You are a songbird right this minute. Today you’re a better songbird than you was yesterday, ’cause you know a little bit more, you seen a little bit more, and all you got to do is just park yourself under a shade tree, or maybe at a desk, if you still got a desk, and haul off and write down some way you think this old world could be fixed so’s it would be twice as level and half as steep, and take the knocks out of it, and grind the valves, and tighten the rods, and take up the bearings, and put a boot in the casing, and make the whole trip a little bit smoother, and a little bit more like a trip instead of a trap.
– Woody Guthrie
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between being optimistic and being hopeful. I would say that I’m a hopeful person, although not necessarily optimistic. Here’s how I would describe it. The pessimist would say, “It’s going to be a terrible winter; we’re all going to die.” The optimist would say, “Oh, it’ll be all right; I don’t think it’ll be that bad.” The hopeful person would say, “Maybe someone will still be alive in February, so I’m going to put some potatoes in the root cellar just in case.” And that’s where I lodge myself on this spectrum. Hope is a mode of survival. I think hope is a mode of resistance. Hope is how parents get through the most difficult parts of their kids’ teenaged years. Hope is how a cancer patient endures painful treatments. Hope is how people on a picket line keep showing up. If you look at hope that way, it’s not a state of mind but something we actually do with our hearts and our hands, to navigate ourselves through the difficult passages. I think that as a fiction writer—or any kind of writer—hope is a gift I can try to cultivate.
– Barbara Kingsolver
But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologico-cosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities. From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic.
– Peter Wessel Zapffe
Where does mercy exist? –
by Jess Housty (Cúagilákv)
When the power cuts out, you can hear
the snowfall. We ask who needs stew, sweet tea,
a load of firewood or a little gasoline.
People blend against the arctic outflows to love one another.
We are all speaking quietly
as though to avoid waking others,
but the truth is all of us are wide-eyed in the darkness,
seeking each other out for comfort.
The hum comes from all around me now:
some of us are speaking to our neighbours, some to our lovers, some to our children and some to our ancestors.
But we all talk low and slow to make the night into a ritual of connection.
This is how we utter ceremony,
a ceremony builds bridges,
across the darkness – a blanket gifted or loaned,
an armful of kindling, a prayer.
Really wish meditation teachers would finally let go of all the “Sit comfortably by a peaceful lotus pond” aesthetics, because what we’re actually called to do now is help people work with their own minds-and work with others—in the midst of a world we’ve set on fire.
– Ethan Nichtern
There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
– W.E.B. DuBois
It is curious, too, that though the modern man in the street is a robot, and incapable of love he is capable of an endless, grinding, nihilistic hate:
that is the only strong feeling he is capable of; and therein lies the danger of robot-democracy and all the men in the street, they move in a great grind of hate, slowly but inevitably.
– D. H. Lawrence
Ah City!
I would tell you how it was to
stalk your streets!
So young! Anonymous!
– Lew Welch
…we can only
Walk in temperate London, our educated city,
Wishing to cry as freely as they did who died
In the Age of Faith. We have our loneliness
And our regret with which to build an eschatology.
– Peter Porter
Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out
to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married
to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do
if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on, cheerfully enough,
this and every crisping day,
though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.
– Mary Oliver
THE VISIBLE WORLD
Lilac willing to be beautiful. Wild
blackberries, wild lack—
now my tenderness is full
of briars. The light like velvet.
It was a time in the world.
The bluey lake dimming, the rhubarb.
You know-that simple.
Despite everything, there is still a self in me
who worships the visible world
and doesn’t take it back.
Egrets. Milkweed. Milk.
I am being here, right now.
– Leila Chatti
Forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of understanding.
– Proverbs 9:6
These memories won’t get any bigger,
will they?
– Alice Fulton
It is impossible to control things from outside. To change your world all you have to do is manage your thoughts and feelings on the inside of you, and then your whole world changes.
– Rhonda Byrne
It is inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.
– Clarice Lispector
In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone.
– Hunter S. Thompson
All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit, is to stop seeking something more, or better, or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.
– Adyashanti
But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness.
– D.H. Lawrence
a bottle stuffed
with wildflowers
an autumn gift
– Issa
One Way or Another
by Maya C. Popa
it is you who leaves. So I set out
to read for signs of imminence,
the same river twice stepped in.
Morning rises gently on the harbor;
our letters come disguised as life.
We know the score but fracture
on fact. We sign a dotted line
made out of promise—the pipes
in November clanging on with heat,
the window left at night a little open.
I love you; then what? Hands
suddenly alive. I plead with time,
adamant, remorseless. So we begin
in earnest; what then? I plead
with time, adamant, remorseless.
Hands suddenly alive. I love you;
then what? The pipes in November
clanging on with heat, the window
left at night a little open. We sign
a dotted line made out of promise—
we know the score but fracture
on fact. Our letters come disguised
as life; morning rises gently on
the harbor. So I set out to read
for signs of imminence, the same
river twice stepped in. One way
or another, it is you who leaves.
React to no one, react to nothing. Do not react to the world. Do not even react to your own body. Do not even react to your own thoughts. Learn to become the witness. Learn to be quiet.
– Robert Adams
Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Happiness is simply the knowing of our own Being – the natural, effortless and innate condition of our Self, when it is no longer pulled into an imaginary past or projected into an imaginary future by resistance and seeking.
– Rupert Spira
If you are psychologically naïve you may believe that you are perceiving, rather than projecting.
– Murray Stein
The most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man; without failure, no ethics; for a being who, from the very start, would be an exact co-incidence with himself, in a perfect plenitude, the notion of having-to-be would have no meaning. One does not offer an ethics to a God.
– Simone de Beauvoir
MARVELOUS SHARING
Every time, it’s a miracle. Here are all these people, full of heartache and hatred or desire, and we all have our troubles and the school year is filled with vulgarity and triviality and consequence, and there are all these teachers and kids of every shape and size, and there’s this life we’re struggling through full of shouting and tears and laughter and fights and break-ups and dashed hopes and unexpected luck–– it all disappears, just like that, when the choir begins to sing. Everyday life vanishes into song, you are suddenly overcome with a feeling of brotherhood, of deep solidarity, even love, and it diffuses the ugliness of everyday life into a spirit of perfect communion…
Every time, it’s the same thing… everyone singing together, this marvelous sharing. I’m no longer myself, I am just one part of a sublime whole, to which the others also belong, and I always wonder at such moments why this cannot be the rule of everyday life, instead of being an exceptional moment, during a choir. When the music stops, everyone applauds, their faces all lit up, the choir radiant. It is so beautiful. In the end, I wonder if the true movement of the world might not be “a voice raised in song.”
– Muriel Barbery
YOU ARE EVERYTHING
Take a good look at yourself.
You are already saved.
You are originally Buddha.
You are overflowing with happiness and glory.
To talk of paradise or heaven is
to be talking in your sleep.
Take a good look at yourself.
Transcend time and space,
and you’ll see that you are eternal,
you are infinite.
Should the universe collapse and disappear,
you would still be immovable.
You are all forms and all formlessness
in the universe, the universe itself.
You are the twinkling stars and
the dancing butterflies – you are everything.
Take a good look at yourself.
All truths are within you.
To look for truth outside yourself is
to search for water outside of the ocean.
Take a good look at yourself…
Forget your selfishness and
use all your energies to help others.
If you remove all traces of greed and desire,
the Eye of the Heart will open up and
you’ll see yourself as you really are,
as pure gold.
– Seong Cheol Sunim
Let’s put down at least some of these gadgets and spend a little time just being ourselves. One of the essential problems of our society is that we have a tendency, amid all the craziness that surrounds us, to lose sight of what is truly human in ourselves, and that includes our own individual needs – those very special, mostly nonmaterial things that would fulfill us, give meaning to our lives, enlarge us, and enable us to more easily embrace those around us…
We need to reduce the speed limits of our lives. We need to savor the trip. Leave the cellphone at home every once in a while. Try kissing more and tweeting less. And stop talking so much.
Listen.
Other people have something to say, too. And when they don’t, that glorious silence that you hear will have more to say to you than you ever imagined. That is when you will begin to hear your song. That’s when your best thoughts take hold, and you become really you.
– Bob Herbert
I do not believe that our sexuality, gender expression and bodies can be liberated without making a ferocious mobilization against imperialist war and racism an integral part of our struggle.
– Leslie Feinberg
We’re a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that’s all. You can’t change history. History is happening to us now.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.
– Eckhart Tolle
The system wants us to be sad and we have to come to be happy to resist it.
