending to anything else, is Brahman. When there is no thinking about objects in the mind, the mind is clean, it is still. That is the state of Brahman.
– Siddharameshwar Maharaj

A person raised in love and another raised in survival, will never see the world the same way.
– @Literariium

The one who is desperate still
believes in something.
– D. Shostakovich

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you’re thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you’re embarking on something, which will take the whole of you.
– C.S. Lewis

O you who wish to learn the wonder of love from the book of reason, I fear you will never unravel this point.
– Hāfez

But, indeed, is not this whole world itself a monument of the Resurrection?
– George MacDonald

Time does not
bring relief; you all
have lied..

– Edna St. Vincent Millay

The moon high up and small. High up and small.
Perfect like a flower. Or an oracle. Something
Completely understood. But unspeakable.
– Brigit Pegeen Kelly

The greatness of the human being consists in this: that it is capable of the universe.
– Saint Thomas Aquinas

The weight of the world is love.
Under the burden of solitude,
under the burden of dissatisfaction
the weight, the weight we carry is love.
– Allen Ginsberg

There’s a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.
– Lou Reed

The easiest man to frighten is the one who believes that everything ends when his fleeting existence comes to an end. The new slave traders understand this well, and it is on this belief that the importance of materialist doctrines rests.
– Ernst Jünger

You must realize yourself as the immovable, behind and beyond the movable, the silent witness of all that happens.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

Meditate. Live purely. Be quiet. Do your work with mastery. Like the moon, come out from behind the clouds! Shine
– Buddha

A truthful word is more powerful than popes, bishops, kings, and all the rich men on earth.
– Leo Tolstoy

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

– Anis Mojgai

If we were to walk for a hundred years, we could never take/ One step toward heaven—
you have to wait to be gathered.

– Charles Wright

Love says two things,
and one is greater:
I would die for you.
I would rise for you,
and live.

– Joseph Fasano, Easter

I’ve been thinking for years about how I want to articulate this.

The more I travel this country to talk with people about poetry, to listen to their hopes and frustrations, the more I think a major change is long overdue.

How did poetry become so marginalized in the United States? It’s a big question. But one part of the answer is that our poets long ago felt (understandably) angry about being ignored by “American” culture, so they took their unconscious vengeance and turned away from the people.

That has to change.

What we need is a culture in the world of poetry that doesn’t assume a poem is aesthetically worthless because it is popular, a culture—and let’s frame this not in a negative way but a positive one—that has the capacity to realize how elitist and destructive such an idea is.

What we need is a culture that can hold this thought: a poem can be so brilliant that it is for the rarefied mind, yes, but a poem can also be so good that it resonates with people from all walks of life, and understands them, and challenges them, and changes them. Because maybe (what a strange but ancient thought) poetry is not just for poets and professors of poetry.

I am not saying that any string of words is poetry, or that we need to compromise quality for “reach.” This isn’t about selling a product. I am not saying we need to flood the world with diary entries and Hallmark cards and “content” that calls itself poetry while caring nothing for the craft of that great and ancient and ever freshening art.

I care about poetry so deeply that I would die for it. I want it done well. When I read it, I want it to transform me. To write it, I want to have to be transformed. As poets have always done, I have given my life to it. Even now—especially now, after years of writing—I pace the floor at midnight, trying to get one word right, one word. And I fail again and again. And I love that mad-hearted labor. I love it.

But I don’t love the self-congratulatory fetishizing of the misunderstood poet, a self-marginalizing that becomes indistinguishable from elitism, emotional gatekeeping, and the ironic re-establishment of an academic artistic aristocracy.

What I am saying, then, is that we talk a lot about “democratization” in this country, but we are in danger (in both politics and poetry) of forgetting what that really means. What I am saying is that a real mastery of poetic craft can result in the creation of a poem that moves people for reasons they don’t—and need not at first—understand. And we desperately need that inclusivity.

Just as Van Gogh went so deeply into his craft that his paintings move even those with no academic knowledge of painting, and just as Beethoven went so deeply into his craft that his compositions move even those with no academic knowledge of music, the poet must go so deeply into his craft that his poems can move even those with no academic knowledge of poetry—and he must *not despise the readership of those people.* He must treasure it.

The practice of poetry has always been about understanding others, fathoming the human heart and its desires, the human mind and its structures, and a poet should focus on mastering his craft *so that* he can create what resonates with anyone—with everyone—who thirsts to be all of what she is.

Because that’s just it: poetry speaks to the whole human being. So why on earth would it not be for everyone who wants to explore her whole self? Why is it only in this land that we can’t imagine poetry being quoted on factory floors, in break rooms, in the halls of our government? Why is it only in this land that we’ve forgotten that poetry is here to help people feel understood, seen, challenged, held, opened? Why is it only in this land that we’ve forgotten how to want all of those things?

Of course it has everything to do with money, and what we value, and what we make time for, and what we’re told we can love.

But we don’t have to accept that as our reality.

To be clear, I’m talking here about two things at once: (1) the creation of poetry that, because of its quality and heart, resonates with people beyond the walls of established academic poetry spaces, and (2) the creation of a culture that values poetry, that helps people see that it is not a parlor game, or an elitist trick, or a luxury. Poetry is, as one poet recently said to me, precisely for those who feel they lack the words to say what’s in their hearts. And, at times, that’s all of us.

This is not about disdaining what’s academic. In truth, I’m an academic by heart, and always will be. I love the pursuit of knowledge, esoteric or not, and I think ultimately the best way to come to know a poem or a galaxy or a frog or anything at all is to study it with academic intensity and focus, to be initiated into its relevant art and/or science, with all the grand inheritance of the past and hopeful push into the future. Yes, a casual viewer can be moved by Van Gogh, and a casual listener can feel heard by Beethoven, and a casual spectator can be transformed by Shakespeare, but what if that art leads those casual consumers into a deep study, a deepening love of what art can do? What if some of those causal consumers are inspired to become scholars of those arts, to find even deeper riches in the form and content of those works? What if there are pleasures we can—contrary to “American” anti-intellectualism—be instructed in, and opened to, and freshly changed by?

Undoubtedly that’s the case. But it can be done with aesthetic standards and without institutional gatekeeping. It can be done by really thinking about what the democratization of art looks like, both in what’s aesthetically valued and in how we make spaces for such poetry to be found.

That means thinking about what “publication”—making public—even means. This is not about replacing the existing modes of publication. I adore the people who give their time and efforts to run literary journals and independent poetry presses (I’ve worked on that side of the desk, as an editor at a poetry publisher, as a judge for poetry contests, as a blurber and thesis advisor and all the rest of it.) This is sacred work, and people do it for the love of it, and they (we!) should be celebrated and supported.

But this is about including people outside of poetry’s usual audience, and therefore it is about supplementing those modes of publication. I myself have published traditionally for many years, in literary journals and with wonderful publishers, and I love them, and will continue to work with and support them, because I believe in excellent editors and informed publishers and the whole apparatus of stewardship that identifies work of quality and puts it in front of eager readers.

But I think, quite simply, that this cannot be the only “respectable” means of sharing poetry.

So let’s talk about social media.

I often share my work online. Invariably, fellow poets ask me, “Don’t you want to ‘save’ that poem—to submit it to a literary prize, or to publish it in a journal that doesn’t allow submissions of poems that have already been ‘shared’?”

No. I want to give it away. I want to give my heart-work away. As soon as it’s really ready. As widely as I can. In case it can help even a single person out there—in that unique way that only poetry can—even if that person doesn’t yet know that they’ve been looking for a part of themselves, for a word, for a poem.

It remains an honor to be recognized by one’s peers within the institution of poetry. But I wish we lived in a world that didn’t tell poets, implicitly or explicitly, that they can either be popular or true.

That’s a symptom of our sickness. And that’s the false dichotomy I’ve been trying to break down with my work in these online spaces.

Even if the truth so rarely resonates in our world of lies and tricks, we need to do our part to make the truth valued; we cannot be Pilate washing his hands of it; we cannot give up on reaching everyone.

I’ve been proud to work in that direction. I’ve been proud to help build poetry communities in online spaces over the past years, and to share my own work both on social media and in traditional publications.

But it’s about changing the culture at large.

I don’t think we should perpetuate a culture that encourages artists not to be ultimately vulnerable, in their art and in its sharing, and that calls such willful obscurity beauty, and such self-insulation truth. I don’t think we should diminish poetry’s emotional and formal complexity so it can reach all people; I think we should learn to respect the complexity of all people enough to help them reach poetry—poetry that understands and challenges them, that lifts them up into greater possibilities, that invites them into their own mystery.

And I think that means breaking down some walls.

I’m not speaking as someone who’s tired of knocking on the doors of elite spaces. I’m speaking as someone who has been in those spaces and has come to believe there’s something additional that’s needed—very much needed—especially now.

I grew up among the horse dung of a little town in the Hudson Valley, and I’m proud to have earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia, proud to have taught in MFA programs and served on Editorial Boards of poetry presses and published widely. But having been in the “ivory tower,” and having reached it from that small town where I began, I don’t want to close the door behind me. I want to go back to those small towns, to my origins and yours, and bring back the word, the good news of poetry.

But I want to bring something good, in all the senses of that word. The poetry of an age is only as good as the criticism of that age, and we are not in an age of good, thoughtful, long-form literary criticism. We need that. We need outlets for that. We need good curators and editors and well-funded spaces for them to do their curating and editing. But that funding will only happen if there’s a demand, and there will only be an increased demand if poetry is something that’s valued and read by people who have learned that it’s not a puzzle for the few—it’s the mystery in which we all live.

What we need is a poetry that values craft and that values the readership of people from all walks of life.

Because that’s what poetry has always wanted to be.

Think of Gilgamesh. Of the Homeric poems being recited to wide-eyed shepherds. Think of the shoemaker and the wet-nurse looking up into Hamlet’s eyes, their boots caked with dung. Think of Whitman. Wordsworth. Keats. Sappho. Dante. Li Bai. Hafez. Frost. Yeats. Cavafy. Pablo Neruda. Federico García Lorca. Seamus Heaney. Dylan Thomas. Wendell Berry. June Jordan. Rumi. Think of any poet who really, really helps you feel seen.

They all had that dream. It’s the dream of every writer who has endured: to serve, to speak to everyone, to help another human heart through the ache and the splendor of its changes.

Perhaps poetry will never be for everyone—neither is broccoli or skydiving or sex in the morning—but it should be available for everyone, for anyone who wants to find words for what’s going on in his heart, or what that heart could become.

Yes, as Rilke writes, everything beautiful is terrifying—just as mystery can be terrifying—but, as the poet Lorca tells us, only mystery helps us live. And what we need is a culture that values that mystery, not just swift answers and quick bucks and bottom lines. And yes, that seems like a losing battle in this world. I know. As a poetry Professor who has tried to get arts funding, as a writer who laments the use of AI, as a human like you, I know.

But there is a place to start. And that place is from within the institution of poetry. That means changing what’s left of the culture of self-celebratory isolationism in the poetry world. And it can start with destigmatizing the sharing of new poems in online spaces.

It also means creating more spaces where people can encounter and experience poems, normalizing the encounter with poetry and integrating it into the American way of life.

There are so many wonderful people who do this: organizers of Poetry Festivals that are open to the public; editors of literary journals that are open to submissions from everyone; criminally underpaid teachers; bold owners of independent bookstores; volunteers who work their mercies by bringing poetry to prisoners, children, the socially forgotten—and the list of unsung heroes goes on.

My own work has been to create online spaces where people outside of academic spaces can share, read, and discuss poetry—and where they can learn about poetic craft (prosody and form and lineation and imagery and the whole good mystery) on a level that is usually reserved for institutionalized undergraduate or graduate study.

But this is just a start.

As poets, we can’t be so insecure about our place in society that we cling to certain institutional credentials to announce that our poetry is worth reading. No one in 100 years will care about your CV. They will care if something you wrote helps them survive.

And our task is to make a world in which poetry can do that—not just for the few, but for all.

Where are the offline spaces where we could make poetry available and integrated into American life? I don’t have the answers. But I know we have to ask these questions in a more focused way:

Can literary journals be spaces where editors gather together work they love and judge to be excellent, even if that work has first appeared elsewhere, in the poet’s effort to connect with people? Can we make a world in which those journals and their editors are praised and valued for that anthologizing work, rather than as initial gatekeepers to making a poem public? Can we make a world in which much-needed poems about social and political events can be made public in a timely manner, rather than “saved” for the “publication” schedule?

Can we help all independent and traditional poetry publishers feel that their existence isn’t threatened—but rather their flourishing is helped—by new, supplemental ways to share poetry for free?

Can we just finally understand this tool called the internet that we have at our disposal? Can we as poets finally use it well, and thoughtfully, and intentionally, and not in a half-embarrassed and haphazard and divisive way?

Can we imagine “public” poets who are also valued by the Academy, because the Academy knows it exists for the people?

Let’s start there.

Because poetry does have the power to transform people, to help them feel seen, to open their lives—perhaps even to bring them into the pleasures of deep contemplation and emotional growth—all of which may just, in addition to being its own reward, make people less susceptible to the lies of demagogues, to the lure of AI and immediate gratification, to all that makes us less human.

A poet born in another country recently told me, “I don’t think you Americans understand how much Walt Whitman is read and loved around the world. Because he speaks for the people. Wasn’t your country supposed to do that?”

Maybe we can do that. Maybe we’re in a hell of a mess because we don’t have a larger culture—not just of poetry—of the arts. Maybe we need turn to each other and do what the arts can really do: listen.

“I am the mate and companion of people,” Whitman wrote:

“For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,
For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
For me children and the begetters of children.

Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.”

– Joseph Fasano

In man there is a deep so profound it is hidden even to him in whom it is.
– Augustine

Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, riches take wings, and only one thing endures and that is character.
– Horace Greeley

This earthly life’s like a meadow, where a snake hides among the grass and flowers: and if anything is pleasing to the eye, it leaves the spirit more entangled.
– Francesco Petrarch

War prevails over peace, I imagine, finally because it brings an apparently simple end to the great burden of civilized thought.
– Wendell Berry, The Need To Be Whole

She herself is a big fan of the non sequitur, which really only means that a conversation is free-flowing and intuitive, as opposed to following a predictable trajectory, so to speak.
– Bernardine Evaristo

How to be an artist: Stay loose. Learn to watch snails. Plant impossible gardens. Make little signs that say “yes” and post them all over your house. Make friends with uncertainty.
– Henry Miller

In any contest between the conscious and the unconscious, it is the unconscious which usually wins. Unconscious aims and urges are more powerful than conscious ones, because they operate surreptitiously, so we unwittingly find ourselves at their mercy.
– Liz Greene

So you, who’ve always sought a mind at peace, before the final day, follow the few, and not the common crowd.
– Francesco Petrarch

It is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

We went to the moon to explore the moon, we looked back and discovered Earth.
– Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.
– Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle

Philosophy has never been anything but a disavowal of the reality principle. … Today this unreality has entered into things. This then is the end of philosophy and the beginning of something else in which reality merges with its ironic refraction.
– Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

Man is quite insane. He wouldn’t know how to create a maggot, and he creates Gods by the dozen.
– Michel de Montaigne

One had to know Plato personally to appreciate the love he suppressed puritanically for the music, poetry, and drama he censured in his philosophy and censored in his model communities. They moved him too deeply.
– Joseph Heller, Picture This

A spectral picture, composed of shadows; a phantom picture, a picture which did not last for long and, therefore, struck his imagination far more powerfully than would have done a motionless picture hung for him to look at all day long.
– Marcel Proust

People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery… in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.
– Richard Rohr

Exit Strategy
by Kazim Ali

I hear the sound of the sprinkler outside, not the soft kind we used to run through

but the hard kind that whips in one direction then cranks back and starts again.

Last night we planned to find the white argument of the Milky Way

but we are twenty years too late. Last night I cut the last stargazer

lily to wear in my hair.

This morning, the hardest geography quiz I’ve ever taken: how does one carry

oneself from mountain to lake to desert without leaving anything behind?

Perhaps I ought to have worked harder.

Perhaps I could have paid more attention.

A mountain I didn’t climb. Music I yearned for but could not achieve.

I travel without maps, free-style my scripture, pretend the sky is an adequate

representation of my spiritual beliefs.

The sprinkler switches off. The grass will be wet.

I haven’t even gotten to page 2 of my life and I’m probably more than halfway through,

who knows what kind of creature I will become.

I Shall Not Care

When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Though you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.

I shall have peace as leafy trees are peaceful,
When rain bends down the bough,
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.

– Sara Teasdale

To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad.
– Eckhart Tolle

I sought a timeless truth: the flowers’ glory
is just another form of dust.
– Buson (tr. Sam Hamill)

Nations tend to see the other side’s war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants.
– George Orwell

All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.
– Anne Lamott

It is not that what we have experienced and then forgotten now returns imperfectly to consciousness, but rather that we enter at that point into what has never been, into forgetfulness as the home of consciousness. That is why our happiness is steeped in longing….
– Agamben

There is nothing we need more definitely or desperately than an adequate spiritual code of life.
– Manly P. Hall

It does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me, and the fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it. Human behaviors are fractal in nature.
– Edouard Glissant

DANDELIONS
We were fabulously lucky.
We became dandelions.
Before we were even born
We kept wishing to be dandelions.
Next we found ourselves traveling
Out of the great unknown.
We rode down in a train
Sixteen coaches long,
We sat prim and proper
In our golden yellow dresses.
Others came as black widows,
Little monkeys, and red birds,
And of course many ants,
Snuggled together and looking glum.
– Charles Simic

Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
– Alain de Botton

Whether you are working through deep fear and shame or a less acute emotional reaction, your inner freedom will arise from bringing attention to how the experience is expressed in your body.
– Tara Brach

everything left us in such ruins.
– Sandra Simonds

This sort of simultaneous awareness that there’s nothing that really matters to us more than literature, and at the same time there’s nothing that matters less on this sad, lonely planet than literature.
– Nell Zink

Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf – seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things – travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.

That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality – your soul, if you will–is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Theresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.

And someday, in 80 years, when you’re 100, and I’m 134, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been. I hope you will say: It has beens so wonderful.

– George Saunders

There is no need for God to situate himself in relation to others: he is himself the situation.
– John Berger

Gorge after gorge, turning, turning. Caverns of sunset, falling, falling away—just a single vast gold air breathed out by beings—they must have been marvelous beings, those gold-breathers. Down. Purple-and-green islands. Cleft and groined and gigantically pocked like something left behind after all the oceans vanished one huge night: the mountains. Their hills fold and fold again, fold away, down. Folded into the dens and rocks of the hills are ghost towns. Broken streets end in them, like a sound, nowhere. Shadow is inside. We walk (oh quietly) even so—breaking lines of force, someone’s. Houses stand in their stones. Each house an empty socket. Some streaked with red inside. Words once went on in there—no. I don’t believe that. Words never went on in there.
– Anne Carson

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.
– Richard Powers

No longer can democracy and freedom be fully and truly secure in one country, or even in a group of countries; their defense in a world saturated with injustice and inhabited by billions of humans denied human dignity will inevitably corrupt the very values they are meant to defend.
– Zygmunt Bauman

We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in. The man who believes that the resources of the world are infinite, for example, or that if something is good for you then the more of it the better, will not be able to see his errors, because he will not look for evidence of them. For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception – his epistemological premises – he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be. Sometimes the dissonance between reality and false beliefs reaches a point when it becomes impossible to avoid the awareness that the world no longer makes sense. Only then is it possible for the mind to consider radically different ideas and perceptions.
– Gregory Bateson

Let us look for secret things somewhere in the world on the blue shores of silence.
– Pablo Neruda

Giving notice
Joy Sullivan

One day soon, you’ll rise from your desk or quietly excuse yourself from the meeting or turn the car around in the middle of the street. Anything might trigger it. An open window. A sunny day in April. Daffodils panting in a mason jar. Call it madness. Call it glorious

disappearance. Call it locomotion. Do what you should have done years ago. Let your body out to pasture. Fill your calendar with nothing but sky. Surrender to the woods. To cicadas and sap beetles. To the moths, the color of memory and dream. Wear dusk like an ancient cloak. Hurry —

there’s still time to creature — to pluck all the wild cloudberries and carry them home. Even now, you can hear coyotes crying at the canyon’s edge. Grow back your hackles and howl. This was always your first chorus, the mother tongue, a feral hymn you know by heart.

Is it foolish to speak of little joys that occur in the middle of tragedy? It is our humanity. Whatever we have left of it. We must not deny it to ourselves.
– Ilya Kaminsky

We take our colors, chameleon-like, from each other.
– Nicolas de Chamfort

Knowing life grinds us,
And dust
Is what we’ll become

Sensing, likewise,
That the moral
Of our story
Has to do
With being mortal.

Yet love ground us.

And the beloved
Grows in us:
We are her slow cocoon.

And the poem is a door;
The song, a little window.

– Gregory Orr

That your world is in agony is no reason to turn your back on it, or to try to escape into private “spiritual” pursuits. Rilke reminded me that I had the strength and courage to walk out into the world as into my own heart, and to “love the things / as no one has thought to love them.”
– Joanna Macy

May my heart hold the earth all the days of my life. And when I am gone to the farther camps, may my name sound on the green hills, and may the cedar smoke that I have breathed drift on the canyon walls and among the branches of living trees. May birds of many colors encircle the soil where my steps have been placed, and may the deer, the lion, and the bear of the mountains be touched by the blessings that have touched me. May I chant the praises of the wild land, and may my spirit range on the wind forever.
– N. Scott Momaday

With nothing to gain from the human adventure—nothing to prove, nothing to achieve, and a dangerously unboundaried heart that left him defenseless against the hard edges of this world—Jesus came anyway: that, claims Bernadette Roberts, was the real crucifixion!
– Cynthia Bourgeault

[…] like any human practices, those of religions are not exempt from ethical questioning. Rituals and rites in groups change behavior, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. For the madness of crowds is a very close cousin to the fervor or congregations and the martial spirit of armies.
– Simon Blackburn

In a skiff on a sunrisen lake we are watchers.

Swimming aimlessly is luxury just as walking
loudly up a shallow stream is.

As we lean over the deep well, we whisper.

– Marie Ponsot

Intimacy, loss, feminism, Marxism, psychological breakdowns, the world of children, the summer, thunderstorms, hurricanes, beauty, song, a sense of justice, labor, dead labor, ghosts, memory, diaries, text messages, sex. All of it. I guess I want all of it.
– Sandra Simonds

The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us. Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you?
– Jung

Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
– Alain de Botton

You feel good not because the world is right, but your world is right because you feel good.
– Vernon Howard

Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.
– Socrates

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.
– Epicurus

But there is something that happens when you are told you are Too Much You begin to ask everyone, how small would you like me?
– Mary Lambert

You can only give away what you have inside. Become an instrument of love.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer

I’d like to point out to people the divine in a musical language that transcends words. I want to speak to their souls.
– John Coltrane

No intelligent person is interested in dominating others. His first interest is to know himself.
– Osho

People who live alone always have something on their minds that they would willingly share.
– Anton Chekhov

Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

Not caring about winning trivial arguments saves so much time and energy.
– James Clear

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
– Tolstoy

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
– Harper Lee

Self-care is recognizing that what you want to do and what is best for you are not always the same thing.

Self-love is acting on behalf of what is best for you, even if it doesn’t temporarily satisfy you.

– Jamie Varon

“The Lost Scroll of Hidden Mountain”

If a master-sage hands you a text
and says, “Something to govern your life…”

…always read the fine print.*

*Enlightenment means every dark corner of the self.

– Frank Inzan Owen

“What They Do Not Tell Us”

What they do not tell us
is that regardless of outward
goings-on

the threshold of midlife
leaves one speechless,
stupefied even

attending a silent, invisible funeral
for all that you were and have been;

and the journey cannot truly resume
until one has completed the tasks
of one’s deep inner-looking.

Everything else is a detour.
Everything else is a thin tributary
incapable of quenching the greater thirst.

– Frank Inzan Owen

“Have You Seen Them?”

Cross-eyed coyotes
standing at podiums
vomiting lies.

A nation of brave defenders conscripted
into a confederacy of dunces.

American Presidents
once mounted horses,
hill-walked mountains;
talked the night away
beneath giant sequoias
with Nature-loving visionaries.

Now we are ruled by a devil in diapers.

– Frank Inzan Owen

“Swiveling Ribcage”

The last time I split open
the husk of the “self,”
I found a pesky saboteur
lying in wait.

Like a stranger
that moves into one’s home village
and starts seeding all manner of discontent,
I sparred and sparred against his ways.

This time, becoming aware
that I’ve covered myself in armor again,
I watch as the husk slowly disintegrates,
drifting on like eagle down
being carried by the Spring wind.

I’m gentle with the husk now.
I’m gentle with the “self” now.
I’ve embraced my Imperfect Fool status.

– Frank Inzan Owen

“Everyday Homecoming”

Some of us,
by Red Dust World standards,
are strange birds.

We much prefer a hidden perch
at the edge of the world
than to shape ourselves
for the world of constant being-in-Time.

Being outside-Time
the “self” can settle
into the Way of the Self,
into the Way of Nature,
into the Tao.

The Way is an everyday homecoming.

– Frank Inzan Owen

“Ten-Thousand Forms of the Formless”

The Tao cannot be sought from others;
it is attained in oneself. If you abandon
yourself to seek from others, you are far
from the Tao. – from the Huainanzi
__

The Soul of the Wayfarers is a luminous prism.

The Spirit of Wayfaring is a light
that shines through each facet differently.

Don’t compare your ‘way’ to another.

Remember the Wayfarer Santoka
and his words on the matter:

“I cannot be Basho. I have no choice
but to be Santoka.”
___

Liner Notes:

The Wayfaring Spirit shines through Baisao
and emerges as tea gatherings under pines.
The Wayfaring Spirit shines through Rengetsu
and emerges as sculpted clay bowls and paintings.
The Wayfaring Spirit shines through Hanshan
and emerges as a rustic in a cave.
But, if we belabor the point by too much explaining,
we will get away from our own Wayfaring.

– Frank Inzan Owen

Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.
– Kakuzo Okakura, The Cup of Humanity

In French, “bibliothèque intérieure” means your “inner library”-the invisible shelf you carry inside, filled with every story that’s ever shaped you.

Sometimes I draw a certain comfort precisely from the terrible hopelessness of the situation. This is a peak; nothing, neither good nor evil, can remain in a state of superlatives.
– Victor Klemperer

Man will never be free until the last king is
strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
– Denis Diderot

If you reached the stage where you
have grown beyond your
family-of-origin, its important not to
pressure yourself to bring them along
with you. You don’t have that
obligation, and you also don’t have
that right. In the same way as you
didn’t want them to define you, they
don’t want you to define them. It’s up
to them, just like it was up to you. You
may feel sure that you have found a
more awakened way of being, but they
may not agree. And even if they do,
it’s for them to decide if they want to
join you. The world I want to live in, is
one where everyone gets to pick the
path that is true for them. None better
than the other. None more worthy of
praise. Each of us a pioneer of our
own unique path.

– Jeff Brown

…the individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be… The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.
– Erich Fromm

We can’t suddenly quit a job and then race to find a form of art that will pay off before the next mortgage payment is due. Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it.
– Seth Godin

The definition of biology is not a biological problem in the way that the definition of philosophy is a philosophical problem.
– Lawrence C. Becker

We eventually absorb grief, or rearrange ourselves, so that we become creatures of loss as we get older; this is part of our fundamental fabric of what we are as human beings.
– Nick Cave

The kind heart needs the protection of a wise mind.
– Buddhist proverb

A new Nature is being not merely made but made out of an old one. We live amid all the anomalies, inconveniences, hopes, and excitements of a house that is being rebuilt.
– C.S. Lewis

A bright moon can astonish, no matter how many times you have seen it.
– Jennifer Egan

I go around doing nothing but persuading both young and old among you not to care for your body or your wealth in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of your soul, as I say to you: Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.
– Socrates, Plato’s Apology

I dreamed about Ray Charles last night, and he could see just fine.
– Joan Osborne

People get emotionally attached to their working hypothesis as though it were an eternal truth, and then naturally this becomes a prison which hampers the development of consciousness, as much as it once before helped it along.
– Marie Louise von Franz

And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

– William Wordsworth

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.
– Sylvia Plath

The survival of humanity depends on civilization’s suppression of erotic passion and destructive aggression, a never successful but always necessary coercion that results in incurable misery.
– Richard Tarnas

Democracy is the name we give the people whenever we need them.
– Robert, Marquis de Flers and Gaston Arman de Caillavet

As long as the world is turning and spinning, we’re gonna be dizzy and we’re gonna make mistakes.
– Mel Brooks

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

There’s a faith to knowing that people are going to harvest fruit that I may not see. But that doesn’t make my role in planting that seed any less important.
– Solaris J. Capehart

We can bomb the world to pieces,
but we can’t bomb it into peace.

– Michael Franti

People are less quick to applaud you as you grow older. Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there.
– Sloane Crosley

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on.
– William S. Burroughs

We were all trapped in stories, she said, just as he used to say, his wavy hair, his naughty smile, his beautiful mind, each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative, each family the captive of the family story, each community locked within its own tale of itself, each people the victims of their own versions of history, and there were parts of the world where the narratives collided and went to war, where there were two or more incompatible stories fighting for space on, to speak, the same page.

She came from one such place, his place, from which he had been forever displaced, they exiled his body but his spirit, never. And maybe now every place was becoming that place, maybe Lebanon was everywhere and nowhere, so that we were all exiles, even if our hair wasn’t so wavy, our smiles not so naughty, our minds less beautiful, even the name Lebanon wasn’t necessary, the name of every place or any place would do just as well, maybe that’s why she felt nameless, unnamed, unnameable, Lebanonymous.

– Salman Rushdie

It is a defect of God’s humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.
– Tom Stoppard

The stranger is being discussed here, not in the sense often touched upon in the past, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the person who comes today and stays tomorrow.
– Georg Simmel

As soon as I felt a necessity to learn about the non-human world,
I wished to learn about it in a hurry.
And then I began to learn perhaps
the most important lesson that nature had to reach me:
that I could not learn about her in a hurry.
The most important learning, that of experience,
can be neither summoned nor sought out.
The most worthy knowledge
cannot be acquired by what is known as study —
though that is necessary, and has its use.
It comes in its own good time
and in its own way to the man who will go where it lives,
and wait, and be ready,
and watch.

Hurry is beside the point, useless, an obstruction.
The thing is to be attentively present.
To sit and wait is as important as to move.
Patience is as valuable as industry.
What is to be known is always there.
When it reveals itself to you, or when you come upon it,
it is by chance.
The only condition is your being there and being watchful.

– Wendell Berry

I want to live in a world where
harm is not systemic, where love
organizes society, where the
earth is respected, and where life
is valued above all else.
– Yung Pueblo

Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed.
– Charles Bukowski

Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours;
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust.