– Gilles Deleuze
Poetry is inherently political; there’s not enough money changing hands for it to be anything else.
– Ramsey Tawfick
I wrote this letter to you to curb my consumption. To stop my fingers growing fatter. Love in the time of quantities, I begin to eat my pen.
– Ramsey Tawfick
The next life will be darker
than this so we must
prepare a light.
– Franz Wright
I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
I write prose with a poet’s head.
– Lucy Sante
November 4.
Paralysis again. How I waste my days. I feel a terrific blocking and chilling go
through me like anesthesia.
– Sylvia Plath
Cool how writing poetry requires turning off the part of your brain that can tell if it’s good
– @ratlimit
I’m a night writer and a binge writer—I could go sixteen, twenty hours. In those moments I am just not aware of having a body. My thoughts are elsewhere. I forget to eat. I’m barely functional as a human, my brain’s doing a little extra.
– Mary Robison
autumn wind
a couple red leaves
show an old caterpillar
how to fly
– @NJBarico
How do we write joy without all the implied exclamation marks, the gooey language, the purpling of our prose? How do we make, of joy, a story that is alerting, alive, and credible?
– Beth Kephart
We have to remember the virtues of our ancestors instead of justifying ourselves by carefully remembering their vices.
– Manly P. Hall
Most everything has been done before.
– Rosmarie Waldrop
One of the first signs of a saint may well be the fact that other people do not know what to make of him.
– Thomas Merton
The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence.’ There is no such mode of existence; every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.
– Alfred North Whitehead
We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.
– Teju Cole
If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child’s soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man’s wisdom for the child’s.
– Johan Huizinga
When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder. Evil is that which kills spirit. There are various essential attributes of life – particularly human life – such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy, will. It is possible to kill or attempt to kill one of these attributes without actually destroying the body. Thus we may “break” a horse or even a child without harming a hair on its head. Erich Fromm was acutely sensitive to this fact when he broadened the definition of necrophilia to include the desire of certain people to control others-to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredectibility and originalty, to keep them in line. Distinguishing it from a “biophilic” person, one who appreciates and fosters the variety of life forms and the uniqueness of the individual, he demonstrated a “necrophilic character type,” whose aim it is to avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming others into obedient automatons, robbing them of their humanity. Evil then, for the moment, is the force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness.
– M. Scott Peck
A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate “need” for “stuff.” A mall—the shops—are places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthy’s taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary, instead. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power.
– Caitlin Moran
To be away from home, yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world — such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.
– Charles Baudelaire
My memory rummaged through that heap of insignificant recollections that we haphazardly cast aside once our attention has judged them unfit for use — yet which, through some old thrifty habit of our subconscious, end up stacked away in the vast, empty chambers of remembrance, as in the attic of an old country house where three-legged chairs, dented buckets, cracked dishes, chipped jugs, and mismatched books take refuge, to endure quietly in their serene uselessness.
And sometimes it happens that we stumble among the innumerable castoffs of our memory, irritated or moved to discover there an object, an image that we would never have thought to keep.
– Marcel Brion
There is the inner life, which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time, consciously or unconsciously like the heartbeat. There is also the thinking process by which we break into the inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it. That process of raid, or persuasion or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we do not somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of man who cannot fish.
– Ted Hughes
The endless expanses of the human brain are crumpled to the size of a fist.
In April the swallow returns to last year’s nest under the guttering of this very barn in this very parish.
She flies from Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks over two continents, makes for precisely this vanishing dot in the landmass.
And the man who catches the signals from a whole life in a few ordinary chords for five strings,
who makes a river flow through the eye of a needle,
is a stout young gentleman from Vienna known to his friends as “The Mushroom,” who slept with his glasses on
and stood at his writing desk punctually in the morning.
And then the wonderful centipedes of his manuscript were set in motion.
– Tomas Tranströmer
In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
– George Orwell
They were both so scared they weren’t talking at all, which made me feel the kind of shame you know you’re not going to cure by saying sorry, and where the only thing to do is: go out, get more shame.
– George Saunders
Your voice I know. It had me terrified. When I hear it in dreams, from time to time all my life, it sounds like a taunt—but dreams distort sound, for they send it over many waters. During these hard days, I, a pilgrim, am giving my consideration to this. I trudge along the bottom of the river and the questioning goes on in me. What are we made of but hunger and rage? His heels rise and fall in front of me. How surprised I am to be entangled in the knowledge of some other animal.
– Anne Carson
“This isn’t about what is,” said Mr. Nancy.
“It’s about what people think is. It’s all imaginary anyway. That’s why it’s important. People only fight over imaginary things.”
– Neil Gaiman
To live in the world of creation—to get into it and stay in it—to frequent it and haunt it—to think intensely and fruitfully-to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation-this is the only thing.!
– Henry James
The writer’s role is to menace the public’s conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle for social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.
– Rod Serling
I’m alive. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really.
– Ray Bradbury
…I floated on my back, trying to pick out constellations I knew in the confusing white spatter of stars: Lyra, Cassiopeia the queen, whiplash Scorpius with the twin stings in his tail, all the friendly childhood patterns that had twinkled me to sleep from the glow-in-the-dark planetarium stars on my bedroom ceiling back in New York. Now, transfigured—cold and glorious like deities with their disguises flung off—it was as if they’d flown through the roof and into the sky to assume their true, celestial homes.
– Donna Tartt
I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.
– Gaston Bachelard
Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.
– Robert Wright
If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously—as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.
– George Saunders
What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea.
It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.
– Joseph Campbell
Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes.
– Joan Didion
So, which is it: did you leave your little room because you’ve made a habit of getting drenched, or because you don’t know which you like more: rain on the windowpane or rain on your hair?”
– Danilo Kiš
…it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.
– Helen (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre)
The tribe, an extended form of a family of blood relatives, is exploded by print, and is replaced by an association of men homogeneously trained to be individuals.
– McLuhan
He Tells Her
He tells her that the earth is flat –
He knows the facts, and that is that.
In altercations fierce and long
She tries her best to prove him wrong.
But he has learned to argue well.
He calls her arguments unsound
And often asks her not to yell.
She cannot win. He stands his ground.
The planet goes on being round.
– Wendy Cope
I wanted to write a book that was beyond
what usually gets communicated in language.
– Claudia Rankine
Even the absence of language – the gaps between
or beside words – come to seem like glyphs.
– Maggie Millner
People will secretly learn from you and never
tell you how much you’ve influenced them.
Keep going.
– Rumi
get your dopamine from what you create not what you consume.
– @isabelunraveled
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
– John Steinbeck
So rapidly does the ‘common good,’ without God behind it, sink into a mere blown—up projection of each man’s private desire! So readily does ‘the welfare of society’ become a cloak for the seizure of power by an individual or a clique!
– Joy Davidman
You have to talk,
otherwise your
head turns into a
cemetery.
– Chuck Palahniuk
I simply do not believe this world anymore. Not the outrage. Not the distortions. Not the people in any of the positions. I believe only the call of the divine that steers me in a completely different direction.
– Nika Solé
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
Receive my instruction, and not silver; and knowledge rather than choice gold. For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it.
– Proverbs 8:10-11
Some of our most powerful emotions, especially those connected with loss, are not beautiful, and Apollo does not necessarily make them beautiful. He makes them bearable. The object is not to create something pretty, but to offer one’s grief to the god, naked and unashamed. This is different from wallowing in it, which is not an act of offering. Grief can be horrific, but expressing it in this way changes the way we experience it. Feelings of grief are not usually beautiful. They are more often savage and black and brutal.
– Liz Greene
No painter could show what Flaubert has the Queen of Sheba say to the hermit: “I am not a woman, I am the world.”
– Hans Blumenberg
Wake up. Become free. There is no one for you to attach yourself to. There’s no one for you to worship. There’s no one for you to be afraid of outside of yourself, for you have created all these things yourself, out of your mind.
– Robert Adams
Our greatest need is to be silent before this great God with the appetite and with the tongue, for the only language he hears is the silent language of love.
– St. John of the Cross
External crisis are the symptoms, the cause is unconsciousness and chaotic mind. The aim of meditation is not to cure the symptoms, but to resolve the cause. Meditation can transform human beings.
– Brahma Kumaris
What’s interesting to me is that so many people have such a shoddy knowledge of history.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
From the outside, you seem mature with a philosopher’s mind. But inside, you’re just a child lost in a sweet delusion.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Almost everything glows when it’s healthy. That’s when you know.
– Nika Solé
To meditate means to go home to yourself. Then you know how to take care of the things that are happening inside you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Using the mind to look for reality is delusion. Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness. Freeing oneself from words is liberation.