– Stanley Kunitz

It dawned on me how very much we are strangers to each other, how little you understand me.
– Liubov’ Mendeleeva-Blok

A person who is not loving has not experienced love. It is not his fault. Realizing this gives rise to forgiveness. We vow that suffering will stop with us.
– Guo Jun

Never will God reject a soul that sincerely loves him: be his speculative opinions what they may: and whether in any given instance certain opinions, be they unbelief, or misbelief, are compatible with a sincere love of God, God can only know.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

One who sees inaction in action and action in inaction is intelligent among men, and he is in the transcendental position, although engaged in all sorts of activities.
– Bhagavad Gītā 4.18

Accepting new consciousness requires devotion, courage of the heart in the spirit of life, the willingness to accept suffering and despair, and our enduring the cycle of transformation.
– Bud Harris

The world is a dream that the soul interprets according to its own level of wakefulness.
– Rumi

It’s the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly.
– Jean-Paul Sartre

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
– Susan Sontag

You can give another person a precious gift if you will allow him to talk without contaminating his speech with your own material.
– Robert A. Johnson

Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way.
– Norman Mailer

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid, if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.
– John Steinbeck

Some of it is ugly, obscene and bestial,
some of it is pure and holy and spiritual:
all of it is myself.

– James Joyce

The more you know yourself,
the less there is to say.
– Osho

Nothing is merely a means to an end, nothing is merely a step on the path to somewhere else. Every moment, everything, is absolutely foundational in its own right.
– Barry Magid

I must experience everything that is about to happen to me as fully as possible, I must experience it as some kind of joy. I can’t just let it all speed by without living it fully. I can’t let this life or this struggle happen without me.
– Jacob Wren

The gods are true in the way poetry is true.
– Joseph Campbell

The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies. It cannot, therefore, have a different origin, but must proceed from a like operation of the imagination upon like objects.
– David Hume

As long as we feel safely held in the hearts and minds of the people who love us, we will climb mountains and cross deserts and stay up all night to finish projects.
– Bessel A. van der Kolk

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place.
– Marcus Aurelius

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
– Barbara Kingsolver

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
– David Hume

We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.
– Terence McKenna

In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.
– Thoreau

The deterioration of a government begins almost always by the decay of its principles.
– Montesquieu

The world has figured out that we are not who we were.
– Sue Gordon

I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.
– Haruki Murakami

There are many paths to enlightenment. Be sure to take the one with a heart.
– Laozi

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
– Mark Twain

If you only live from your polite side, you are not whole, you are half alive.
– Alan Watts

I accept what I do to myself, but I reject what is done to me.
– Carl Jung

I can’t say I’ve loved you all, either… but I’ve loved as many of you as I could.
– Captain Hawkeye Pierce

The condition of man ….
is a condition of war
of everyone against everyone.
– Thomas Hobbes

Her heart is meadows of wild.
In darkness, she blooms with light.
Flowers in her heart—
the moon settles inside her soul,
the sun burns her memory gold.
– Dede Hawkins

What you truly crave is little, the rest is noise the heart has learned.
– From the Journals of the Beacon in the Mist

Read books and study nature.
And when the two don’t agree,
throw out the books.
– William Albert Albrecht

Seek to do brave and lovely things that are left undone by the majority of people. Give gifts of love and peace to those whom others pass by.
– Yogananda

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
– John Ruskin

When you are in the presence of people who are suffering and you don’t turn away, something in you changes. The heart grows larger.
– Ram Dass

God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk.
– Meister Eckhart

The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.
– Albert Einstein

An aroma of lavender and faint musk is not right for an appointment of this kind at this moment.

– Lord Goodman, chair of the Arts Council, objecting to Harold Wilson’s proposal of John Betjeman as Poet Laureate following the death of John Masefield in 1967.

Old literature keeps reminding me that half of being human is saying the wrong thing beautifully.
– Eden A. Campbell

Things don’t change with a change in scene.
– Steinbeck

You are special in all this emptiness.
– Victor Glover, Artemis II

It is not in the stars to determine our destinies but in ourselves.
– William Shakespeare

People will say, “work smarter, not harder” but then spend all day defending elaborate army corps of engineer projects that destroyed healthy ecosystems and provided more problems than solutions.
– Sam England

If education doesn’t teach you to resist injustice, it has failed.
– John Dewey

Ego is the unobserved mind that runs your life when you are not present as … the watcher.
– Eckhart Tolle

The world needs more empathy, and less addiction to certainty.
– Ashley C. Ford

When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best – that is inspiration.
– Robert Bresson

Sit with people who’ve failed more than they’ve won.
They lost their ego along the way, but gained wisdom.
– Oscar Karuna

The measure of a country’s greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis.
– Thurgood Marshall

The truth is not a result of effort. It is a result of stopping all effort and being still.
– Ramana Maharshi

I don’t mind dissenting opinions, I really don’t. But they have to come with solutions.
– Captain Christopher Pike

I never enjoyed classrooms. I could read on my own at a much faster rate.
– Gen. Mattis

I lov’d thee from the earliest dawn,
When first I saw thy beauty’s ray,
And will, until life’s eve comes on,
And beauty’s blossom fades away.

– George Moses Horton

Diplomat: A person
who is disarming when
their country isn’t.
– Sidney Brody

Become a possibilitarian. No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see possibilities – always see them, for they’re always there.
– Norman Vincent Peale

The world is the way it is thanks to love and not to competitiveness.
– Gerald Huter

You don’t fix the world. You just stop amplifying the frequency that’s fracturing it! So today, before you post, before you argue, before you judge, check your frequency
– Arash Rahbar

Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.
– Oprah Winfrey

None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody – a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns – bent down and helped us pick up our boots.
– Thurgood Marshall

When envoys are sent with compliments in their mouths, it is a sign that the enemy wishes for a truce.
– Sun Tzu

Be yourself so the people looking for you can find you.
– Arlan Hamilton

Always put yourself in a position to be discovered.
– T.C. Stallings

War should be the politics of last resort. And when we got to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.
– Colin Powell

What we call healing is often the slow work of learning to tell the truth to ourselves.
– Jung

How many more mothers have to bury their sons? All for what? A seat at the table in Hell?
– Will Putney

I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
– C.S. Lewis

Remember, every single dollar that is spent on a bomb is stolen from you.
That’s a dollar they spent blowing up a school overseas instead of building a school in your neighborhood.
– Hasan

At twenty-two, Emily [Bronte] was already aware that her unhappiness was a result of not being able constantly to live in . . . [another] metaphysical dimension.
– Winifred Gerin

I am going to make everything around me beautiful – that will be my life.
– Elsie de Wolf

Chicago is expanding access to their public library system for students with a program that allows public school ID cards to double as public library cards. What a brilliant initiative.
– Hannah Larson

People made the library…Without them, all the sacredness was gone. It was just a building with books.
– Scott Douglas

the sensitive suffer more; but they love more and dream more.
– Augusto Cury

History does not repeat, but it does instruct.
– Tim Snyder

It’s funny how the colours of the like real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.
– Anthony Burgess

Travel tips for Americans
Spend you vacations in Israel, Russia or Hungary.
The rest of the world doesn’t want to see your face.
– Nancy Harris

One must learn to “sense” one’s own body and to be present in every movement and every breath.
– Lahiri Mahasaya

I’ve learned over time, in the darkest of skies, there will come a break in the clouds.
– David Larbi

If women ran the world we wouldn’t have wars, just intense negotiations ever 28 days.
– Robin Williams

The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.
– Bertrand Russell

Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.
– George Washington

The man who loves walking will walk further than the man who loves the destination.
– Sal Di Stefano

The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.
– Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez

Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts. For out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built.
– James Allen

Reality is too heavy for most people to carry. So they borrow illusions, soft dreams, sweet lies, and call it happiness.
– Franz Kafka

The strength of society lies in the moral integrity of its citizens.
– John Locke

A wise society teaches inquiry-not obedience.
– John Locke

Good fortune deceives, but bad fortune enlightens.
– Boethius

… but Lenson was also aware that the cynical could afford the luxury of their cynicism because of the stability of the system they mocked.
– John Scalzi

“Never mind,” I said. “Never mind, never mind.”
“But you do mind,” a small voice said.
“No,” I insisted.
For a while it was quiet.
Then it said again, “you do.
And I said, “I do. But it aches too much to admit it.”

– Sue Zhao

The point at which things happen is a decision. Instead of focusing on yourself, focus on how you can help someone else.
– Germany Kent

Anything that draws you out of yourself in a positive way—for all practical purposes—is operating as God for you in that moment.
– Fr. Richard Rohr

When one loves somebody everything is clear – where to go, what to do – it all takes care of itself and one doesn’t have to ask anybody about anything.
– Maxim Gorky

At the end of it all, it is our relationship with people that will determine whether they will share in our pain if we fall into dangers.
– Israelmore Ayivor

Great perfection seems flawed, yet its use is never impaired.
– Laozi

The perfect man uses his mind like a mirror.
– Zhuangzi

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.
– William Shakespeare

We seek for every possibility of life and sentience, because the universe is vast and cold and mostly empty, and variance from that void is to be treasured.
– Adrian Tchaikovsky

Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul?
– Paz Marquez Benitez

You can’t lead others
forward if you’re
still fighting yourself.
– Jessica Roberts

This is how you pray continually – not by offering prayer in words, but by joining yourself to God through your whole way of life, so that your life becomes one continuous and uninterrupted prayer.
– St. Basil the Great

Modernity taught us to crave knowledge as a substitute for being embedded in communities where being known is the practical foundation for going on. We settled for objectivity when what we long for is communion. But “being right” is a sorry substitute for being loved. And becoming the sort of people who crave recognition for being right has made monsters of us all.
– James K. A. Smith

Anyone can wage war, but maintaining peace is a difficult thing.
– Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

I’ve never seen a lazy man;
I’ve seen a man who never ran
while I watched him, and I’ve seen
a man who sometimes slept between
lunch and dinner, and who’d stay
at home upon a rainy day,
but he was not a lazy man.
Before you call me crazy,
think, was he a lazy man or
did he just do things we label “lazy”?

– Ruth Bebermeyer

The purpose of humanity is creating and not destroying.
– Astronaut Jeremy Hansen, Artemis II

In such ugly times the only true protest is beauty.
– Phil Ochs

As a teacher, as a performer, as a parent, you are only as powerful as you make other people feel.
– Jacob Collier

When I say I love, I mean I wait at the door for you to arrive, I mean the walls of my chest are decorated with your pictures; I mean it’s safe here.
– William Bortz

People will admire you more if they aren’t jealous of you.
– Ben Franklin

there is a weeping in this world.
all the waters are coming home.
– Jaiya John

I cannot love you gently, it’s not in me to love in part, so I will love you completely, and a little madly.
– Matthew Spenser

Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.
– Toni Cade Bambara

Here is something beautiful etc.
by Richard Brautigan

Here is something beautiful (etc.
I have so little left that you
would want.
Its color begins in your hand.
Its shape is your touch.

40% of people in the USA believe that the earth is no more than ten thousand years old. How do their brains cope with the idea that the Persian state has existed for 9000 years?
– Michael Wardell

The affect you have on others is the most valuable transaction there is.
– Jim Carrey

I’m beginning to suspect this life
is a study for another one,
research for a larger project
still taking shape.

– Maggie Smith

I’ll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.
– Henry Rollins

we’ve had vicious kings, and we’ve had idiot kings. But we’ve never had a vicious idiot for a king before
– Tyrion Lannister

It is not right to put strength ahead of wisdom, which is good.
– Xenophanes

Just because you were born into a small world doesn’t mean you don’t deserve a bigger one.
– Nan

The letter E is the word LIFE looked at vertically.
– Steve McCaffery

The lines of life are various; they diverge and cease
Like footpaths and the mountains’ utmost ends.
What we are here, elsewhere a God amends
With harmonies, eternal recompense, and peace.

– Holderlin

Shadow deniers may look like they have a head start, but numbness is a really high price to pay.
– Rachel McNassor

How we think about ourselves has everything to do with how we act toward one another.
– Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
– Carl Sagan

Even the smallest
action done with
good intention
is consequential.

– Sharon Salzberg

Only the US government can go to war with a country that popularized the game of chess and be utterly flummoxed as to how they’re being outmaneuvered at every stage.
– Nikita Gill

To succeed in the world, it is much more necessary to possess the penetration to discern who is a fool, than to discover who is a clever man.
– Voltaire

As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.
– Socrates

We don’t often notice the people who look after us, do we? Though we’d miss them if they weren’t there.
– Ann Cleeves

Keep calm and carry on.
– Winston Churchill

I hope I die warmed by the life that I tried to live.
– Nikki Giovanni

Knowing more about the soul and its mysteries you could free yourself from the fascination which makes you suffer.
– Carl Jung

Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.
– Barbara Kingsolver

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.
– David Quammen

If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle. / Our electioneering racers have started for the prize. Such a whipping and spurring and huzzaing! Oh what rare sport it will be! / How long will it be possible that honor, truth or virtue should be respected among a people who are engaged in such a quick and perpetual succession of such profligate collisions and conflicts?
– John Adams

The late senator, presidential hopeful, Paul Simon once said, “we know what happens when you prepare a nation for war, let’s find out when you prepare for peace.” Still waiting on that answer 48 years later.
– Jeff Hayford

I suppose the only thing at 50 you can really start to look forward to is just total irresponsibility.
– Johnny Depp

And in the night when thirty hawks are high
In pendent rhythm, and all the wayside loud;
When they are burning field and bush and hedge,
I’ll steal you like a penny from the crowd.
– Djuna Barnes

Finding The Root

To fully solve a problem, you first have to get to the root of it. The root is the source of the harm that is being caused and so it is the root that must be found and changed for the problem to be eliminated.

Once you start looking, you might find something that looks like the root, but also appears unalterable. You cannot see how this thing could be changed to be anything other than it already is. You might then investigate further, only to discover that it is not only solid, but also appears permanent or necessary.

This is a sign that you haven’t found the root, but rather another symptom of the problem. The actual root lies elsewhere — it is something that you haven’t seen yet. It’s possible that you cannot see it, because it exists outside the range of your current awareness. It might be something you take for granted, something that looks entirely obvious or factual, when it is really a contingent truth in disguise.

To find the actual root of the problem, you must first overcome the deficit of awareness. You must allow your investigation of the problem to become broader and deeper than before. This means you’ll need to let go of the false root you found earlier. If your attention remains focused there, it will continue to circle the false root, confirming its necessity and permanence, until you fall into hopelessness and give up.

When you see the actual root of the problem, the solution will be obvious to you. This doesn’t mean it will be easy, but you will know what you must do and feel motivated to do it. The problem will no longer seem permanent or unchangeable — it will instead look like something you can begin to fix right away.

You’ll start taking action because your new awareness has shown you the necessity of doing so. You’ll want to solve the problem for yourself and others with a new intensity and a new hope. It is through openness to alternatives and relentless questioning of everything that seems fixed that you can discover creative solutions even to those problems that seem completely impossible to solve.

– Suli Qyre

You can keep telling people that chaos is order, that retreat is triumph, that bombing is peace, that corruption is authenticity, that senility is virility, and that every setback is a brilliant game of multidimensional chess. Eventually, the contradictions pile so high that even the most devoted liar can no longer see over them. That is the moment we are entering now.
– Mary Geddry

God does not want the church to evangelize the world through the coercive apparatus of civil authorities, for to do so is to try and wrest control of history from God’s hands.
– William Cavanaugh

I don’t associate with people who blame the world for their problems. You are your problem. You are also your solution.
– Melissa McCarthy

and with it scorching gravel and dead birds.
I couldn’t breathe and spun around and around.
Anyone who saw me must have thought I was dancing.
It cannot be excluded that my eyes were open.
It’s possible I fell facing the city.

– Wislawa Szymborska, Lot’s Wife

And this is the magic I’m interested in: not the astonishment kind, not the how-did-he-do-that kind, but the release kind.
– Kay Ryan

The sky and the earth and the waters and the things that are in them, the fishes, and the birds and the trees are not evil. All these are good; it is evil men who make this evil world.
– Saint Augustine

May any praise of your character come from others instead of yourself.
– Joyce Rachelle

The Irish way of telling a story is a complex and elaborate one, complete with wild exaggerations, a certain delight in improbable fantasy, and a heightened sense of drama.
– Rashers Tierney

The value of art is not how much it costs or how little effort it takes but what you would risk to be in its presence.
– Guillermo Del Toro

The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
– Donald Hall

We are made of the stories we tell ourselves in the dark; may yours be a tale of resilience, a narrative of grace, and a testament to the love that stays when everything else departs.
– G.H. Goodland

A petty man is fond of employment.
– Zhuangzi

As the creators of sophisticated technologies, we have made ourselves increasingly machine-like; robotic servants of institutional systems we have been conditioned to revere, whose purposes we neither understand nor control, and of which we are afraid to ask questions.

Our corporate-state world plunders, enslaves, controls and destroys us, all in the name of advancing our liberty and material well-being. Most of us are dominated by an unfocused fear of uncertainty, a longing for the security of emptiness.”

– Butler Shaffer

Some people feel the rain, others just get wet.
– Bob Dylan

My heart is heavy, unliftable. I talk with angels.
– Marcel Proust

Darkness is impervious to light until the darkness wishes to see.
– April Lashon

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
– René Descartes

Its powerlessness is always behind anger. The ego pretends that your power is there in anger. But anger rises out of a sense of powerlessness.
– Eckhart Tolle

Unfortunates, who ought to begin with God, do not have any hope in him till they have exhausted all other means of deliverance. — for in prosperity prayers seem but a mere medley of words, until misfortune comes and the unhappy sufferer first understands the meaning of the sublime language in which he invokes the pity of heaven.
– Alexandre Dumas

The presidency is not merely an office of power; it is an office of example…
– George Will

We always see our worst selves. Our most vulnerable selves. We need someone else to get close enough to tell us we’re wrong. Someone we trust.
– David Levithan

I only pick the purple one when I want to change the narrative.
– Sheng Wang

These are the days that must happen to you.
– Walt Whitman

When the history books are written, someone will say there lived black people who had the courage to stand up for their rights.
– Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Ginebra
by William Archila

For my uncle, a drink must be extravagant
pleasurable but not sentimental. There must be
a love for the gurgle of the bottle, a sound
for the click of neck & lip which sleeps for years
in the canals of his ears. There must be fire
down his throat. The tumbler must have nerve
despite the pain in his backbone, despite the leg
that goes off. As a child when he first learned
to form questions did the answers light up
the bottle pocketed in his father’s jacket.
On winter holidays when he got so lit my father
drove him home & most likely put him to bed.
I always knew he would come like this, outdrinking
everyone & no one lifting a finger to stop what then
meant nothing now means every lick of it. I love
to see the lines of his eyes curve when he savors
juniper berries like a good monk in a monastery. I love
to hear him say, you gat dat right, when he speaks
of my dead father. It is possible to make a phrase sound
so beautiful there’s a rhythm to it. From my uncle
I’ve learned so much I’ve got nothing on his father.
I could paint the notes for you, the madder
& amber color of a bottle in a Rembrandt painting.
Such a non sequitur, I must exaggerate to be exact.
All my lousy life I have fallen for it, this dark brew
personified. I can tell the answers by the way
the gin rises in a burst out of his throat. I mean it
like a clenching mourner, I’ve carried a flask.

Poetry fails, in each poem, to be as good as poetry ought to be-or as I somehow think it somewhere is, somewhere I’m not looking. Every flesh is flawed and poems are flesh.
– Donald Hall

If a man’s thoughts are muddy, If he is reckless and full of deceit, How can he wear the yellow robe? Whoever is master of his own nature, Bright, clear and true, He may indeed wear the yellow robe.
– Buddha

“If the sun comes up tomorrow, it is only because of men of good will” and that is all there is between us and the devil.
– Kenneth O’Donnell

And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, ‘Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest.’ So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper.
– Tom Waits

Understanding our history is essential to building a truly equitable society.
– Nikole Hannah-Jones

Were you to grant me but one of my many requests, let it be this one: Don’t work so hard, go for walks

– Franz Kafka, 1914.

Fear will make a voice sound sharper than a mind filled with undeniable clarity.
– April Lashon

If a person’s heart does not overflow with love or anger, nothing can be accomplished in the world.
– Nikos Kazantzakis

We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.
– Nikki Giovanni

We are living in a time where the Pope is fighting harder to save US democracy than Democrats.
– Scott Fleck

Riding a fireball through the atmosphere is profound as well!
– Victor Glover, Artemis II

Humility is the most undervalued Godly virtue.
– Emily R. King

There will be times when moving forward hurts, moving backwards hurts, and standing still is deadly. So all I can say is, have courage and move in.
– unknown

Get out of your body sense. Your body is made out of the five elements, but, but it is not ‘You’. This body that you think is your whole world, is not permanent. As long as you are identified with the body, you are a sick person and still not ready for realization.
– Nisargadatta

There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.
– Bill McKibben

Nothing ever really ends. That’s the horrible part of being in the short-story business—you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. ‘Millicent at last understands.’ Nobody ever understands.
– Kurt Vonnegut

If your nervous system could speak, it would tell you that real love brings safety and clarity into your life, not chaos.
– Yung Pueblo

As we actually taste the flavor of what he’s teaching, we begin to see that it’s not proverbs for daily living, or ways of being virtuous. He’s proposing a total meltdown and recasting of human consciousness, bursting through the tiny acorn-selfhood that we arrived on the planet with into the oak tree of our fully realized personhood. He pushes us toward it, teases us, taunts us, encourages us, and ultimately walks us there.
– Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

Do you think you can clear your mind by sitting constantly in silent meditation? This makes your mind narrow, not clear. Integral awareness is fluid and adaptable, present in all places and at all times. That is true meditation. Who can attain clarity and simplicity by avoiding the world?
– Lao Tzu

The Essence of Belonging:

…You persist,
And a clean wind measures your persistence.

Along a cleavage in space the day becomes,
And you conspire in the invention of belonging,
Radiant, jealously imagined, estranged from time,

And to the crowded habitation of the mind
You bring a solitude, a mere and sensual silence
In which the essence of belonging belongs.

– N. Scott Momaday

In a love relation, as Jung once put it, you risk everything. You put yourself on a table, you stop the power game and the trying to dominate or conquer the other person. If you succeed in really loving the other person, if you really relate, then all sorts of miracles happen. But in the beginning stages a general state of blindness possesses you, illusions or wrong expectations, disappointments, recriminations. You have to work through all that first. And that’s how you become more conscious. I didn’t say it is agreeable. So if you don’t love the other, you run away after a while.
– Marie Louise Von Franz

If there were other lives,
I swear I spent them
trying to get back to you—
through different towns,
different sorrows,
different faces worn
over the same heart.

– EAC

Song for Baby-O, Unborn
by Diane di Prima

Sweetheart
when you break thru
you’ll find
a poet here
not quite what one would choose.

I won’t promise
you’ll never go hungry
or that you won’t be sad
on this gutted
breaking
globe

but I can show you
baby
enough to love
to break your heart
forever

One poem proves another and the whole,
For the clairvoyant men that need no proof:
The lover, the believer and the poet,
Their words are chosen out of their desire,
The joy of language.

– Wallace Stevens

Both nations got, through peaceful means and over decades, more of what they had murderously sought than their wars ever delivered — and got it more securely, more lastingly, and at a fraction of the cost.

This suggests a principle that ought to be obvious but apparently is not: any nation powerful enough to mount a serious military campaign is, almost by definition, powerful enough to pursue its interests through diplomacy, economic leverage, and strategic patience. The return on investment of war — measured in lives, treasure, and actual lasting gains — is almost always catastrophically negative compared to the alternatives. Even when you win.

– Curtis C. Morgan, Responsible Statecraft. Aggressors rarely
emerge victorious from conflict. So why do they fight?

By the smallest of one’s actions one can restore some sense of order to the world.
– Amor Towles

I want to be born again, in exactly the selfsame life,
aware this time from the inside out, and to stand this time
as a beautiful un-worrying witness, living beyond
the need for this or that…
– David Whyte

It is one of the beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Little history picks up where Great History leaves off.
– Tadeusz Nyczek

Sometimes two people have to fall apart, to realize how much they need to fall back together.

– Colleen Hoover

The moon isn’t beautiful.
It’s just an empty blush in the sky.

You want beauty?

Look at the sun
With your eyes wide open.

– john zbigniew guzlowski

I like to say that translating poetry is the deepest form of reading because you can’t speed-read a poem. It’s about deepening: deepening the experience and appreciating the power of imagination and emotion that’s there in a poem.
– US Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze

There is a Japanese Legend that says:

Whether it’s a machine, a house, or a relationship… Maintenance is always cheaper than repairing.” What you don’t maintain, you eventually lose.

Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
– Alan W. Watts

For resentments of any nature bring their fruit in the physical.
– Edgar Cayce

For the benefit of the flower,
we water the thorns too.
– Egyptian Proverb

Stop deceiving us philosophers
work is not a joy man is not the highest goal
work is deadly sweat Lord when I get home
I’d like to sleep but sleep’s just a driving belt
transporting me to the next day and the sun’s a fake
coin morning rips my eyelids sealed as before
birth my hands are two Gastarbeiter and even my tears
don’t belong to me they participate in public life
like speakers with chapped lips and a heart that’s
grown into the brain
Work is not a joy but incurable pain
like a disease of the open conscience like new housing projects
through which the citizen wind passes
in his high leather boots

– Adam Zagajewski, Philosophers

I can lead you to the goldmine, but you have to do the digging. I can share these things with you, but unless you do it yourself, you will never know that your real state of mind is consciousness. Do not believe what I say. Do the practice and see what happens.
– Robert Adams

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.
– Epicurus

I hope the failure to speak speaks.
– Ben Lerner

You can’t teach character. If you haven’t got it by now, you’re not going to get it. I can teach you how to use a camera, I can teach you how to write a script, I can’t teach you to give a fuck.
– Anthony Bourdain

You should not honor men more than truth.
– Plato

You have to develop a strong opinion of yourself so you don’t end up internalizing the beliefs others have of you.
– Victoria Nyanzi

Write about those moments / when friendship’s footbridges / seem more enduring / than despair.
– Adam Zagajewski

The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages.
– Anne Lamott

To end our dukkha, however, we need to understand and experience anatta, our lack of self, which seen from the other side is also our interdependence with all other things.
– David Loy

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.
– Logan Pearsall Smith

No opinion is worth burning your neighbor for.
– Voltaire

He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
– Joseph Joubert

Isolate as much as you want to become stronger, even if you see that loneliness is an unbearable hell, it is much better than the multiple masks of humans.
– Dostoevsky

bills due —
in my dream
the endless stairs

– Michael Dylan Welch

School is the crucible where raw vitality encounters the collective will to impose order and control but also to bring cultural richness to lives that might otherwise remain inhibited and crude.
– Tim Parks

each stands equally
beneath the drifting
blossoms

– Basho

In the bird’s eyes
west is
where the sun sets
and east is
where the sun rises;
that’s it.

– Abbas Kiarostami

Wisdom begins only when one takes things as they are.

So it is a healing attitude when one can agree with the facts as they are, only then can we thrive.

– Carl Jung

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
– Henry Ward Beecher

You remember the insults you received far more than those you gave.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Of all the stars in the known universe, isn’t it a grand coincidence that we should all happen to end up here.
– D. A. Powell

Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

There is hurt within the word.
Word that hurts and, strangely, comforts
Mystery of its strangeness.

– Edmond Jabes, (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop)

True health fundamentally means to be in tune with the nature, both inner and outer.
– Sadhguru

Someone who knows that he can contradict also knows that he, as it were, agrees if he does not contradict.
– Hannah Arendt

If you really feel the urge to speak, definitely stay silent, and most of all don’t say what you want to say.
– Leo Tolstoy

We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.
– Russell Kirk

It is not the object discovered that matters, but the light that falls on it.
– Boris Pasternak

The New York and Frankfurt intellectuals never joined forces, indeed hardly ever met. Only Hannah Arendt, who had not been a member of the Frankfurt group, bridged the two worlds.
– Frank Krupnik

Whenever our minds are occupied with hatred and revenge, we must realize that we have become unhealthy, sick. When our minds are filled with love, we are healthy. A heart filled with love is a clear sign of good health and a stable mind.
– Mohanji

People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.
– James Baldwin

You should study risk taking, not risk management.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Treat the impossible as if it were possible!
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

All are mere words, of what use are they to you? You are entangled in the web of verbal definitions and formulations. Go beyond your concepts and ideas; in the Silence of desire and thought the truth is found.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

I SO LIKED SPRING

I so liked Spring last year
Because you were here;-
The thrushes too-
Because it was these you so liked to hear-
I so liked you.
This year’s a different thing,-
I’ll not think of you.
But I’ll like Spring because it is simply Spring
As the thrushes do.

– Charlotte Mew

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
– Milan Kundera

Delight in meditation and solitude. Compose yourself, be happy. You are a seeker.
– Buddha

The most alive people I know get sick a few times per year. Sickness humbles people. You dip your toes in the pool of death, and come back reborn. When your sick, you feel what health is. If your healthy all the time, you’re the fish that can’t see the water.
– George Mack

Number Two: I Try to Waken and Greet the World Once Again

In a pine tree,
A few yards away from my window sill,
A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down,
On a branch.
I laugh, as I see him abandon himself
To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do
That the branch will not break.

– James Wright

One of the truisms of human life is that the older you are, the more you live in the past.
– Walter Mosley

You never know what worse luck
your bad luck has saved you from.
– Cormac McCarthy

the rise and fall
of these Pacific waves  —
a ten-year exile
from my country
and from my self

– Chen-ou Liu

Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
– Emil Cioran

Revolutions of our day are sometimes seen as manifestations of an impulse to freedom that may put an end to history as we have known it.

Freedom alone, however, is far too abstract a goal. As Heine said, freedom is a prison song: those who care about it are those who have been deprived of it. History tells us that, ever since Adam’s six hours in paradise, man has never known what to do with freedom except throw it away. Involved in the Christian conception of original sin is the perception that no human society is likely to do anything sensible for longer than the time that it takes to break a New Year’s resolution. Despite this, I think there is a real truth in the notion of an impulse to freedom, but it needs to be placed in a broader and more practical context. …

We want to live and love, but we go to war; we want freedom, but depend on the exploiting of other peoples, of the natural environment, even of ourselves. In the twentieth century, with a pollution that threatens the supply of air to breathe and water to drink, it is obvious that we cannot afford the supremacy of ideological concerns any more. The need to eat, love, own property, and move about freely must come first, and such needs require peace, good will, and a caring and responsible attitude to nature.

– Northrop Frye

Centre oneself in the invariable: some have managed to do this, they have hit the true centre, and then? Few have been able to stay there.
– Confucius

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

entering old age
I look less for truth
but find it more —
a mid-winter thaw reveals
pieces of sky

– George Swede

There’s truths you have to grow into.
– H.G. Wells

You should … live in such a way that there is nothing which you could not as easily tell your enemy as keep to yourself.
– Seneca

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

– Maya Angelou

All the things that
lie before you are
revelations, and they are
without end.

– Lou Andreas-Salomé

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
– Carl Jung

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
– Walter Benjamin

Low energy is caused by being too tense.

A tense body is always the product of stress.

De-Priotorize most things in your life and the stress will fade.

And over time your energy level will rise.

– @moveorperish

I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.
– Fernando Pessoa

You describe it all splendidly, but couldn’t you perhaps describe it a little less splendidly?
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.
– Eckhart Tolle

Consciousness is literally self-reflection, self-awareness, the ability to know the self by knowing what is not the self.
– Bashar

The price of empire is America’s soul, and that price is too high.
– J. William Fulbright

So what is this radical
idea? That most people,
deep down, are pretty
decent.