– Bodhidharma
Are you lost if you know where you’re going– just not how to get there?
– Uzodinma Iweala
The Fall Almost Nobody Sees
by David Budbill
Everybody’s gone away.
They think there’s nothing left to see.
The garish colors’ flashy show is over.
Now those of us who stay
hunker down in sweet silence,
blessed emptiness among
red-orange shadblow
purple-red blueberry
copper-brown beech
gold tamarack, a few
remaining pale yellow
popple leaves,
sedge and fern in shades
from beige to darkening red
to brown to almost black,
and all this in front of, below,
among blue-green spruce and fir
and white pine,
all of it under gray skies,
chill air, all of us waiting
in the somber dank and rain,
waiting here in quiet, chill
November,
waiting for the snow.
In Psychopolitics, Byung-Chul Han describes the digital age as a shift from passive surveillance to active control. Instead of being forced, people are seduced. Freedom slowly crumbles within, as even our own will turns into something controlled and dominated by neoliberalism.
One voice to talk to us.
Yes listen. It carries away
The second and the years
– W.S. Graham
When everything has gone to hell, there’s nothing to do but to play idiotic games.
– Simone de Beauvoir
I never mistook pleasure as the final cause of poetry; nor leisure, for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work… and, as work, I offer it to the public, feeling it’s faultiness more deeply than any of my readers.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
There is only attachment; there is no such thing as detachment.
The mind invents detachment as a reaction to the pain of attachment.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
You can’t expect anything.
Even dawn is a presumption.
More raptors this year after two
good monsoons. I found a lush
and hidden valley I couldn’t bear
to enter today. It frightened me
as if it might be home to new species
of creatures God had forgotten to invent.
The old man is also a timid boy.
– Jim Harrison
Your unresolved issues will continue to call-in experiences to teach you what you need to learn.
– Bryant McGill
He discovers himself in her presence, that’s the thing. It is a reflection all others must play against. He is pleased with himself.
– James Salter
How many dream-washed limits of earth
must be drawn out
till music comes
from an alien star—
– Nelly Sachs (translated by Michael Roloff)
The soul exists partly in time and partly in eternity.
– Marsilio Ficino
Like wildflowers; you must allow yourself to grow in all the places people never thought you would.
– E.V.
Idolatry lies not in the idol but in the worshipper. It is a psychological attitude that governs his whole life, and a very murderous attitude. We begin by offering others to the idol; we end by offering ourselves.
– Joy Davidman
All my own perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded upon Our Lady.
– Tolkien
It was years, really, before I learned to drive, which, like many other things one learns, consists of paying attention, looking in the rearview mirror, and not counting on others to play by the rules.
– Cynthia Zarin
Use a reader’s leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel his time has been wasted.
– Kurt Vonnegut
In times past, poets had a sixth finger on each hand
to better endure the ache of writing.
– Nasser Rabah
Gold and silver are not real treasures.
A mind that knows contentment — that is the true treasure.
– Ajahn Chah
Nowhere, Beloved, will world be but within us. Our life
passes in transformation. And the external
shrinks into less and less. Where once an enduring house was,
now a cerebral structure crosses our path, completely
belonging to the realm of concepts, as though it still stood in the brain.
Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power,
formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.
Temples are no longer known. It is we who secretly save up
these extravagances of the heart. Where one of them still survives,
a Thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt before-
just as it is, it passes into the invisible world.
Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance
to build it inside themselves now, with pillars and statues: greater.
– Rilke
The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. Just move to the side and live differently.
– Richard Rohr
Sibyl
Once upon a painted gate
Many words were written—
Some effusive and some cunning.
I stood there reading day and night,
Though my clothes frayed, and
I grew hungry,
The cold was fresh
And fair and lovely, and
I ate the words like
They were curds and
Drank the air like
Honey
– Krikmöklet Egelanaard
Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.
– Erich Fromm
A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings: on condition that each being, each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess – in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and, in turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return.
– Gilles Deleuze
I can look back and see that I’ve spent much of my life in a cloud of things that have tended to push “being kind” to the periphery. Things like: Anxiety. Fear. Insecurity. Ambition. The mistaken belief that enough accomplishment will rid me of all that anxiety, fear, insecurity, and ambition. The belief that if I can only accrue enough – enough accomplishment, money, fame – my neuroses will disappear.
– George Saunders
The Next War
It will take place,
it will take time
it will take life,
and waste them.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
The difference between theory and practice is larger in practice than the difference between theory and practice in theory.
– Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut
Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty read-ing, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.
– Italo Calvino
Oh, THE WORLD OVER THERE, it’s
So hard to explain!
Just-like, a dream’s-got, lost in yer brain!
– Thomas Pynchon
Only then (nearly out the door, so to speak) did I realize how unspeakably beautiful all of this was, how precisely engineered for our pleasure, and saw that I was on the brink of squandering a wondrous gift, the gift of being allowed, every day, to wander this vast sensual paradise, this grand marketplace lovingly stocked with every sublime thing.
– George Saunders
E.L. Doctorow said once said that ‘Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.
– Anne Lamott
There are only four stages to life: infant, child, failure, and dead. That’s all you have.
– Dylan Moran
We should know clearly before we discuss a matter; to guess is one thing, to know clearly another.
– Aeschylus, Oresteia
[Lovingkindness] is a duplicate deliciousness. There are within it linked sweetnesses long drawn out. Lovingkindness. It is a kind of word with which to cast spells which should charm away all fears.
– Charles Spurgeon
Each day, acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes, as well.
– Seneca
No tyrant, however evil, has yet lacked ready hands to execute his most abominable will. To read how eagerly men have rushed to serve the despot is the bitterest, the saddest matter of history; it is the saddest sight in our own day.
– Richard Jefferies
Without meditation you don’t know the secrets of life, you know only the surface of life.
– Osho
Jung argued to an astonished scientific public that the mind functions best when it is connected to archetypal symbols, which free us from the literalism of reason and link us to the regenerative forces of the psyche.
– David Tacey
Breath-cloud. On cold mornings, that first white cloud of escaping breath is proof that we are living. Proof of our bodies’ warmth. Cold air rushes into dark lungs, soaks up the heat of our body and is exhaled as perceptible form, white flecked with grey. Our lives’ miraculous diffusion, out into the empty air.
– Han Kang, The White Book
In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
– William S. Burroughs
The greatest win is walking away and choosing not to engage in drama and toxic energy at all.
– Lalah Delia
Adopt new habits yourself: consolidate your principles by putting them into practice.
– Epictetus
Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity.
– Adam Phillips
The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
– Oscar Wilde
Whenever the powers of government are placed in any hands other than those of the community, whether those of one man, of a few, or of several, those principles of human nature which imply that government is at all necessary, imply that those persons will make use of them to defeat the very end for which government exists.
– James Mill, Essay on Government
Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them.
– Michel de Montaigne
The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle?
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus
Finger tracing the terrain, you hold me through autumn’s loss of color.
– Chloé Yelena Miller, Pop Rivet
Capitalism is obsessed with death. The unconscious fear of death is what spurs it on. The threat of death is what stirs its compulsion of accumulation and growth. This compulsion drives us towards not only ecological but also mental catastrophe.
– Byung-chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive
Encourage, lift and strengthen one another. For the positive energy spread to one will be felt by us all. For we are connected, one and all.
– Deborah Day
There are people whose whole life consists in always saying no. It would be no small accomplishment always to be able to say no properly, but whoever can do no more, surely cannot do so properly.
– Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments
When someone challenges dominating myths, the powerful strike back. This happened to the prophets. It happened to Jesus. It will happen to you, should you start poking at the myths that hold our society together. Poke anyway. God loves us too much for us to be enslaved by false myths.
– Maki Ashe Van Steenwyk
I am aware that there is a world out there that functions without regard to me. There are wars and budgets and bombings and vast dimensions of wealth and greed and ambition and corruption. And yet I don’t feel a part of that world, and I wouldn’t know how to join if I tried.
– Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!
To be an artist, you don’t have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It’s just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.
– Viggo Mortensen
the prayer is the earth shifting
continental spiritual drift
one tribe to another
exchanging nothing but movement
the functional traffic of energy
later this becomes known as war
– Ramsey Tawfick
Something I learned from writing about George Orwell is that authoritarians see truth, fact, history, science as rival powers. They want the only source of information of truth to be themselves, which is why they have to dismantle the deeply democratic nature of fact, truth, history, and science. And so that’s part of what’s going on.
– Rebecca Solnit
A problem is never solved on its own level; being complex, it must be understood in its total process.
– Krishnamurti
He knew that by confessing, one earned the subtle right to become confessor to the other, in his turn. A secret deserves a secret, and a tale deserves a tale; the gentle expectation of a response in kind was a pressure he knew how to apply.
– Eleanor Catton
Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.
– Martha Nussbaum
My mother used to tell me that poverty is not a sin, it is sin to be rich and humiliate others.
– Dostoevsky
Light is only possible through dialogue between cultures, not through rejection of one or the other.
– James McBride
The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.
– Michael Parenti
There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another.
– Rene Descartes
There are no incurable diseases — only the lack of will. There are no worthless herbs — only the lack of knowledge.
– Avicenna
Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.
– Dostoevsky
It’s so easy to look around and notice what’s wrong. It takes practice to see what’s right.
– Melody Beattie
As Jung discovered, the absence of a spiritual approach to life was in many cases the root cause of the psychological and existential problems his patients were experiencing.
– Keiron le Grice
Poems and stories are the whisperings of angels we cannot see.
– Jayne Anne Phillips
It is solely on the basis of common interest that every society should be governed.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
– Adrienne Rich
I live in a loving, abundant, harmonious universe, and I am grateful.
– Louise Hay
The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out.
– Irwin Shaw
The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.
– Albert Camus
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
– Sandra Cisneros
Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must recall that the basic principle is freedom of choice, which saying many have on their lips, but few in their minds.
– Dante
Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.
– Mary Shelley
The world is good natured to people who are good natured.
– William Makepeace Thackeray
Fun is good.
– Dr. Seuss
We don’t abandon our pursuits because we despair of ever perfecting them.
– Epictetus
There is an intelligence to the universe (of which we are fractal) and that intelligence has a character and that character is benign. Intends well toward all things. How could it not?
– Cormac McCarthy
Large angels take a long time unfolding their wings, but when they do, soar out of sight.
– Bessie Parkes
My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.
– Graham Greene
To make life a little better for people less fortunate than you, that’s what I think a meaningful life is.
– Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
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
Suspicion often creates what it suspects.
– C.S. Lewis
Let’s be poets first -all else is unessential.
– Anne Sexton
Poetry is not the change directly. — …I view it more as a signifier of change, the ‘poet of the picket line’ needs to write about the world around them in a way that makes movement but not be deluded enough to think that this alone can be their contribution, or at least that’s how I look at it to hold myself accountable.
– Ramsey Tawfick
The reader is an impatient bird, perched on the thin edge of distraction or sleep.
– William Zinsser
The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.
– Thucydides
Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other.
– John Steinbeck
People are divided by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love.
– bell hooks
Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression, because power, real power, comes from our conviction which produces action, uncompromising action.
– Malcolm X
The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.
– George Bernard Shaw
I hope death will be a great happiness, a happiness as great as that of love, fulfilled love.
– Hermann Hesse
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
– John Updike
I’ve always considered Christ to be one of the greatest revolutionaries in the history of humanity.
– Fidel Castro
When I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough women on the Supreme Court and I say: ‘When there are nine.’
– Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.
– Robert A. Humphrey
Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.
– Omar El Akkad
Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.
The ultimate rulers of our democracy are the voters of this country.
– FDR
We have to call this what it is: cultural — and sometimes physical — genocide by design. Hoffman’s eugenics, Reagan’s homophobic hate, and Trump’s xenophobia are all the same disease in different generations. They rely on public apathy, and on the willingness of good people to look away. Each time, the target group changes, but the mechanism remains: withhold care, strip rights, justify suffering, and declare it “justice”.
– Thom Hartmann
One of the great gifts you can give yourself and others is refusing to believe that you must agree with a person to like or respect them. Don’t burden friendship with the obligation of agreement. Kindness, patience, and generosity are transcendent. Agreement is transient.
– David French
The Universal Law is impartial. It will give you anything you believe. It will throw you garbage or roses depending on the energy you put in. You are the one in charge.
– Stuart Wilde
It’s hard to say which came first: our so-called media illiteracy or the dumbing down of the media. Complaints about our inability to read, interpret, or discern irony, subtlety, and nuance are as old as art. What feels new is the expectation, on the part of both makers and audiences, that there is such a thing as knowing definitively what a work of art means or stands for, aesthetically and politically.
– Namwall Serpell
We grieve whenever an anchor in our understanding of our identity is lost.
– Sameet Kumar
It is easy to be a communist in a free country… The difficult thing is to be free in a communist one.
– Santiago Soler Bernabeu
No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.
– Audre Lorde
I do not want you to hear that I LOVE you, but I want you to feel it without me having to say.
– Khalil Gibran
Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepy by turns; oftentimes rising to the clouds; oftentimes challenging the heavens.
– De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis
Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable.
– Rosa Luxemburg
The center of the Buddha’s teachings lies not in a grim confrontation with absurdity and futility but in the sublime pleasures of the contemplative path and the liberated mind.
– Matthew Gindin
If you sleep in a democracy, you wake up in a dictatorship.
– Lauri Elbing
Do you still perform autopsies on conversations you’ve had lives ago?
– Donte Collins
It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.
– C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
To be free is to be capable of thinking one’s own thoughts, not the thoughts merely of the body, or of society, but thoughts generated by one’s deepest most original, most essential and spiritual self, one’s individuality.
– Rudolf Steiner
One cannot be angry at one’s own time without harming oneself.
– Robert Musil
We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
It’s autumn in the country I remember
How warm a wind blew here about the ways!
And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber
During the long sun-sweetened summer-days.
It’s cold abroad the country I remember.
– Trumbull Stickney
It is only by being shameless about risking the obvious that we happen into the vicinity of the transformative.
– Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
I used to advertise my loyalty and I don’t believe there is a single person I loved that I didn’t eventually betray.
– Albert Camus
It doesn’t make sense to continue wanting something if you’re not willing to do what it takes to get it.
If you don’t want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. To crave the result but not the process, is to guarantee disappointment.
– James Clear
Now Ovid is weeping. Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing. In his spare time he is teaching himself the local language (Getic) in order to compose in it an epic poem no one will ever read.
– Anne Carson
…those in despair are mystic — adhering to the preobject, not believing in Thou, but mute and steadfast devotees of their own inexpressible container.
– Julia Kristeva
Nothing surrenders itself so completely as the word.
– Javier Marias
This November there seems to be nothing to say.
– Anne Sexton
To watch a horror movie is to know that something bad is going to happen. To have a body is really the same thing.
– Julia Armfield
Everyone wants healing until medicine shows up in the form of discipline.
– Hippocrates
One has to be a total outsider. Then the world has a meaning, and the beauty of the heavens and the earth is constant.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.
Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
– Anne Carson
You said to imagine a great big sphere, and inside is all of time and space. All of it. And outside are these intelligent entities, and all they are is curious; all they want to do is experience.”
“Go on,” Alice said. Her eyes are so bright.…
“One might say: ‘I want the experience of being a seventeen-year-old girl in the fourteenth century who was burned at the stake.’ Or ‘I’d like the experience of being a four-month aborted fetus in 1994.’ And they just dive in and do it.” I looked at Alice. She was waiting for something. I thought about what I just said, and then I remembered: “They have to create what happens. Write a script.” She still waited, so I said, “Not only the experience itself; the house, the city, the country, the whole world where it happens. All of it.”
“Which makes that entity responsible for all of it,” she reminded me.
“So that’s who the ‘little man watching’ really is—that, that thing—”
“Not a thing,” she said, interrupting for the very first time. “It’s you. You’re living a script that you wrote. Which is why free will and predestination are the same thing.”
– Theodore Sturgeon
I am trying to rekindle my feeling of fondness for the world.
– George Saunders
None of it was real; nothing was real. Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now must lose them. I send this out to you, dear friends, before I go, in this instantaneous thought-burst, from a place where time slows and then stops and we may live forever in a single instant. Goodbye goodbye good—
– George Saunders
Touching hands are not like pharmaceuticals or scalpels. They are like flashlights in a darkened room. The medicine they administer is self-awareness. And for many of our painful conditions, this is the aid that is most urgently needed.
– Deane Juhan
The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.
– Margaret Atwood
What a beautiful country this must have been once, when you could hop in a coupe and buy a bag of burgers and drive, drive, drive, stopping to swim in a river or sleep in a grove of trees without worrying about intaking mutagens or having the militia arrest you and send you to the Everglades for eternity.
– George Saunders
…we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things.
– William James
Mastery of a skill, no matter how small—a step, a bow, a bend, a note—will inhabit you forever. You can never again be the human being that you were.