– Rutger Bregman

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
– William Burroughs

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Eventually we must give up trying to be something special.
– Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Every act of kindness gives back to the world a piece of its lost heart.
– Sue Monk Kidd

Dream Fields
by Gary Innes

I can smile and laugh with you
Share a memory at the bar
Hug and hold and talk of old
But inside my minds afar
Far from the dream fields
Where thoughts were swung aside
The black dog now wants to walk
Leash pulling at my side

Far from the dream fields
Where life will carry on
Far from the dream fields
Where there’s no right or wrong
Far from the dream fields
Where we made our history
Until we meet again my friend
Here’s to you and here’s to me

The north wind is blowing
On mind and adversity
While the dark clouds linger
A light shine’s perfectly
But not with you mortal souls
That fight with gravity
It’s elsewhere in another realm
An Aird, a galaxy

Far from the dream fields
Where life will carry on
Far from the dream fields
Where there’s no right or wrong
Far from the dream fields
Where we made our history
Until we meet again my friend
Here’s to you and here’s to me

In my prime, It’s now my time
To change course on this road
Where to start on mind and heart,
Door unlatched to my abode
That of a new world
Without despondency
Now the shadow of my soul
Stands by you constantly

Far from the dream fields
Where life will carry on
Far from the dream fields
Where there’s no right or wrong
Far from the dream fields
Where we made our history
Until we meet again my friend
Here’s to you and here’s to me

The Boys of War

The boys of war are at it again

transferring the ‘epic fury’
they feel toward their fathers
onto others.

The boys of war are at it again

aiming the alienation they feel
from women
from Nature
from Earth-rooted people
from people wiser than they
onto ‘The Any’ and ‘The Other’
who resemble anything different than they.

The boys of war are at it again

projecting their projectiles
their hatreds
displacing their loneliness
so others will feel the same.

The boys of war are always the same:
bold and boisterous
sending the sons and daughters
of others into harm’s way

yet not having the courage
to truly face themselves
in a room
in the dark
in a mirror
night or day.

All the tributaries of tragedy
they spin up, and spin out,
and send down the line
for their children’s children to bear…

…all because the the boys of war
never received a true blessing from anyone
leaving them incapable of doing the same.

– Frank Inzan Owen

Settling of the Dust

Clearing away shit piles
removing cupid’s arrows
falling silent.

What now?

Having become a hidden mountain,
I am at the mercy of clouds and rain,
shadows upon shadows,
refractions within dreams.

I cannot join the world of titles again.

What would I call this human windsock
being blown about by the Great Pattern?

– Frank Inzan Owen

Sage-ing

I know you won’t believe me
but there are men
who are pregnant
with river-dragons
in their bellies.

It is a ninety-year pregnancy.

– Frank Inzan Owen

Tribute to the Sun

As the slanting sun
turned Her shoulder
toward Night

I thought of Her
many contributions made
gone unnoticed by the masses.

Infinite rivers of light
cascading down
renewing the land

coiling around trees and sundials
reflected in slow-flowing rivers
children’s faces
hummingbird eyes
as they sip from blossoms.

Across every domain there is,
there are givers,
there are takers,
there are conscious, grateful receivers.

– Frank Inzan Owen

I hate when people ask about my career goals. Listen Susan, I just want to read a good book, play outside, take a nap, and have a snack. Basically, I’m trying to get back to kindergarten, but with adult money.

– Paul Avellino, Writer and Humorist

We walked where the ancient pier juts into the sea.
Stood on the rim of the pool, by the circle
of black boulders. No one saw we were there
and everyone who had ever been there
stood silently in air.

Where else do we ever have to go, and why?

– Naomi Shihab Nye, Isle of Mull, Scotland

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.
– Richard Powers

But to understand the overall situation, we have to imagine that everything is made of an undivided energy that has the desire and the capacity to experience and know itself. I call this unified field ‘One’.
– Federico Faggin

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?
– William Shakespeare

What ferocious beauty the line from Shakespeare puts on! … While it has its modulation of despair, it holds its plea and its plea is noble. There is no element more conspicuously absent from contemporary poetry than nobility. There is no element that poets have sought after, more curiously and more piously, certain of its obscure existence. Its voice is one of the inarticulate voices which it is their business to overhear and to record.
– Wallace Stevens

It was true yesterday, it’s still true today and it’ll be true tomorrow: sand castles eventually fall to the tide of reality.
– Mary Geddry

The same ignorance that produced the crisis becomes the reason it spirals. […] The stagecraft is failing because the actors have become too incompetent to memorize their lines, too arrogant to notice the audience laughing, and too delusional to admit the set is on fire.
– Mary Geddry

When the astronauts return, we have to keep a part of our consciousness up there, gazing down, seeing why we need to heal.

We cannot forget.

– Joseph Fasano

often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk—and to act.

– andré malraux

Harmony is inclusive. Perfection is exclusive. When we are with an individual who is living from the centre, we instinctively sense that they are a whole person.
– Liz Greene, Apollo’s Chariot

Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves.

This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times.

– Kurt Vonnegut

We are reminded by ancient counsel that we should be aware of getting what we want. Depth psychology echoes this: we could be getting simply what the complex wants, what the unconscious history wants, what the unlived life wants.

– James Hollis

Preference for a human being can be of two kinds. Either we are seeking some particular good in him or we need him. In a general way all possible attachments come under one of these heads. We are drawn towards a thing, either because there is some good we are seeking from it, or because we cannot do without it.

– Simone Weil, Waiting on God

If you know friendly me, easygoing me, sincere me, then we’re probably buddies. If you’ve been subjected to uncontrolled, completely out-of-pocket weirdness me, you’re probably one of my chosen people.
– Justin Hamm

It’s a cliché, certainly, to say an artist or a writer should lead a questing life. It’s less often acknowledged, however, that in pursuing such a quest, a person frequently leaves behind a trail of at least minor injustices. I believe an artist has to remind herself or himself, in other words, that when you write or paint or compose music, you draw in mysterious ways on the courtesy and genius of the community. It is this sensitivity to gifts welling up unbidden, this awareness of the fate of the community, no matter how ego-driven or self-absorbed a writer or artist might become, and no matter how singular the work, that divides art from commerce.

In traditional communities all over the world, this ethic of communal reciprocity, in my experience, is what separates acts of selfishness from the work of leadership.

The role of the artist, in part, is to develop the conversations, the stories, the drawings, the films, the music—the expressions of awe and wonder and mystery
—that remind us, especially in our worst times, of what is still possible, of what we haven’t yet imagined. And it is by looking to one another, by attending to the responsibilities of maintaining good relations in whatever we do, that communities turn a gathering darkness into light.

– Barry Lopez

The political demand for piecemeal (as opposed to Utopian) methods corresponds to the decision that the fight against suffering must be considered a duty, while the right to care for the happiness of others must be considered a privilege confined to the close circle of their friends… But the use of political means for imposing our scale of values upon others is a very different matter. Pain, suffering, injustice, and their prevention, these are the eternal problems of public morals, the ‘agenda’ of public policy.
– Karl Popper

The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
– Blaise Pascal

Injustice occurs in free states as in despotic states; and the attempt to right the wrong is as unpopular and dangerous in the one as in the other.
– A. J. P. Taylor

There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely – or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence
that the world in its hypocrisy demands.
– Oscar Wilde

It is a royal privilege
to do good and be ill
spoken of.

– Antisthenes

I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?
– Emil Cioran

The world is full of people who have never,
since childhood, met an open doorway with an
open mind.
– E.B. White

In nature the deepest root of a tree is the “radicle” or taproot. When it comes to human nature, each soul has its own radical roots that connect us to deep inner resources. The taproots of the soul involve surprising capacities for resiliency as well as deep wellsprings of creativity.

More than the ability to withstand adversity, true resiliency involves a creative vulnerability that allows us to both “spring back” and “leap forward.” To avoid overwhelm and find meaningful ways forward, we need to tap the resources of our souls which connect to the timeless roots of imagination and the endless energies of creation.

– Michael Meade

There is far too much work done
in the world

– Bertrand Russell

Meritocracy is the lie that keeps the oppressed blaming themselves rather
than the system that oppresses them.
– Sofo Archon

I am perfectly aware that art, in all forms, is vastly greater than I am. While I may reject most of what I experience in the art world, I feel obligated to do what I am able to do to keep this world going. . . I believe it is the obligation of all creative people to keep creativity moving. It is increasingly clear to me that my art relates more and more to a sublimation of my closeness to the natural world, its events, light itself, and the positive. What I do seems natural and simple to me; to others it may appear as a miraculous performance. It is neither simple nor miraculous; it is a personal expression based on observation and reaction that I am not able to define except in terms of the work itself.
– Ansel Adams

Splashdown

Tomorrow, the astronauts will reemerge
from their journey around the world and
behind the moon. So much depends upon
parachutes; on the ability to catch oneself.

glazed with rain*

They’l see flames out their windows, then
hit the Pacific like a car crash. Will the blue
chop all around them feel like home? Will
they hate the gravity of gravity? They’ll be

the hatching

unable to walk, but I’m more curious about
how they’ll manage to talk, and how they’ll
go about trying to quote the deep-space air.

luna moths

after WCW

– KHD

The Secret Word
by A. Harris

A poem with a secret word?
Come on, this isn’t fair.
Readers shouldn’t have to think
Of words that might be there.
Stupidity – that’s all it is.
This really drives me spare.
I’ll never find your hidden word.
Can’t make me. I don’t care.

The majority of mankind is lazyminded,
incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid
in emotion, and is therefore incapable of
either much doubt or much faith.
– TS Eliot

Keep the Pineal Gland operating and you
will Never grow Old, You will always be
Young.

– Edgar Cayce

Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.
– Robert Anton Wilson

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.
– Aaron Rose

The Self is the same in a beggar and a king; only the costume is different.
– Ashtavakra

The truth never hides, it is always hidden by others who cannot and will not endure or embrace it.
– Baba Taji Nanji

What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.
– Paul Hawken

To become learned, each day add something. To become enlightened, each day drop something.
– Lao Tzu

The petty bourgeoisie will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory.
– Karl Marx

if I show my tenderness of love
a tree, too, will start talking —
spring moon

– Heinosuke Gosho

You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite.
– Madeline Miller

If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.
– Wendell Berry

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
– Zora Neale Hurston

May quietness descend upon my limbs,
My speech, my breath, my eyes, my ears;
May all my senses wax clear and strong.
May Brahman show himself unto me…

– Chandogya Upanishad

Better a brief warfare and eternal rest, than false peace and everlasting torment.”
– Charles H. Spurgeon

Don’t forget that everything you deal with is only one thing and nothing else.
– Paulo Coelho

Of all the places in the world, she belongs in Florida. How dispiriting to learn this of herself.
– Lauren Groff

The soul that is virtuous is one that turns its rhythms not to the domination of others, but to their benefit.
– David Bentley Hart

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
– Simone Weil

Expect poison from the standing water.
– William Blake

I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn’t capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.
– Albert Camus

The longer I live, the more I become convinced that the only thing that matters in literature is the (more or less less irrational) shamanism of a book, i.e. that the writer is first of all an enchanter.

– Nabokov to Edmund Wilson

Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
– William James

Cultivate your beginner’s mind. Be willing not to be an expert. Be willing not to know. Not knowing is nearest. Not knowing is most intimate.
– Zenkei Blanche Hartman

Everything has 2 faces: one of passing away, one of becoming.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Stop thinking about art works as objects and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. What makes a work of art good for you is not something that’s already inside it but something that happens inside you.
– Brian Eno

A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
– Antonin Artaud

When we treat everything as “mine,” fear quietly follows fear of losing, changing, or not getting enough.

But when we see life as a temporary stay, like a guest, we begin to relax.

A guest enjoys, appreciates, but doesn’t cling.
And that’s where peace begins.

– Brahma Kumaris

To practice movement we need two approaches:

Training to progress.

Play to improvise.

Both sides of the coin are necessary to unlock
he full potential of the human body.

– @moveorperish

People do not turn pale nowadays as often as they did, and still do, in fiction.
– Nabokov to Edmund Wilson

Your neurosis is a religious experience that you are not taking correctly. Don’t get rid of it, but mature it.
– Robert A. Johnson

I used to think that to write poems, to make art,
meant trying to transcend the prosaic elements

of the self, to arrive at some essential plane, where
poems were supposed to succeed. I was wrong.

– Rick Barot

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill… we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.
– Plato

Never defile your Self, by hating yourself. Never believe there is any mistake you’ve made that is going to rise up against you. Everyone has made mistakes, forget it. Begin to realize who you are, begin to love yourself dearly, lift yourself up and become free.
– Robert Adams

The amusements of modern urban populations tend more and more to be passive and collective, and to consist of inactive observation of the skilled activities of others.
– Bertrand Russell

It is the force of love that will lead beyond fragmentation, loneliness, and fear.
– Sharon Salzberg

Kindness is a decision. It’s a decision to incline the heart toward goodwill for all beings, especially those that are suffering in ignorance, knowingly or unknowingly.
– Ruth King

Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
– William James

It is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit.
– Socrates

If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly.
– Andrew Harvey

It’s easy to be a naive idealist. It’s easy to be a cynical realist. It’s quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
– William James

The ultimate truth is so simple. It is nothing more than being in the pristine state. This is all that need be said.
– Ramana Maharshi

The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.
– William James

Try to be predictable to your friends and unpredictable to your enemies, rather than the opposite.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
– William James

One should strive to understand what underlies sufferings and diseases – and aim for health and well-being while gaining in the path.
– Buddha

Earth is a polka dot.

– Yayoi Kusama

We may fight against what is wrong, but if we allow ourselves to hate, that is to insure our spiritual defeat and our likeness to what we hate.
– George William Russell

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne

All human beings are alone. No other person will completely feel like we do, think like we do, act like we do. Each of us is unique, and our aloneness is the other side of our uniqueness. The question is whether we let our aloneness become loneliness or whether we allow it to lead us into solitude.
– Henri Nouwen

literacy is more than reading comprehension; it is also understanding how another person (the author) is inviting you (perhaps challenging you) to imagine another experience, perspective, life.
– Chen Chen

And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be – unutterably – contained in what has been uttered!
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

We have no reason to hope that the advancement and perfection of computerization will have any effect upon human morality and ethics.
With present attitudes, it will only supply another tool for human beings to abuse.
– Manly P. Hall

You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares and I would not. I think it’s a bad bargain.
– Cormac McCarthy

First, come inside,
then see what needs to be done
in the world.

– Mooji

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
– William James

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
– Henry David Thoreau

Whether a thing is a symbol or not depends chiefly upon the attitude of the consciousness considering it.
– Jung

We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I’m nothing but nausea, nothing but reverie,
nothing but longing. I’m something very far
removed, and I keep going!
– Fernando Pessoa

Corollary to Moore’s Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Good timber does not grow with ease; the stronger the wind, the stronger the trees.
– J. Willard Marriott

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think…
– Franz Kafka

An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all.
– Socrates

Politics, wars, causes—for thousands of years we have ended up with a sack of shit. It’s time we learned to think.
– Charles Bukowski

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.
– Voltaire

All things find fulfillment by actualizing their nature. You don’t need to seek anything else. If you pin your happiness on anything outside of that, you won’t be free.
– Marcus Aurelius

The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity.
– Epicurus

We are here to find that dimension within ourselves that is deeper than thought.
– Eckhart Tolle

Modernitys double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In times of crisis, preaching reasonable things is to feel like losing your mind.
– José Ortega y Gasset

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate oddfellow society.
– Henry David Thoreau

Lonelier now, dependent on one another
utterly, though not knowing one another at all,
we no longer lay out each path as a lovely meander,
but straight ahead.

– Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke; tr. Stephen Mitchell

Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
– William James

Life is in charge. We can fight it and be miserable or surrender to it and laugh at our own arrogance and ideas of what should be.
– Gangaji

In this model of fiction, the writer is asking, ‘What would you like to say, story?’ rather than ordering, ‘O.K., story, here’s what I need you to do.’
– George Saunders

What a glorious time they must have in that wilderness, far from mankind and election day !
– Henry David Thoreau

On his head shall be helm,
in his hand lightning,
afire his spirit,
in his face splendor.
The Serpent shall shiver
and Surt waver,
the Wolf be vanquished
and the world rescued.