– Alan Bowers
Forms within the universe, whether galaxies, human beings or trees, are generated as an expression of vast forces at work within a holistic framework. Separateness, fragmentation, and disconnection are all illusions … Wholeness is never lost, and the Health within the human system, which is a manifestation of this unity, is also never lost.
– John Upledger
In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world.
– George Saunders
Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.
The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.
I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield […]. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the place where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
– Thomas Merton
A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamor of Being for all beings: on condition that each being, each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess – in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and, in turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return.
– Gilles Deleuze
The Poet
by Mary Cornelia Hartshorne
Sunlight was something more than that to him.
It was a halo when it formed a rim
Around some far-off mountain peak. He called
It thin-beat leaf of gold, and stood enthralled
When it lay still on some half-sheltered spot
In gilt mosaics where the trees forgot
To hide the grasses carpeting the spot.
The sky to him was not just the blue sky,
But a deep, painted bowl with clouds piled high;
And when these clouds were tinted burning red,
Or gold and bacchic purple, then he said:
“The too-full goblets of the gods had over-run,
Nor give the credit to the disappearing sun
Who flames before he leaves the world in dun.”
Between his eyes and life fate seemed to hold
A magic tissue of transparent gold,
That freed his vision from the dull, drab, hopeless part,
And kept alive a fresh, unsaddened heart.
And all unselfishly he tried to share
His gift with us who see the harsh and bare;
But we refused. We did not know nor care.
When Do Dahlias Bloom?
by Jose Hernandez Diaz
A man in a “The World Is Burning” shirt darted into the public library on a midsummer’s day. It was 91 degrees in southern California. The library was a good escape for the locals; everyone was welcome.
The man in a “The World Is Burning” shirt read his favorite Spanish language poet, Vicente Huidobro. He loved the musicality and imagery of Huidobro’s fine work.
As he was eagerly reading Huidobro, a woman in a “Frida Kahlo for President” shirt came up to him and asked the time.
“It is 2:42 pm,” he said. “I have to go to my haiku writing workshop soon.”
“Can I go with you?” The woman in a “Frida Kahlo for President” shirt asked, on a whim.
“Of course!” he said. “Nothing would make me happier.”
They both had written dozens of haikus before. Both were odd-English-major-types. But this was their first haiku writing session together. Their first date.
They both wrote about flowers in an idyllic field. He wrote about marigolds; she wrote about dahlias.
The Search
by Jose Hernandez Diaz
A man in a “The World is Burning” shirt went outside of his cabin in the woods in search of his name. Was it Gaston? Was it Federico? Was it Jean Michel Basquiat? Was he named after a famous artist? Was he named after a peasant farmer? A communist revolutionary? The man in a “The World Is Burning Shirt” went to the public library next to the woods, to look for his forgotten name. He considered his name to be Petrarch. Miguel. David. Hakeem Olajuwon. Was he famous? Was he grand? Was he a champion? A beggar? Somewhere in the middle? When he finally found his name, it was written on the bottom of his bedroom slipper. His name, it turns out, was “Exist.” Exister. Existed. Existence. Existing. Exist.
The best films are about expanding our understanding of what it means to be human, they’re a journey into pushing the boundaries of form, an adventure beyond the clichés of commercial cinema, an expression of our deeper consciousness.
– Bernardine Evaristo
Jung understated the case when he said, “We have in all naivete forgotten that beneath our world of reason another lies buried. I do not know what humanity will still have to undergo before it dares to admit this.”
– Connie Zweig
It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
– George Eliot
Once it is concluded that Christianity is infected with ‘Whitianity,’ once it is granted that a racist doctrine of the tradition has been perpetuated, the tradition must be scrutinized in the most radical and comprehensive manner.
– William R. Jones
A wound heals, but a scar remains as a lesson.
– Turkish Proverb
Our motive in searching for the cause is the desire to be rid of the effect. This desire is another form of resistance or condemnation, and when there is condemnation, there is no understanding.
– Krishnamurti
My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.
– Salvatore Quasimodo
Nobody succeeds beyond his or her wildest expectations unless he or she begins with some wild expectations.
– Ralph Charell
Hunger is the first element of self-discipline. If you can control what you eat and drink, you can control everything else.
– Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah
Most of my inspiration, if that’s the word, came from books themselves.
– Shelby Foote
Conceived as the foundation of liberty, modern democracy paves the way for tyranny. Born for the purpose of standing as a bulwark against Power, it ends by providing Power with the finest soil it has ever had in which to spread itself over the social field.
– Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power
To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.
– F.A. Haye
When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?
– Mary Shelley
I don’t want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers.
– John D. Rockefeller
No place is safe if built on a foundation of hatred.
– Louise Penny
In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.
– Eugene Victor Debs
We shall then first be true persons when we have suffered ourselves to be fitted into our places. We are marble waiting to be shaped, metal waiting to be run into a mould.
– C.S. Lewis
God touches us with a touch that is emptiness and empties us. He moves us with a simplicity that simplifies us. All variety, all complexity, all paradox, all multiplicity cease. Our mind swims in the air of an understanding, a reality that is dark and serene and includes in itself everything. Nothing more is desired. Nothing more is wanting.
– Thomas Merton
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom…
– Michael Ondaatje
Every person understands God in different ways, but people fulfill His will in the same way.
– Tolstoy
As the cost of health insurance continues to climb, politicians debate how to control those costs and expand coverage. But the truth is, there’s already enough money in the system to cover everyone. It’s just being siphoned off by insurance corporations for profits, lobbying, and stock buybacks.
– Rachel Madley PHD
A bad deed which you regret in your heart is a thousand times better than the good deed that makes you feel proud.
– Imam Ali
Lessons in Trying To Save The World
If you name it hope instead of impossible.
If you hold it with tenderness.
If you call it the blessing of your ancestors.
If you look around and see the faces of everyone you love
trying to save the world with you.
Then this work becomes love.
And even mountains will move.
– Nikita Gill
You cannot avoid paradise;
You can only avoid seeing it.
– Charlotte Joko Beck
I often think that I don’t have a single new idea in my head. But the big mistake is to just wait for inspiration to happen. It won’t come looking for you. You have to start doing something: you have to build a trap to catch it. I like to do that by starting the very mundane process of tidying my studio. It may seem like it has nothing to do with the creative job in hand but I think tidying up is a form of daydreaming, and what you’re really doing is tidying your mind. It’s a kind of mental preparation. It’s a way of getting your mind in place to notice something. And that’s what being creative is really: it’s noticing when something interesting is starting to happen.
– Brian Eno
There is an old Eastern saying that every human being should play the role that is assigned to him, the king should play the king, the beggar the beggar, and the criminal the criminal-but always remembering the gods. That would mean that one should take one’s role in life as a sort of mask, not identifying with it, yet recognizing it as one’s task, and always reminding oneself of the divine being that cannot possibly be identical with the more or less incidental role.
– CG Jung
The diseconomies of capitalism are treated as the public’s responsibility. Corporate America skims the cream and leaves the bill for us to pay, then boasts about how productive and efficient it is and complains about our wasteful government.
– Michael Parenti, Against Empire
There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Most misunderstandings in the world could be avoided if people would simply take the time to ask, ‘What else could this mean?’
– Shannon L. Alder
In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory.
– Alfred North Whitehead
“Power,” wrote the political theorist Hannah Arendt, “always comes from men acting together, ‘acting in concert.’” Tyranny, by contrast, prevents concerted action by turning people against each other; it is characterized by “the fundamental inability to act at all.”
Finish something. Anything. Stop researching, planning, and preparing to do the work and just do the work. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad it is. You don’t need to set the world on fire with your first try. You just need to prove to yourself that you have what it takes to produce something. There are no artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, or scientists who became great by half-finishing their work. Stop debating what you should make and just make something.
– James Clear
If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.
– Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Inequality is a crisis in need of concerted action.
– Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
Likewise, people who are blinded by their own interests are poorly qualified to give counsel to their neighbors.
– Aesop
The level of collective psychosis gripping a human society that even entertains the notion of letting one human hoard $1,000,000,000,000 while people starve is impossible to express, but we need to do so in order to avoid normalizing it.
– Ethan Nichtern
I am not a materialist at all. I don’t like fancy cars, fancy dates, or big expensive houses. I want inner peace and flourishing, which cannot be achieved through external consumption.
– Saurav
Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia.
– Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout
I am going, friend, I am all but gone, I believe you prideful and wrong but I have no desire, now, to cure you. Your wrongness was an idea I had. I am all but gone. My idea of your wrongness will go with me. Your rightness is an idea you are having. It will go with you. For all of that, I hope you live forever, and if the place falls down around you, as it seems to be doing, I hope even that brings you joy. It was always falling down around you, everything has always been falling down around us. Only we were too alive to notice. I feel the truth of this in my body now. I am trying not to be terrified. But I am sometimes, in the night…
That letter exists in my mind. But I am too tired to write it. Well, that is not true. I am not too tired.
I’m just not ready.
The surge of pride and life and self is still too strong in me.
But I will get there. I will. I will write it yet.
Only I must not wait too long.
– George Saunders, Liberation Day
The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
– Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature
Whatever I had read as a child about the saints had thrilled me. I could see the nobility of giving one’s life for the sick, the maimed, the leper…. But there was another question in my mind. Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place?… Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?
– Dorothy Day
The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.
– Richard Rohr
….politics and governing demand compromise….
– Barry Goldwater
We are in danger of forgetting that God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and light and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him.
– Joy Davidman
Like a spider that produces a web out of itself and then goes and lives in it, Consciousness creates all these beings and dwells in the heart of them.
– Mooji
thirty years of this
thirty years of that . . .
the blue-green mountains
– Patrick Sweeney
Soul, mind or ego are mere words. There are no entities of the kind. Consciousness is the only truth.
– Ramana Maharshi
Every individual must ultimately become desperate enough to change himself.
– Manly P. Hall
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
– W. B. Yeats
I say I want to save the world but really
I want to write poems all day
– Dorothea Lasky
But the delight of Earth, the wonder of it; the essential feeling as of the necessity for magic; that juggling with the golden moon and silver sun (such are they) that is man’s universal pastime: these are the things to seek in the Kalevala.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
You want to be full of ease and spontaneity? Stop trying to become something in a dream. When you are completely empty of the unreal, you become a vessel for the real.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
You must stand alone without any support, without friends, without guru, without hope, completely and inwardly naked and empty. Then only, as the cup which is empty can be filled up, so the emptiness within can be filled up with that which is everlasting.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Reality is the basis of all great art. Without it there is no life, no substance. Reality is the ground under our feet and sky over our head. Everything the artist creates has its point of departure in nature.
– Yvan Goll, Surrealism Manifesto
Destroy my desires,
eradicate my ideals,
show me something better,
and I will follow you.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
– Adrienne Rich
doctor’s waiting room
the Buddha statue has been sitting here
for three years now
– Elisabeth Kleineheismann
Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.
– Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
All our attempts [to solve problems in world] have proved to be singularly ineffectual, and will continue to do so as long as we try to convince ourselves and the world that it is only they, our opponents, who are all wrong, morally and philosophically.
– CG Jung
Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone, who tend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.
– Audre Lorde
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
– Jorge Luis Borges
It’s your privilege to find me incomprehensible. I gave you
my minutes; let them remain ours. I hope I haunt you.
– Theodore Roethke
“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,“ Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”
– Italo Calvino
This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh.
– Aaron Shurin
Love acts as the Immanent Divinity that unites the Creativity of the sun with the Intelligence of the earth.
– JG Bennett
I AM THOU,
THOU ART I,
HE IS OURS,
WE BOTH ARE HIS.
SO MAY ALL BE
FOR OUR NEIGHBOR.
– Gurdjieff
An impression of oneself is an organic phenomenon that is not at all intellectual. How is it that at one moment I don’t vibrate and at another, I do? How is it that I receive or do not receive a current of energy, allow it to feed me or not to feed me? How do I sing with it, or resonate with it like a musical instrument? Life keeps hitting us, producing only a dull sound. Yet suddenly, there is a pure, crystalline sound. How does that come about?
– Michel Conge, Inner Octaves
Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it. And it is grace itself which makes this void.
– Simone Weil
He lives in a small country of hope, which is his heart.
– Anne Carson
The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite.
– Jules Verne
My secret drug is death
I take it whenever I see you
And you don’t see me
– Leonard Cohen
I am sure now that life is not what it is purported to be and that nature, in the canny words of the Scotch theologue, ‘is not as natural as it looks.’
– Loren Eiseley
Let’s say there was a wrist-mounted meter that could measure energy output during dancing and the goal was to give off an energy level of 1,000 units. Or someone would (say) kill you. And you had a notion of how you wanted to dance, but when you danced that way, your energy level was down around 50. And when you finally managed to get your energy level above 1,000, you glanced up at a mirror (there’s a mirror in there, wherever you’re dancing off death) and—wow. Is that dancing? Is that me dancing? Good God. But your energy level is at 1,200 and climbing. What would you do? You’d keep dancing like that.
– George Saunders
and I thought I am so many! What is my name? What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us?
– Mary Oliver
But let us imagine RIGHT NOW that we find out about a world where there are artists who paint without brushes, make music without instruments, and write without pen and paper. The very thought makes me happy. That this world could be ours, right here and now.
– László Krasznahorkai
When I was young, there were very few elders willing to talk about the darkness; most of them pretended that success was all they had ever known. As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I felt I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked upon a journey toward joining the human race.
– Sharon Moon
In the healing of that wound, which never closes,
lies the invented, strange qualities of a man’s work.
– Lorca
…when you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. They hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen. With your death they do not die. Instead, they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves, something that had its own life, something they can hardly put a finger on.
– David Eagleman
Nothing which is ready-to-hand or present-at-hand within the world functions as that in the face of which anxiety is anxious.
– Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
The two most salient facts of our reality are ecological collapse and income inequality, and the response by every person with authority is a chaotic swing among denial (“it isn’t real”), defeatism (“it can’t be helped”), and sneering rationalization (“only the unworthy suffer”).
– Gerry Canavan
I doubt there is a more quotable man in the United States. (You can readily see this by reading the text of the talk, or by visiting this lovely page of Wendell Berry quotes.) Monday, he spoke of the “mechanical indifference” of a financial trust, that it had the “indifference of a grinder to what it grinds,” saying, “It did not intend to victimize its victims. It simply followed its single purpose of the highest possible profit, and ignored the ‘side effects.’” This from a poet and an essayist who, by following his love of the land and its people, describes the current state of affairs as accurately and succinctly as anyone on earth: “The two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment.”
– Wendell Berry, American Hero by Mark Bittman
As soon as we start looking through the outer and visible to the inner and invisible and trying to see how form and meaning relate, most of the old body/soul dichotomy vanishes. The soul then becomes the body’s meaning, and the body the expression of the soul.
– Karlfried Durckheim
You might be a bit like me,
rowing your boat
of murk
and curiosity,
bleak
and sudden clarity,
agony,
recovery,
surprise
and mediocrity,
fake
and authenticity,
decline
and synchronicity,
fears and beliefs
and pleasures
and griefs
and light
as a feather
autumn leaves.
– Wendy Videlock
If you can then understand the secret hints which are contained in a dream, your eyes are opened and you rediscover life and find it on a new level. Only the guidance of the unconscious can help at such a moment.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
I think both as poets and people we are taught how to perform constantly, to act for a series of invisible audiences and the poem was me imagining the internal apocalypse that would happen if there were no more stages to stand on.
– Ramsey Tawfick
I don’t do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.
– Allen Ginsberg
Poem [I do not always understand what you say.]
by James Schuyler
I do not always understand what you say.
Once, when you said, across, you meant along.
What is, is by its nature, on display.
Words’ meanings count, aside from what they weigh:
poetry, like music, is not just song.
I do not always understand what you say.
You would hate, when with me, to meet by day
What at night you met and did not think wrong.
What is, is by its nature, on display.
I sense a heaviness in your light play,
a wish to stand out, admired, from the throng.
I do not always understand what you say.
I am as shy as you. Try as we may,
only by practice will our talks prolong.
What is, is by its nature, on display.
We talk together in a common way.
Art, like death, is brief: life and friendship long.
I do not always understand what you say.
What is, is by its nature, on display.
“Our people have forgotten,” noted the wise and often prophetic Henry Adams, more than a century ago, “that any world exists outside America and their heads are excessively swollen.”
– Pico Iyer
It should be accepted as a most elementary human and moral truth that no man can live a fully sane and decent life unless he is able to say ‘no’ on occasion to his natural bodily appetites.
– Thomas Merton
In the denial of what love is not, love is. Don’t be afraid of the word ‘negation’. Negate all that is not love, then ‘what is’ is compassion.
– Krishnamurti
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
– W. H. Auden
Seeking happiness is a form of ignorance. You think you are lacking, something is wrong with your life but your own simple beingness needs nothing, it is completely at ease and content as is.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
The labour of the righteous tendeth to life: the fruit of the wicked to sin.