– J.R.R. Tolkien

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.
– Bob Dylan

Writing something
To leave behind
Is yet another kind of dream:
When I awake I know that
There will be no one to read it.

– Ikkyu

Dealing with any man means dealing with multiple personalities.
– Rick Riordan, The Serpent’s Shadow

Instead of looking at what’s depressing, look at what’s a blessing.
– Kristen Butler

Kindness was a garment she wore, in the hopes of never being seen, for either the chaos or pain, that always knocked on her door.
– Harriet Thames

They told me the best revenge would be a life well lived.
And the strongest one to holds, would be the hardest one to earn.
– Brandi Carlile

The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective.
– Aldous Huxley

When you really think about it, Artemis II was a very long roundabout way to get from Florida to California.
– Nick Caputo

The ability to simplify, complexity is evidence of understanding.
– Buddha

[the human heart] no matter what the era… never changes.
– Sigrid Undset

If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object; but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become an easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check.
– Thomas Jefferson

Taoism is the most perfect expression of the universal truth I have ever known.
– Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower

Perhaps some day I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.
– Sylvia Plath

A friend to all is a friend to none.
– Aristotle

I believe that there is a longing in my soul that searches the whole world.
– Søren Kierkegaard

I crave the kind of quiet vastness
that reminds my worries
they were never meant to feel this big.
– Dede Hawkins

To stay stable, root yourself in values, breathe through uncertainty, and let your peace come from within, not from what changes around you.
– Ayoub Imilouane

Love me wild,
with dirt on my soul
and stars in my veins—
I am both earth and sky.
– Dede Hawkins

To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beast.
– Ruskin Bond

We have the opportunity to begin the world over again.
– Thomas Paine, 1776

The only thing I know is this: I am full of wounds and still standing on my feet.
– Nikos Kazantzakis

To give a purer sense to the words of the tribe.
– Mallarme

It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
– Mahatma Gandhi

Relationality is not the absence of conflict; it includes disagreement, resistance, and the protection of the vulnerable.
– Lerato R. Pitso

Hang on to your hopes, my friend / That’s an easy thing to say / But if your hope should pass away / Simply pretend / That you can build them again.
– Paul Simon

Almost anything you do will be insignificant, but you must do it. We do these things not to change the world, but so that the world will not change us.
– Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Writing is good, thinking is better. Being smart is good. being patient is better.
– Hermann Hesse

The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.
– C.S. Lewis

Sometimes the universe has to take away the almost – so you make room for the extraordinary.
– Dede Hawkins

Decency becomes the absence of strategy.
Our approach should be simple-minded sometimes,
very simple, allowing a sense of genuineness to emerge.
– Chogyam Trungpa

The foulest intellectual rubbish ever invented by man is that of racial superiority and inferiority.
– Kwame Nkrumah

But your greatest gift
And the curse you lived with
Was that you could always care.

– Harry Chapin, On Phil Ochs

The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can’t wake up.
– D. H. Lawrence

The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.
– Alexander Hamilton

No man chooses evil because it is evil.
He only mistakes it for happiness the good he seeks.
– Mary Shelley

It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
– Arthur Conan Doyle

There must be something like the opposite of suicide, whereby a person radically and abruptly decides to start living or rescue their own life from destruction/obscurity.
– Gabe Kates-Shaw

A word after a word after a word is power.
– Margaret Atwood

The poor die defending the rules that keep them poor.
Because they mistake obedience for belonging.
– George Orwell

The life force of our planet begs us to set down the devices, the constraints, and the social constructs and remember the warm blood that pulses through our veins. The Animal longs for breath, food, procreation, and physicality. It wants soil under our nails and starlight on our skin.
– Kim Krans, The Wild Unknown Archetypes

All that is done by man is the result of external influences.
– Anandamayi Ma

I believe there’s a deeper kind of fatigue etched into the spirits of people who deal with systemic oppression on a daily basis for years on end.
– April Lashon

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.
– Abraham Lincoln

If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.
– James Baldwin

The best writers I’ve read possess oodles of self-doubt, yet claw their way up with each work and remain humble. Boastful ones, not so much.
– Don Roff

Humility makes me cry! There isn’t a bigger asset than it.
– Nikita Dudani

Living for oneself is a bad thing. The keenest intellectual pleasure comes from being able to return to the self after being absent from it for a spell. But living all the time inside the self, that most tyrannical, demanding and capricious of companions – no, one shouldn’t do.
– George Sand

Nothing stands between me and God but the word “I.”
– Yunus Emre

A man can control only what he comprehends, and comprehend only what he is able to put into words. The inexpressible therefore is unknowable.
– Stanisław Lem, The Futurological Congress

Theology, even liberation theology, is organized around a sovereign God who takes sides, who decides who is oppressed and who is oppressor, who splits the world between the liberated and the damned. That structure — the structure of divine sovereignty and decision — is also the structure of the nation-state, the settler colony, and the empire.
– J. Kameron Carter

Great humility brings great grace.
– Lailah Gifty Akita

A person who is carried on another’s back does not know how far the town is.
– African Proverb

People decide what you’re like before they even get to know you.
– Celeste Ng

They think they know all about you. Except you’re never who they think you are.
– Celeste Ng

I think I simply found my place amongst the storytellers. It really changed my world, changed my life.
– Harrison Ford

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.
– Anais Nin

Please, please write to me – if addressed here it will be forwarded: I mean they will be forwarded: I mean you must write every week, or whenever you think of me, or see the moon in a puddle, or hear a dog howling or tread on grass.
– Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West

The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day.
– Robert Frost

Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back upon himself.
– Charles de Gaulle

“Integrity has re-entered earths atmosphere.”
Oh thank GOD. We really needed what little we had left.
– Stephanie Parks

I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.
– Arthur Koestler

I’d much rather everyone made music as opposed to going and beating the shit out of each other.
– Hans Zimmer

The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.
– G.K. Chesterton

There is no need to allow the ways
of the world to drag you down.
Enter the new, and know the
meaning of true freedom.
– Eileen Caddy

If a person has not been at a place where they asked, God where are you? That person has never known pain.
– Winnie Mandela

The wind knows how to read
So much water in this little river

Don’t lose the old religion Moon
We are strong because we need

– Robert Kelly

The origins of two Buddhisms — Theravada and Mahayana — Nagarjuna’s doctrine — and a thoughtful reflection by Alan Watts:

Early in its history, Buddhism split into two branches: Theravada and Mahayana. Theravada is sometimes thought of as the orthodoxy and Mahayana as the reform, but that is not accurate, since both emerged from the original Buddhist teaching. It can seem like Theravada is older because it was dominant early on but has since been quite overtaken by Mahayana, which itself split into several major and myriad minor subsets. Thus Mahayana reminds us of Protestant Christianity, but the metaphor should not be taken too far. Theravada Buddhists see practice of the Buddha’s dharma as the way to reach enlightenment—there is no supernatural help. They believe that reality, the truth, is the bliss they are seeking, so they value nothing above wisdom. Nirvana is understood as the result of penetrating contemplation of the nature of the universe. They see the Buddha as a historical figure, a man who made important discoveries and who has since served as the supreme teacher and inspirer. Over the centuries, many other people following the Buddha’s program had also “awakened,” and they, too, were called Buddha, so that the Buddha who had been Siddhartha had to be designated as such, and in Theravada these other Buddhas are also thought of as great teachers.

The main idea of Mahayana is that anyone enlightened enough to enter nirvana would refuse to do so, out of compassion for his or her fellow human beings. The classic story tells of three men, dying of thirst in the desert, who come upon a high wall. The first makes the effort, reaches the top, shouts out Oasis! , and jumps over. So does the second. The third reaches the top, sees the oasis, and stays put in order to direct other thirsty people toward the water. Someone who was about to step into nirvana, but who could not bear to go in without all of us, is called a bodhisattva—after the Bodhi tree underneath which the Buddha had come to enlightenment. Eventually, and in various places, the bodhisattvas were worshiped for this generosity: the best loved of all bodhisattvas is the Chinese goddess of mercy, Kwan Yin. She is often pictured carrying tears of compassion or pearls of illumination in a little vase. Like all bodhisattvas, Kwan Yin is praised for having refused Buddhahood until she knew that everyone had finished their painful cycles of death and rebirth, but Kwan Yin is understood as the most compassionate of all. She is so merciful that she will not rebuke someone even if he or she well deserves a lesson, and even people so corrupt that they would meet only penance in any other Buddhist system are renewed through her kindness if they call out to her in sincerity. Not all bodhisattvas made it that easy, but a central point of Mahayana was the claim that seeking enlightenment did not require leaving one’s life and joining a monastery. One could stay in one’s life, work toward enlightenment through some degree of stillness and silence meditation, and seek to commune with a bodhisattva through whose grace alone one might be saved.

Both Buddhisms saw themselves as rafts intended to ferry people over to enlightenment, and the Mahayana saw themselves as the big raft—that’s what Mahayana means. They tend to call their rival the little raft, the Hinayana , but the term is mildly derogatory. Theravada, the way of the elders , is what they call themselves. That term, raft, is important because the Buddha said the dharma was like a raft: once you get to the shore of enlightenment you can ditch the raft; there’s no reason to fetishize the thing if you don’t need it anymore. As I have said, the Mahayana split into many subgroups, but what they tend to have in common is an openness to a wide range of interpretation. Some of these have been accused of fetishizing the raft a bit, that is, of making the rituals and images of Buddhist practice an end unto themselves. There is something both looser and more egalitarian here. In contrast to Theravada, the Mahayana sects give later texts more importance, and the spiritual abilities of women are treated with considerably more respect. In many of the Mahayana sects, human efforts to reach nirvana are supported by divine powers, but not necessarily. Mahayana Buddhism is supposed to be for everyone, so it can be interpreted at whatever level works for each person.

The chief philosophical idea that allowed the great variation of Mahayana Buddhism is generally called shunyata [suññatā], and its philosopher was Nagarjuna, a Brahman priest living from 150 to 250 CE. Nagarjuna wanted to know how the Buddha’s system really worked, how awakening really came to pass. He didn’t actually say anything brand-new, but drawing on the sutras, especially the Prajnaparamita, he argued that everything our human minds come up with is equally wrong. Anything that can be framed as a duality is equally wrong on either side of the duality: so truth is neither being nor nonbeing. Nagarjuna concluded that there was ordinary knowledge and then there was transcendent, intuitive knowledge, or prajna. Just as the Buddha had suggested: really knowing that ordinary knowledge is useless for seeing the truth is the condition that can allow the rising of prajna. The mind naturally understands everything in divisive categories, defining night by differentiating it from day. The objective is to free the mind from its attachment to concepts. One has to somehow jostle the grip of the thinking mind until it lets go and you can begin to see the boundary-less, unified being. It is in this state that an awakening can happen. Alan Watts has described Nagarjuna’s doctrine:

There comes a moment when this consciousness of the inescapable trap in which we are at once the trapper and the trapped reaches a breaking point. One might almost say that it “matures” or “ripens,” and suddenly there is what the Lankavatara Sutra calls a “turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness.” In this moment all sense of constraint drops away, and the cocoon which the silkworm spun around himself opens to let him go forth winged as a moth. The peculiar anxiety which Kierkegaard has rightly seen to lie at the very roots of the ordinary man’s soul is no longer there. [Watts, The Way of Zen]

Nagarjuna’s vision is compelling because it spells out the transformative aspect of the experience: you are not going to realize something, you’re going to be knocked out of this whole “realizing” realm and into the total reality. We can’t even believe that there is no self because that is just a dyad with the belief that there is a self, and the thing about reality is that it isn’t the opposite of anything of which we can conceive. The world isn’t one, and it isn’t not-one either; it isn’t this and it isn’t that. Apparently, if you press your mind against this for a long while, some difficult thing pops. The Buddha’s notion of right thinking meant getting the ideas logically straight in your mind, but this new doctrine is not very respectful of right ideas because the content of the doctrines is no longer crucial—they just have to work to rattle you out of normality of concepts. That does seem to contradict the Buddha’s very clear instruction, but on another level, it is in perfect alignment with his message. One result of Nagarjuna’s doctrine was to allow the development of spectacularly diverse cosmologies and a lot of Buddha worshiping where there had once been a program of personal inner training.

It is not uncommon to see the atheist versions of Buddhism described as truer to the original Buddha’s message and considered more sophisticated than the others. Yet the more popular, metaphysically fanciful versions are also regarded as true in their own way. Since there is no philosophically justifiable conception of reality, the more fanciful is at least in the right spirit of things—it’s at least different from the everyday rational mind. Of course, some people who think of the Buddha as a savior are not doing so to jostle their rational mind’s hold on reality; they are believing in a savior. In Mahayana there is ritual and petitionary prayer. Also, in most Mahayana sects, karma and samsara are back: in fact, the whole concept of becoming a Buddha is seen as possible only within the superstructure of karma—it takes a lot of lives for a person to reach this level of enlightenment. Mahayana also teaches that there are thousands of Buddhas, each presiding over a distinct Buddha-realm or Buddha-verse. Again, all of this appears to have moved away from the original teaching, but the Mahayana say that Buddha’s compassion was his chief message and that these doctrines are true to that compassion in a way that makes Theravada seem self-centered and cold. Mahayana values compassion above wisdom.

– Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt, A History

You must remain
kneeling. Even as this moon
making its way through the earth’s
cumbersome shadow, prayer, too,
has its phases.

– R. S. Thomas

Stop thinking, and end your problems. Silence is a source of Great Strength.
– Lao Tzu

The moon is a house
in which the mind is master.
Look very closely:
only the impermanence lasts.
This floating world, too, will pass.

– Ikkyū Sōjun (tr. Sam Hamill)

Things might have been different, but they could not have been better.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

In a sense, I’m the one who ruined me: I did it myself.
– Haruki Murakami

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.
– Carl Jung

The moon is not friendly
No, nor the sun
Nor the darkness, nor
Even the bands of maidens bringing offerings
Pouring libations, buried
Among the ineluctable dead.
– C. H. Sisson

There are shooters of the moon far north.
There are dying eyes holding diadems.
There are deaths sweet as laughing waters.
There are gold heelprints on the fading
staircases of the stars.

– Carl Sandburg

Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains… rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.
– Edward Abbey

The history of all human ideas is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy and of error.
– Karl Popper

What feels like pressure, confusion, or pain is not here to break you—it’s here to shape you.

Growth often hides behind discomfort. Trust the process, even when it doesn’t make sense.

– Brahma Kumaris

No one stumbles
All the way to the top
Of Mount Fuji.
Single-mindedly go forward,
Sweeping aside the pebbles in the path.

– Awa Kenzo

You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references money in his conversation.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is pride that maintains troubling memories deeply concealed; it is pride that separates us from ourselves and others. Individual neurosis and oppressive social structures stem essentially from pride hardened and petrified.
– René Girard

And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.
– Acts 4:32

A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.
– Leo Tolstoy

Without trying to do something, we simply practice, in the same way as when we are hungry, we eat; when we are tired, we rest.
– Maurine Stuart

To see what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.
– Confucius

I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don’t get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.
– Henry David Thoreau

For soldiers, we use the term “mercenary,” but we absolve employees of responsibility with “everybody needs to make a living.”
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Genuine prophecy always sounds a little indecent to those whose minds are closed to its truth.
– René Girard

There is nothing more rebellion than finding joy in something that’s supposed to be your punishment.
– Albert Camus

I am writing to you from the end of the world.
You must realize this. The trees often tremble…
must everything tremble, always, always?