– Proverbs 10:16
We are always in one or another root-metaphor, archetypal fantasy, mythic perspective. From the soul’s point of view we can never get out of the vale of our psychic reality.
– James Hillman
The beginning of freedom is the realization you are not the thinker.
– Eckhart Tolle
Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, preaches endless forms of false happiness, false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.
– Terence McKenna
We cannot save each other, but we can make it easier for each individual to save himself.
– Manly P. Hall
Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
– Martin Heidegger
Too many people have resigned themselves to not reading because they fear they no longer have the focus for it. You only need to limit your screen time for a few days to begin feeling the effects on your brain. I promise you, you are capable of reading books again.
– @SketchesbyBoze
I saw you, and poems came back to me.
– Yanis Ritsos
Tr. Paul Merchant
There is no such thing as enlightenment. The real is ever-present. All that is necessary is to drop the false.
– Nisaggadatta Maharaj
he is not a God of the dead, but of the living
– @KJVnocontext
The telephone is the writer’s devil, the dictionary his guardian angel.
– Octavio Paz
A nation of dunces can be safe only in a world of dunces.
– C.S. Lewis, Democratic Education
All the concepts you have formed in the past must be discarded and replaced by void.
– Huang Po
Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn, or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.
– Denis Waitley
I see the symbolism of our lives. I live on two levels, the human and the poetic.
– Anaïs Nin
Through psychedelics we are learning that God is not an idea, God is a lost continent in the human mind.
– Terence McKenna
Overflow gently – don’t drown.
– Albert Camus
I like to think that at the end of each story another begins for each one that can be much better.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
Above all, we must realize that each of us makes a difference with our life. Each of us impacts the world around us every single day. We have a choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place – or not to bother.
– Dr. Jane Goodall
To become like the sea –
Vast, wise, an empire of royal blue
quietness, rage tasting like salt.
That was her goal.
– Odyssey, The Cynical Idealist
The whole world can love you, but that love will not make you happy. What will make you happy is the love coming out of you.
– Don Miguel Ruiz
Some people awaken spiritually without ever coming into contact with any meditation technique or any spiritual teaching. They may awaken simply because they can’t stand the suffering anymore.
– Eckhart Tolle
Time is a sluice set open
And through it, we mourn, too fast
All beauty shown or spoken,
Apprehended, runs to the past.
Yet what quells my mind the most
Is not the loved and known
But the unregarded un-
Apprehended constantly flowing.
– E. J. Scovell
To experience the peace of your soul you must enter a state of consciousness in which you are unattached to the past, present, or future.
– Debbie Ford
I want to get all the content down so that I can then move on to the fun part, which is sorting out the sentences.
– Geoff Dyer
In every person of whatever station look not for things to criticize, but for something you adore in your Creator.
– Edgar Cayce
If we’re completely honest, not sentimental or nostalgic, we have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is one unending thread, not a life chopped up into sections out of touch with one another.
– P. L. Travers
Your real home is not the house you live in, but the stillness and peace in your heart.
– Ajahn Brahm
Modernity is a totalitarianism of nothingness: globalization, indifferentization, homogenization… Modernity isn’t in crisis, modernity is a crisis.
– Pierre-Émile Blairon
The prime virtue, in one who gives an answer, is to know the mind of him who asks the question.
– St. Jerome
When we hear that we are blessed, we should hear as well a sense of responsibility. A blessing given, a talent bestowed, if unappreciated and unused, is wasted.
– Amy-Jill Levine
It is in the standpoint created by consciousness, when you are in pain, or find yourself obligated, that value lives. … From outside of that standpoint, we can recognize the fact of value, but we cannot recognize value itself.
– Christine M. Korsgaard
I’ve probably overstayed. Once you’re tenured you never leave… Meanwhile, the gap between you and your students widens. You get older, while they stay the same age, year after year. Like vampires.
– Ling Ma
All conservative ideologies justify existing inequities as the natural order of things, inevitable outcomes of human nature. If the very rich are naturally so much more capable than the rest of us, why must they be provided with so many artificial privileges under the law, so many bailouts, subsidies and other special considerations – at our expense?
– Michael Parenti
Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.
– Dr. Seuss
So when I think of Autumn, I think of someone with hands who does not want me to die.
– Toni Morrison
I just don’t think it’s possible ever to be fully conscious. I see it as the tip of an iceberg. . .and then there’s this vast world down below. And I think we are meant to live with mystery. It opens up the dimensions that keep us human and compassionate.
– Marion Woodman
He had become almost inured to death; his frailty had reinforced his conviction that he must do something of consequence while he had the time.
– Min Jin Lee
You seek the path. I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you. May each go his own way.
– CG Jung
Errors do not cease to be errors simply because they’re ratified into law.
– E.A. Bucchianeri
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.
– James Allen
The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.
– Julius Nyerere
Nobody escapes age and gravity.
– Harlan Ellison
Blindly following ancient customs and traditions doesn’t mean that the dead are alive, but the living are dead.
– Ibn Khaldun
NOURISHMENT
– for Tara
As soon as I heard the wise librarian say
that she asks the young people in her life,
How have you nourished yourself today?
I knew I’d be asking the same question
from now on, as often as I could remember.
I knew the care behind those words
was enough to slow the blood, and pause
the restless feet. I knew the asking itself
was a form of nourishment, like someone
holding out a warm and steaming bowl
of soup to soothe a throat parched from
too much talk about the things that
don’t matter. I think you must have
clear and strong eyes, a clear and strong
heart to be a librarian, to lead people
toward the knowledge they didn’t know
they needed, to help them ask the right
questions, and then answer each one.
– James Crews
You felt she’d done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have been for her a city of smoke, its streets the courtyards of limbo, its bodies like wraiths. Smoke seemed to be in her voice, in her movements; making her all the more substantial, more there, as if words, glances, small lewdnesses could only become baffled and brought to rest like smoke in her long hair; remain there useless till she released them, accidentally and unknowingly, with a toss of her head.
– Thomas Pynchon
But sometimes it’s too much to ask
a person to inhabit
the strange region of a foreign heart.
Once, when I was in a glut of pain,
I said to a friend,
Just take an hour and imagine
this is happening to you.
She looked straight ahead
and said, I don’t want to.
– Ellen Bass, Experiment in Empathy
The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It’s a miracle that it exists at all.
– Lauren Groff, Arcadia
Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes a seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response … Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia—em (into) and pathos (feeling)—a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?
– Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams
Please Let Me Flourish
Somewhere on earth where as in heaven
desert doesn’t matter.
The inalienable right to fail.
To flourish is to play.
Insurance against two things: failure and success,
that is to say, being made a fool of by either or of making too much of either. Philosophy is that insurance. So is an inner circle of friends and lovers. We must have those we can be merely whimsical with, unguarded and undesigning.
– Robert Frost
A bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I’m vexed to love you,
– Li-Young Lee
One night I dreamed of such a world. I rowed upon the surface of the moon and there was no wind, there were no moments, for the moon is as empty as the inside of an eye and not even the sound of a shadow falling falls there.
– Anne Carson
A Man and a Woman Sit Near Each Other
by Robert Bly
A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long
at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born
in any other nation, or time, or place.
They are content to be where they are, talking or not talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.
The man sees the way his fingers move,
he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.
They obey a third body that they share in common.
They make a promise to love that body.
Age may come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and a woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,
someone we know of, whom we have never seen.
FREE ELECTIONS
When the slaves reelected their executioner entirely of their own accord and without any pressure from anyone, I understood that it was still very early to be talking about democracy and human dignity.
– Syrian poet and refugee, Osama Alomar
There is a stubbornness to it. The beauty of the world even now, even soaked in the sound of despair. Still the magpie holds onto its midnight blue sheen and its velvet dark wings. And try as we might, there is nothing cliché about noticing the magic of birdsong. Even in grief, the winter sun finds every blade of glass eventually, the result a diamond-like rhapsody. The august stag still visits the frosty, hushed forest and this will continue till the day his body gives itself back to where he was born. It is a reminder that so much of what withers and dies was once a sublime beauty. That though it may seem obscene, it is necessary to witness all of it, the beauty and the terror. To remember even in despair, how to be alive.
– Nikita Gill
It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.
– Thomas Merton
Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism – you learn this as you go on.
– Will Self
A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.
– Thomas Moore
Some people … hate happy endings. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Deer should not jam. The avalanche, stopping in its tracks, a few feet above the cowering in village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically…
– Vladimir Nabokov
Yesterday we obeyed kings
and bent our necks before
emperors.