– Henri Michaux, (tr. Richard Ellmann)
I Am Writing to You From a Far-Off Country

Love sees everything without distortion, and eventually transforms into the third Buddha wisdom, mirror-like wisdom, which sees everything clearly, just the way it is.
– Anne Klein

The wondrous, luminous mind is your true nature. In apophatic terms, you’re already empty. In cataphatic language, you are already free!
– Guo Gu

To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

So, here you are
too foreign for home
too foreign for here.
never enough for both.

– Ljeoma Umebinyuo, Diaspora Blues

Dear Reader
by James Tate

I am trying to pry open your casket
with this burning snowflake.

I’ll give up my sleep for you.
This freezing sleet keeps coming down
and I can barely see.

If this trick works we can rub our hands
together, maybe

start a little fire
with our identification papers.
I don’t know but I keep working, working

half hating you,
half eaten by the moon.

A thousand half-loves
must be forsaken to take
one whole heart home.
– Rumi

Either this stripped-down solitude or the storm of love- nothing else in the world interests me.
– Albert Camus

Man invented
the atomic bomb,
but no mouse in the world
would ever build
a mousetrap.

– Albert Eintestin

The phrase ‘God is dead’ may have made some sense in the Nietzschean context, but as a slogan it’s sheer idiocy. It is far more likely that in the twenty-first century the birds in the trees will be singing ‘Man is dead, thank God.’ What really is dead is the antithesis between a subjective man and an objective God. Nietzsche, by the way, was a power and will worshipper, and because everything man does goes in a circle, he had to wind up with his identical-recurrence horseshit.
– Northrop Frye

Spring rain visiting
That week the clouds left behind
A branch of yellow

– Kathleen Bednarek

If you observe wherefrom all the thoughts arise, then they would all be dissolved in the heart. What Is only will remain.

– Ramana Maharshi

When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.
– C.S. Lewis

I don’t write this letter to put
bitterness in your heart, but to
pluck it out of mine. For my
own sake I must forgive you.

– Oscar Wilde

Reality itself is gorgeous.

It is the plenum; the fullness of total joy.

– Alan Watts

In art there is only one thing
that counts;
the thing you can’t explain.

– georges braque

The conflict in the world is nothing but a symbol of the conflict inside of people.
– Manly P. Hall

One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.
– C.S. Lewis

I cannot know who I am, because I don’t know which part of me is not me.
– Erich Fromm

Our minds quietly try to make sense of others, filling in gaps with quick assumptions.
– Mushim Patricia Ikeda

Quatrain

He sought the music of the distant spheres
By night, upon an empty plain, apart;
Nor knew they hid their singing all the years
Within the keeping of his human heart.

– Wallace Stevens

I would’ve given her the whole world… but she wanted someone who already had it.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

So I watched her leave, not because she didn’t love me… but because I wasn’t enough to make her stay.
– Franz Kafka

Each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen
– Anne Sexton

What you are looking for is already where you are looking from
– St Francis of Assisi

Walking slowly home through the dark avenue of trees, tasting the brackish harbor wind, I remembered Justine saying harshly as she lay in bed: We use each other like axes to cut down the ones we really love.
– Lawrence Durrell

Ecology and spirituality are fundamentally connected, because deep ecological awareness, ultimately, is spiritual awareness.
– Fritjov Capra

Scale matters: small/medium is beautiful, more stable & genuinely more efficient long term. Large becomes top-down.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Munindra, a 20th-century Indian teacher from Bengal, taught that if a meditator is sitting and he knows that he is sitting, then he is meditating.
– Charles Genoud

ANGUISH

Keep thou
Thy tearless watch
All night but when blue-dawn
Breathes on the silver moon, then weep!
Then weep!

– Adelaide Crapsey

The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen – which is (apparently) much easier.

– G.K. Chesterton

The citizen and the novelist in me are always at war, and that can be enormously productive, as long as neither of them wins.
– Javier Cercas

One day I woke up and
we no longer spoke the
same language. I haven’t
heard from you since.

– Hishaam Siddiqi, Where did you go?

An educational institution … can never be sustained on the basis of relevance. Relevance is a disease for which education is a possible, though by no means a certain, cure. It is a disease of nervous degeneration, like St. Vitus’s dance, and it ends by destroying the sense of individual identity. We begin by trying to relate social phenomena to ourselves, but end by partitioning ourselves among the phenomena.
– Northrop Frye, The Beginning of the Word

For never yet has a wicked man been wise.
– The Odyssey, Homer

It’s crazy to me how Robin Hood is now popularized as “stealing from the rich to give to the poor”

(Socialist messaging)

In reality, Robin Hood stole back the taxes that a cruel leader unjustly levied against the population

(Anti-socialist messaging)

– Lauren Chen

There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see.
– Naguib Mahfouz

I’m a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favors businesses where owners are still in charge.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Tongue
by Raffi Joe Wartanian

translated from the Western
Armenian by the author

for Dr. Haroutune Armenian

Estranged from my tongue
Words dissolve to drops
Until meaning remains fluid
Until my self becomes
M i r r o r
Without reflection
Without light
Only shadow remains
Only the search
Toward nation
Toward land
Toward being
Toward …

My tongue is a foreign traveler
Living in my mouth
Without invitation
An unfamiliar kindred.

My tongue is an ocean
Home to a sailboat
Filled with exiles
Who, one-by-one, create
Sounds, sayings,
Sentences,
Poems,
Until the sail rips.

My tongue
Is a memory of the past
A promise to the present
A path toward the future.

The vilification by Nazi elements within the media has not only given me a fierce joy to continue my work—more and more alone out here, as darkness falls on the barricades—but has also made me profoundly orgasmic, mysteriously rich, and constantly at war with those vengeful retro-fascist elements of the Establishment that have hounded me all my life. It has also made me wise, shrewd, and crazy on a level that can only be known by those who have been there.
– Hunter S. Thompson

After tragedies, one has to invent a new world, knit it or embroider, make it up. It’s not gonna be given to you because you deserve it; it doesn’t work that way. You have to imagine something that doesn’t exist and dig a cave into the future and demand space. It’s a territorial hope affair. At the time, that digging is utopian, but in the future, it will become your reality.
– Björk

In order to rectify that basic anxiousness, we create heavy-handed situations. We come up with intense aggression; we come up with intense passion; we come up with intense pride. We come up with what are known as the kleshas-conflicting or confused emotions-which entertain our basic anxiety and exaggerate it altogether. We do all sorts of things because of that basic anxiety, and because of that, we begin to find ourselves in more trouble and more pain.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Did I go to the hardware store for bread?

Why do we look for what we want where it isn’t?

– Anne Heaton

People used to think that learning to read evidenced human progress; they still celebrate the decline of illiteracy as a great victory; they condemn countries with a large proportion of illiterates; they think that reading is a road to freedom. All this is debatable, for the important thing is not to be able to read, but to understand what one reads, to reflect on and judge what one reads. Outside of that, reading has no meaning (and even destroys certain automatic qualities of memory and observation). But to talk about critical faculties and discernment is to talk about something far above primary education and to consider a very small minority. The vast majority of people, perhaps 90 percent, know how to read, but do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word, or, conversely, reject it altogether. As these people do not possess enough knowledge to reflect and discern, they believe—or disbelieve—in toto what they read. And as such people, moreover, will select the easiest, not the hardest, reading matter, they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and convince them without opposition. They are perfectly adapted to propaganda.
– Jacques Ellul

Be a provenance
of something gathered, a summation of
previous intuitions, let your vulnerabilities
walking on the cracked sliding limestone
be this time, not a weakness, but a faculty
for understanding what’s about
to happen.

– David Whyte

BLUE

During last night’s blue moon
the Great Matter and Original Mind
were as close as your skin.
In the predawn dark you ate muskmelon
and the color of the taste lit up the mind.
The first finch awoke and the moon
descended into its mountain burial.

– Jim Harrison

Fukanzazengi: Put aside the intellectual practice of investigating words and chasing phrases, and learn to take the backward step that turns the light around and shine it inward. Your body and mind will drop away of themselves, and your original face will manifest. If you want to get into touch with things as they are, you – right here and now – have to start being yourself, as you are. You met the Buddha Way in this life – how could you waste your time delighting in sparks from a flint stone? Form and substance are like the dew on the grass, the fortunes of life like a dart of lightning – emptied in an instant, vanished in a flash. Please, honored followers of Zen, long accustomed to groping for the elephant, do not doubt the true dragon. Devote your energies to the way that points directly to the real thing. Revere the one who has gone beyond learning and is free from effort. Share the wisdom of Buddhas with Buddhas, transmit the samadhi of ancestors to ancestors. Continue to live in such a way, and you will be such a person. This treasure house will open of itself; it is up to you to use it freely.
– Eihei Dogen

Hope Watches

Hope watches from the window
like a small child waiting
for his parents to come home.

His eyes are the lights
hope keeps burning
long into the night, even when

it seems no one will return.
Hope breathes on the glass,
asks each of us to write our name,

leave some sign that we were here,
that we cared enough
to keep searching.

– James Crews

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.
– Leo Tolstoy

Time travel works! Just yesterday I was in the past.
– Philip White

I do think the purpose of fiction is to reanimate our lives, reenchant our selves, and turn us back into the irreducible complexity of the smallest, simplest day.
– Richard Powers

Staying After
by Linda Gregg

I grew up with horses and poems
when that was the time for that.
Then Ginsberg and Orlovsky
in the Fillmore West when
everybody was dancing. I sat
in the balcony with my legs
pushed through the railing,
watching  Janis Joplin sing.
Women have houses now, and children.
I live alone in a kind of luxury.
I wake when I feel like it,
read what Rilke wrote to Tsvetaeva.
At night I watch the apartments
whose windows are still lit
after midnight. I fell in love.
I believed people. And even now
I love the yellow light shining
down on the dirty brick wall.

The only time my education was
interrupted was when I was in school.
– George B Shaw

But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they are. They are subjects for study, like everything else.
– Oscar Wilde

Good leadership requires
you to surround yourself
with people of diverse
perspectives who can
disagree with you without
fear of retaliation.

– Doris Kearns Goodwin

In youth, it was a way I had,
To do my best to please.
And change, with every passing lad
To suit his theories.

But now I know the things I know
And do the things I do,
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you.

– Dorothy Parker

I see the Beat Generation as the literary wing of the environmental movement.
– Michael McClure

Every book grants you the language
you need to make contact
with something you had no idea even existed.

– Dalia Taha, (tr. Sara Elkamel)

If your society depends on perpetual war to exist, it is not a society. It is a war machine in which each person, civilian or military, plays their role. If what you have created requires constant defense, maybe it is the world that needs defending from what you have created. When ceaseless, invasive offense is cast as patriotic defense, the concept of patriotism is ripe for reckoning. War is not freedom, even if you believe you have won. Freedom from war is freedom. Fly that flag on every peak.

– Jaiya John, Freedom: Medicine Words

Let us not waste our time in idle discourse!
Let us do something, while we have the chance!
It is not every day that we are needed.
Not indeed that we personally are needed.
Others would meet the case equally well, if not better.
To all mankind they were addressed,
those cries for help still ringing in our ears!
But at this place, at this moment of time,
all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.
Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!
– Samuel Beckett

The experience of God is so inexpressible that even those who have experienced God cannot express their experience to somebody else. The word ‘mystic’ describes one who has come across such a truth that he can only say that it is an unexplainable mystery.
– Swami Dhyan Giten

I don’t think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
– W. H. Auden

Where did the shooting stars go?
They flit across my childhood sky
And by my teens I no longer looked upward—
My face instead peered through the windshield
Of my first car, or into the rearview mirror,
All the small tragedies behind me,
The road and the road’s curve up ahead.

– Gary Soto

The capacity for inner dialogue is a touchstone for outer objectivity.
– Carl Jung

Innocence is not a matter of age.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

Contemplation means placing a larger frame around everything, so the small falls into place and we’re reminded of all that doesn’t change. It’s like walking out of a tiny cell into a vast sunlit meadow. No magic or amazement, but just a change of perspective–and proportion.
– Pico Iyer

I need help and advice: I ought to have got it sooner.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

There is a solitude of space,
A solitude of sea,
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be,
Compared with that profounder site,
That polar privacy,
A Soul admitted to Itself: Finite Infinity.

– Emily Dickinson

Life is not linear or predictable, and when we stop wanting it to be, and begin to engage with its circularity and its mysterious depths—well, that’s when things start to get interesting.
– Paul Kingsnorth

Unless we learn to love God’s creation, we can neither truly love nor truly know God.
– Shams Tabrisi

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the
bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that
twisting in dark passions produced everything great or
inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid
beneath everything, what would life be but despair?
– Søren Kierkegaard

Other people’s expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one’s being.
– Winnicott

It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.
– George Eliot

God is behind all things, but all things hide God. Things are black, creatures are opaque. To love a being, is to render her transparent.
– Victor Hugo

For many of us, the body is more repressed and denied than even the mind or the heart. It makes both presence and healing quite difficult, because the body, not just our mind, holds our memories.
– Richard Rohr

A philosopher uses logic without statistics, an economist uses statistics without logic, a physicist uses both.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing we’ll ever do.
– Brené Brown

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.
– George Eliot

Lack of self-knowledge leads to
self-defeat.

– Vernon Howard

Listen with your body, your heart, your eyes, your energy, your total presence. Listen in silence, without interrupting. Fill any spaces of silence between you with love.
– Beth Roth

Emotional pain cannot kill you, but running from it can. Allow. Embrace. Let yourself feel. Let yourself heal.
– Vironika Tugaleva

and the weight of external heat crushes the heat-hating Puritan
whose self-defeating vice becomes a proper sepulcher at last
that love may live
– Frank O’Hara

Most people are afraid of suffering. But suffering is a kind of mud to help the lotus flower of happiness to grow. There can be no lotus flower without the mud.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

Mindfulness can refashion the links in the chain of actions and consequences. In doing so, it unchains us, frees us, and opens up new directions for us through the moments we call life.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn

this grief
not the grief expected
no tears
just miles of sand
and endless desert

– Brian Zimmer

You are not of the world, just as Jesus was not of the world.
– Henri Nouwen

As the work becomes more professional, something is gained and something is lost.
– Jacob Wren

When you say ‘Yes’ to others, make sure you are not saying ‘No’ to yourself.
– Paulo Coelho

I plant roots so deeply in the people I love that I always lose a piece of myself when they go.
– Beau Taplin

When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

Psychoanalysis is, in essence, a cure through love.
– Freud

There are two types of narrative: one is where is the food the other is who is God?
– Will Self

Any wound rather
than a wound of
the heart.

– Ecclesiastes 25:13

You can use this mind either to create wellbeing or misery for yourself. Everyone has this choice.
– Sadhguru

Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
– Lao Tzu

I’m becoming less dogmatic the more I learn about the soul and the spirit world. Increasingly, everyone’s beliefs and experiences and behaviors seem valid to me.
– @tao_lin

The feeling of emptiness is the most fundamental experience of human existence, and yet it is the one we most desperately seek to avoid.
– Lacan

Literature is perhaps creative, but what it creates is always recessed in relation to what is, while this receding only renders what is more slippery, less sure of being what it is, and because of this as though attracted to another measure.
– Blanchot

You have comfort. You don’t have luxury. And don’t tell me that money plays a part. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have no fear of discomfort.
– Jean Cocteau

i’m not fully okay yet,
but i’m not where i used to be either.
and somehow,
that gives me a little hope.

– Literarium

I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.
– Charles Bukowski

It’s (spirituality) driving my work. You cannot separate. I cannot say I have a professional life and apart from that I am also a spiritual person. I cannot keep that apart.
– Wim Wenders

Nearly all of our faults
are more forgivable
than the means we
use to hide them.

– François de La Rochefoucauld

The proper length for a short story is to go as far as you can without going so far that you have forgotten the beginning.
– Russell Banks

Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know —
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.

– Leonard Cohen

Don’t rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage.

Go beyond it altogether.

– Nisargadatta

The secret of being happy consists of knowing how to enjoy yourself—enjoy being at table, in bed; enjoy standing up, sitting down; enjoy the nearest ray of sunshine, the slightest bit of landscape. In other words, love everything.
– Gustave Flaubert

He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.
– Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

He who knoweth that he and the infinite are one mind cannot be quenched for he burneth with eternal fire – He Is the living flame.
– Ethiopian Proverb

The people it is impossible to love are precisely those near to one, while one can really love only those who are far away.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
– Thomas Jefferson

When I bend down to tie my shoes in the morning I think, ‘Christ almighty, what now?’
– Charles Bukowski

I want the present without dressing it up with a future that redeems it… I want to find the redemption in today, in right now, in the reality that is being, and not in the promise, I want to find joy in this instant.
– Clarice Lispector

People like you to be something, preferably what they are.
– East of Eden, John Steinbeck

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.
– Leonardo da Vinci

No story sits by itself. Our lives are connected like threads on a loom interwoven in ways we never realize.
– Mitch Albom

Whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination.
– Joseph Campbell

Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
– Alain de Botton

Continual learning is the key to continual living.
– Dan Miller

Don’t order one for the road, because the road is already laid out.
– Flip Wilson

We’d been through something our parents hadn’t. The war made us older than our parents. And when you’re older than your parents, what are you going to do? Who’s going to show you how to live?
– Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

The mobilization of structures of power against evil often moves the agents of that power, when possessed by their shadow, into the grip of the very forces they perceive so vividly in the enemy.
– Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche

If a man who enjoys a lesser happiness beholds a greater one, let him leave aside the lesser to gain the greater.
– Prince Guatama Siddharta

Wars are begun by frightened men.
– Tom Clancy

it is at the edge of the petal
that love waits

– william carlos williams

Vanity makes us do more things that are distasteful to us than reason does.

– François de La Rochefoucauld, Moral Reflections

Two Years Later

The hollow eyes of shock remain
Electric sockets burnt out in the skull.

The beauty of men never disappears
But drives a blue car through the stars.

– John Wieners

Don’t make friends who are comfortable to be with. Make friends who will force you to lever yourself up.
– Thomas J. Watson

The span we live is small – small as the corner of the earth in which we live it.
– Marcus Aurelius

Forgiveness is a
little hard to find,
but it’s the only town
I want to live in.

It’s quiet here
and real estate
is cheaper.

– Rudy Francisco

Arms

Northern Ireland’s
great unifier was
not John Hume,
it was Kenny Rogers
as The Gambler,
John Denver
on Country Roads,
Neil Diamond
and Sweet Caroline.
Everyone was there
Belting it out
and, linking, linking
arms.

– Ewen Glass

Longing is what turns us inside out until we find the sun and the moon and stars inside.
– Peter Kingsley

God is blind. Did you not know that?… He created us that we would be his guides, his five senses.
– Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

But we are already under the Eugenist State; and nothing remains to us but rebellion.
– G.K. Chesterton

Buddha saw the same old age and sickness and death that we see, but he was driven to find the root causes. His realization that all compounded things are impermanent was his ultimate triumph.
– Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

Avoidance of boredom is the only worthy mode of action. Life otherwise is not worth living.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What does beyond ego look like?
you’re helping vs. judging
you have power to act vs. stuck as a victim of your circumstances
you have an open mind vs. narrow thinking you want to be right vs. happy
you have a clear vision of reality vs. believing your stories.

– Cy Wakeman

Literature is perhaps creative, but what it creates is always recessed in relation to what is, while this receding only renders what is more slippery, less sure of being what it is, and because of this as though attracted to another measure.
– Blanchot

The world is still a weird place, despite my efforts to make clear and perfect sense of it.
– Hunter S. Thompson

The wildness of mind that we experience when we sit quietly, noticing our body and breathing for five minutes, is the result of everything we’ve been doing before those five minutes.
– Gaylon Ferguson

At the first moment of clarity, the desire to improve the mirage ceases.
– Wu Hsin

Mercy consists in bringing a thing out of non-being into being.
– Thomas Aquinas

Has not one of the poets said that a noble friend is the best gift and a noble enemy the next best?
– C.S. Lewis

A common experience: Many brilliant scientists cannot grasp elementary philosophical distinctions. Last night I could not get a colleague to understand the difference between the “hard” (sentience, subjectivity, experience) and “easy” (reportability, information access) senses of “consciousness.” Nor the difference between a definition of consciousness and various explanations of consciousness. Hypothesis: scientists tend to equate rigorous thinking with mechanistic explanation, and don’t recognize that abstract concepts requires sharp analysis as well.
– Steven Pinker

The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization — absolute and unconditional — of its own particular law.
– Carl Jung

new in town
the lingering stare
of a stray

– Chen-ou Liu

the tactile sense
of the town
where I happened to step off

– Soshou Fukawa

Sometimes when I feel hunger I pretend like it’s fat leaving the body.

Hunger is an inevitable part of getting lean. Learn to deal with it.

– Dan Go

A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.
– Robert A. Heinlein

How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them?
– Charles Bukowski

Self Portrait

I am not a
calm water

poet

– Laura Kerr

Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people’s curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good inflammable stuff, it will catch fire.
– Anatole France

I gave them every version of myself
hoping one would be enough.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

But people only love the version
they don’t have to fix.
– Franz Kafka

the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we’re all winning
we’re alive

– Frank O’Hara

Intelligence is perhaps knowing at what moment it is better not to insist.
– Françoise Sagan

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.
– Michael Burke

Whoever loves becomes humble.

Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism.

– Sigmund Freud

Man does not possess wisdom; he merely approaches it, capable of feeling its love. However, this is always worthy of praise.
– Immanuel Kant

Ardently do today what must be done. Who knows? Tomorrow, death comes.
– Buddha

Your liberation thus depends on you.
The Teacher of both gods and humankind
Has shown to us the means.
No one else can save you through their sudden intervention,
Just as no one can prevent your dreams
When you are dazed in sleep.

– Padmasambhava

Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man.
– Primo Levi

Either you run the day or the day runs you.
– Jim Rohn

I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written.
– Irwin Shaw

In the other room there is a sofa on which I lie and feed on milk and honey.
– Franz Kafka, 1916.

Health is more about balance that’s specific to you, not a one size fits all approach.
– Eliot Tokar

The needle is small, but it joins what was torn. The scissors are sharp, but they only cut. Be like the needle, not the scissors.
– Kabir

Protesting is an act of love. It is born of a deeply held conviction that the world can be a better, kinder place. Saying “no” to injustice is the ultimate declaration of hope.
– Amy Goodman

No swami, no system of yoga, no religious organization, no doctrine or belief can lead you to the discovery of truth. Only the free mind can discover.
– Krishnamurti

Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.
– Sonmi in Cloud Atlas

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
– Plato

There are three things we cry for in life: things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.
– Douglas Coupland

Poetry is, after all, the grandest form of truth.
– Charles Spurgeon

By habitually seeing as a problem every tiny thing that does not accord exactly with our self-cherishing wishes, we exaggerate small things into huge problems.
– Zopa Rinpoche

Let us disarm words and we will help to disarm the world.
– His Holiness Pope Leo XIV

Unless I am able to analyze the unconscious aspects of the society in which I live, I cannot know who I am, because I don’t know which part of me is not me.
– Erich Fromm

Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.
– Dr. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
– John Fowles

Long-term relationships, the ones that matter, are all about weathering the peaks and the valleys.
– Nicholas Sparks

The world is very, very beautiful if you look at it….
but most people don’t look very much.
– David Hockney

First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God.
– Julian of Norwich

We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers — thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.
– Peter S. Beagle

Recognizing ‘enoughness’ is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

Another day, another chance to make the mistake that will save you.
– Joseph Fasano

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.
– Dag Hammarskjold

the human soul is deeper than hell, because hell doesn’t pretend to be good.
– Dostoevsky

It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
– Pi Patel

Don’t listen to every elder’s advice, even fools grow older.
– African Proverb

Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.
– Jeffrey Eugenides

Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.
– Plato

I seemed to hold two lives – life of thought, and that of reality.
– Charlotte Brontë

When you’ve been broken a long time, the cracks become a central part of your foundation.
– April Lashon

I can turn that negative energy into something positive.
– Yoko Ono

Never tell a person everything, you may be educating an enemy.
– Niccolò Machiavelli

You must become the man who refuses to stay where his soul is slowly dying. You must become the man who walks away even with tears in his eyes. Because he knows that the longer he stays the further he drifts away from himself.
– The Stoic Detachment for Men

Wars start when you will, but they do not end when you please.
– Machiavelli

Love liberates. It doesn’t bind. Love says, I love you. I love you if you’re in China. I love you if you’re across town. I love you if you’re in Harlem. I love you. I would like to be near you. I’d like to have your arms around me. I’d like to hear your voice in my ear. But that’s not possible now, so I love you. Go.
– Dr. Maya Angelou

An audience is neither refreshed nor entertained when not included as part of the playing.
– Viola Spolin

No matter how easy a job was physically, if it didn’t involve any imagination, it usually ended up exhausting you.
– Koji Suzuki

True grassroots activists support each other in different situations.
– Daniel Joseph Leach Jr

Wisdom always makes men fortunate: for by wisdom no man could ever err, and therefore he must act rightly and succeed, or his wisdom would be wisdom no longer.
– Plato

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood let alone believed by the masses.
– Plato

I made my money the old-fashioned way. I was very nice to a wealthy relative before they died.
– Malcolm Forbes

The reason why our souls are empty of joy, is because our mouths are empty of prayer.
– Robert Traill

Those who tell the stories rule society.
– Plato

The work did not end then, and it cannot end now.
– Bernice King (Daughter of Martin Luther King Jr.)

There is nothing more sacred than the Archives. Even temples can be rebuilt, but books cannot be rewritten.
– Rebecca Yarros, Fourth Wing

He who is not a good servant will not be a good master.
– Plato

Life is good. Life is hard. These two truths are unrelated.
– Glennon Doyle

If rainbow sidewalks threaten your moral compass more than war, I’d suggest your compass might be broken.
– @bumblingbard

Man’s instinct is to find a way to live, but who wants to be the last die?
– Mitch Albom

When we are kind, kindness grows.
– Mark Carney

I need an extraordinary amount of solitude to function as a human.
– Sadia Hakim

God brings men into deep waters, not to drown them, but to cleanse them.
– John Aughey

In terms of morals there is no such thing as ‘state.’ Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts.
– Robert A. Heinlein

When someone tells you they are too ‘busy’… It’s not a reflection of their schedule; it’s a reflection of YOUR spot on their schedule.
– Steve Maraboli

If a goal is worth having, it’s worth blocking out the time in your day-to-day life necessary to achieve it.
– Jill Koenig

Act as if everything always works out.
– Carl Jung

When a man points a finger at someone else, he should remember that three of his fingers are pointing at himself.
– Louis Nizer

Some thoughts should just be written on paper and not said out loud.
– Tyrone Fecher

We live our childhoods at least twice. First, we live through them with eyes of wonderment. And then later in life we have to revisit them to understand what it all meant.
– David Brooks

Other people hear a higher version of your voice than you do, because you’re hearing it resonate through your bones.
– Thomas Warren

Religion begat prosperity and the daughter devoured the mother.
– Cotton Mather

I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I’d like to be known.
– Kristin Hannah

Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today.
– David Bohm

Put up with it and you will get more of it.
– Lynne Deal

There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.
– Jane Austen

Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!
– Pope Leo

The fool wanders, a wise man travels.
– Thomas Fuller

colossal desire to escape, retreat, not talk to anybody.
– sylvia plath

Without a daily obligation, you are only existing.
– Zig Ziglar

Someone once said, “You could be the most beautiful shade of green, but it still wouldn’t be enough for someone whose favorite color is blue.”

And that healed something in me.

– Suliyana Aswan

You are the poison I am willing to take,
Are you willing to be my antidote?
– A. Crew

It’s not easy to be alive now
It wasn’t easy to be alive then
It’s not easy to be old
It’s not easy to be young.
– Iggy Pop

There are always threats and challenges. You deal with them by pureness of heart and quickness of wit, rather than by prudence or just not going because it’s dangerous.
– Adrian Tchaikovsky

Nothing better than memories, and nothing worse than them.
– Anton Chekhov

Music is like food. You don’t take a bite and then ask someone else if it’s good.
– Mike Muir

Put blinders on to those things that conspire to hold you back, especially the ones in your head.
– Meryl Streep

Goals are not only absolutely necessary to motivate us. They are essential to really keep us alive.
– Robert H. Schuller

Anytime in radio that you can reach somebody on an emotional level, you’re really connecting.
– Casey Kasem

“I am a battlefield of admiration.” He nodded at the horizon. “I cannot decide which I like best. The sunrise, or the sunset. They are like life, and her quiet companion, death.”
– Rachel Gillig

in this terrifying world you continuously offer someone else a little relief. why would you withhold that? do you remember what a little relief feels like? it feels like a lot.
– JB-Blunk

If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the f___ing window and find out which is true.
– Jonathan Foster

How shall I feel at the judgement, if multitudes of missed opportunities pass before me in full review, and all my excuses prove to be disguises of my cowardice and pride?
– William Edwin Sangster

The best way to cherish life is to remind yourself of life’s impermanence. It is to remember that every time you see someone that is one less time you see them.

It is to remember that every time you go somewhere that is one less time you visit.

By doing this, you naturally slow down. Almost like a reflex, you start to truly live.

– Andrew Anabi

How is the world inside your mind any less real than the one outside it?
– Sara Ella

Congress continues to become the Russian Duma, a willingly powerless peanut gallery deferring to the president in every way.
– Garry Kasparov

Micro-abandonment is when you neglect yourself in the most subtle ways. There was no single moment you lost yourself, there were a thousand small moments you chose everyone else.
– Christina Distasio

The hardest thing in the world is to be good & clear, because sometimes to be clear, you become obvious and when you’re obvious, you’re not good. So that is a lifelong sort of process, figuring out on each project, given its intentions and its demands, how to make it good and clear. Being obscure is easy. It’s easy to make something that is elliptical and difficult to grasp and fob it off on being artistic, and if you don’t understand it, that’s your problem.
– Steven Sorderbergh

For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn oneself into a universe of words.
– Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

You have to have an ego, but your ego must be at One with the subject. It must understand the subject and allow the subject to take over.
– Roy DeCarava

Who you are is not your state, province, neighborhood, country, religion, or any part of your culture. Who and what you are is beyond this plane of existence, but as a soul, you chose to come here.
– Jyotidātrī

Libraries are not made; they grow. Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.
– Augustine Birrell

If you have the power to geo engineer Mars into Earth, then you have the power to geo engineer Earth back into Earth.
– Neil deGrass Tyson

Can you step back from your own mind and thus understand all things? Giving birth and nourishing, having without possessing, acting with no expectations, Leading and not trying to control: this is the supreme virtue.
– Lao Tzu

The only way to ever heal is to go completely unapologetically and permanently silent.
– The Stoic Detachment for Men

The warehouse of fascism must be reduced to ash from time to time with the fires set by the abused workers.
– Thomas Jefferson

What keeps people in love is not what makes them fall in love in the first place.
– Arthur C. Brooks

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.
– Georg C. Litchenberg

Everybody knows that memory is not a simple accessible file whose contents remain undisturbed from one inspection to the next. Memory is an endless, lifelong process, fluid, active and mysterious.
– Helen Garner

You don’t have to convince anyone of who you are. You just need a crystal clear energy signature and they’ll feel it.
– Nika Solé

Nothing is harder on the soul, than the
smell of dreams, while they’re evaporating.
– Mahmoud Darwish

I never saw a wild thing sorry for
itself.
– D. H. Lawrence

If God forgives us we must forgive ourselves otherwise its like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than him.
– C.S. Lewis