But today we kneel only to
Truth, follow only Beauty,
and obey only Love.
– Khalil Gibran
Enlightenment is totalitarian when it refuses to recognize anything outside itself.
– Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno
(Dialectic of Enlightenment)
The real master creates masters, not followers.
– Osho
Don’t let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.
– Toni Morrison
Unbroken prosperity cannot bear a single blow.
– Seneca
Awareness opens up responsibility, which is why I think most of the world would rather be unaware. Because it’s easier to be in ignorance, in innocence and naive than to be with the truth of the experience.
– Raj Jana
If I don’t feel like writing today or for a few days, I don’t. And I don’t think about it. It is not an obligation-it is the greatest privilege.
– Jonathan Carroll
A man’s learning is like the branches
and leaves to a tree;
he cannot be without it.
Learning, however, is not just in reading something,
but rather is something we integrate with our own various ways.
– Takeda Shingen
True mastery begins when learning stops being borrowed and starts being lived.
Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
– Marshall McLuhan
Mind is the master weaver, both of the inner garment of character and the outer garment of circumstance.
– James Allen
Detachment is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you.
– Ali ibn Abi Talib
The test of a democracy is not the magnificence of buildings or the speed of automobiles or the efficiency of air transportation, but rather the care given to the welfare of all the people.
– Helen Keller
The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
– Ray Bradbury
The Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. ‘He sees too deep and too much,’ and what he sees is essentially chaos. He is the one man who knows he is sick in a civilization that doesn’t know it is sick.
– Colin Wilson
The great poems, plays, novels, and stories teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress.
– Harold Bloom, Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles
Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place, we are swept up, suddenly, between the body’s smooth, functioning predictability, and the need for disruption. We do irrational things, outrageous things. Or else something will come along and intervene, an unimaginable foe.
– Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
A mountain’s fame lies not in its height,
but in the immortals who make it their home.
A river’s sanctity lies not in its depth,
but in the dragons who dream beneath its waves.
– Liu Yuxi, Tang Dynasty
What could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout?
– Ben Lerner
The shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends.
– Cicero, Laelius De Amicitia
Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don’t ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it.
– Howard Zinn, Marx in Soho: A Play on History
The Perfect Man is godlike. Though the great swamps blaze, they cannot burn him; though the great rivers freeze, they cannot chill him; though swift lightning splits the hills and howling gales shake the sea, they cannot frighten him. A man like this rides the clouds and mist, straddles the sun and moon, and wanders beyond the four seas. Even life and death have no effect on him, much less the rules of profit and loss!
– Zhuangzi
So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.
– Roberto Bolaño
The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.
– Aristotle
I cannot write my native language and have no native home any more and am amazed by that horrible homelessness all French- Canadians abroad in America have.
– Jack Kerouac
sitting upright
through it all
a Buddha
– Joan Halifax
Let my lusts be my ruin, then,
since all else is a fake
and a mockery.
– Hart Crane
Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.
– T.S. Eliot
By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets—the sickness is out there.
– Hillman
Or like it said at the end of a labor song I liked a lot when I was a kid: what I mean is, take it easy, but take it.
– Charles Mingus
Reconciliation
by Else Lasker-Schüler
translated by Babette Deutsch
and Avrahm Yarmolinsky
(To My Mother)
A great star will fall into my lap. . .
We would hold vigil tonight,
Praying in languages
That are carven like harps.
We would be reconciled tonight—
So fully God overwhelms us.
Our hearts are only children,
Eager for weary-sweet slumber.
And our lips would kiss each other,
Why are you fearful?
Does not your heart border upon mine—
Your blood always dyes my cheeks red.
We would be reconciled tonight,
If we clasp each other, we shall not perish.
A great star will fall into my lap.
No gain in social efficiency can save a community that offends against the little ones. And let us be honest about it: our modern cities have created a society in which children are in the way.
– Joy Davidman
Nothing can die in a universe in which there is nothing but life.
– Manly P. Hall
tea steam wafting
over wildflowers
autumn festival
– Ogawa
This transformation of an experience into language, this possibility of a relationship between our sensibility and a world that reduces it to nothing, can today be seen as the most perfect example in French contemporary writing of what literature can be.
– Georges Perec
There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
– Hermann Hesse
she is neither
by the sea nor the sea by her . . .
she’s just a poet
– Mohammad Hoghughi
Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.
– Marcus Aurelius
We loved the songs around the fire in the big stone fireplace or under the darned stars, where every girl merged her own spirit of happiness with the voice of the group.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Behind the silence are His higher thoughts. He is fitting stone to stone in His plan for the world and our lives, even though we can see only a confused and meaningless jumble of stones heaped together under a silent heaven.
– Helmut Thielicke
Those who have a hungry heart and broken spirit are the favorites of God.
– Helmut Thielicke
Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic…Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?
– Tolkien
the first bite
is all I want
wild pear
– S. M. Abeles
William of Aquitaine Returns
by Luis Alberto de Cuenca
I’m going to make a poem out of nothing.
You and I will be the protagonists.
Our emptiness, our loneliness,
the deadly boredom, the daily defeats:
all these things will go into the poem,
which is bound to be short, since they
fit in a few lines, maybe as few as seven,
or perhaps eight, if this last line counts.
– Translated from the Spanish
by Gustavo Pérez Firmat
A birdsong can – even for a moment –
make the whole world into a sky within
us, because we feel that the bird does
not distinguish between its heart and
the world’s.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, The Inner Sky
The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of “independent existence.” There is no such mode of existence; every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Every spring in the wet meadows and ditches I hear a little shrilling chorus which sounds for all the world like an endlessly reiterated “We’re here, we’re here, we’re here.” And so they are, as frogs, of course. Confident little fellows. I suspect that to some greater ear than ours, man’s optimistic pronouncements about his role and destiny may make a similar little ringing sound that travels a small way out into the night. It is only its nearness that is offensive. From the heights of a mountain, or a marsh at evening, it blends, not too badly, with all the other sleepy voices that, in croaks or chirrups, are saying the same thing.
– Loren Eiseley
The world, I’ve discovered, is a masterful flirt. It leaves little gifts everywhere—the way morning light catches in spider webs, how rain releases that earthy sweetness into the air (petrichor, they call it, though no word could fully capture that particular alchemy of water and dust that smells like pure possibility), the particular green of new leaves that somehow manages to be both ancient and urgent. But here’s the thing about flirtation: it requires participation. The world can bat its eyelashes all it wants, but if we’re not looking, if we’re not present enough to catch the gesture, the moment dies unwitnessed.
– Stephanie Tyler
Stitches of experience are dropped, never to be picked up again. Words fade, events vanish, and the self becomes an ocean strewn with islands of exact recall and other islands of vagueness; identity becomes a vast and mysterious archipelago, surrounded by fog and with unknown currents and tides and indecipherable shorelines that are almost impossible to chart or navigate […] Experience is not imprinted. The components of ordinary human experience do not register. Life on earth passes by you. You are invisible to yourself. Surely this is the definition of a curse. And when I think back on that summer now, it is with disbelief. I was barely more than a teenager, a time when one’s identity is a subject of constant intrigue, curiosity, and fascination, a framework for existence with which one is only beginning to become familiar. Choosing to obliterate even a tiny piece of it seems now, some forty years later, like a form of insanity.
– Akiko Busch
The air is not a random bunch of gases simply drawn to earth by the earth’s gravity, but an elixir generated by the soils, the oceans, and the numberless organisms that inhabit this world, each creature exchanging certain ingredients for others as it inhales and exhales, drinking the sunlight with our leaves or filtering the water with our gills, all of us contributing to the composition of this phantasmagoric brew, circulating it steadily between us and nourishing ourselves on its magic, generating ourselves from its substance. It is as endemic to the earth as the sandstone beneath my boots. Perhaps we should add the letter i to our planet’s name, and call it “Eairth,” in order to remind ourselves that the “air” is entirely a part of the earth, and the i, the I or self, is wholly immersed in that fluid element.
– David Abram
He could understand that the creatures, the fish and the owls, should feed and frolic at moon-rise, at moon-down and at south-moon-over, for these were all plain marks to go by, direct and visible. He marveled, padding on bare feet past the slat-fence of the clearing, that the moon was so strong that when it lay the other side of the earth, the creatures felt it and stirred by the hour it struck. The moon was far away, unseen, and it had power to move them.
– Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
In the night of our technological barbarism, monks must be as trees which exist silently in the dark and by their vital presence purify the air.
– Thomas Merton
The roots of all living things are tied together. Deep in the ground of being, they tangle and embrace. If we look deeply, we find that we do not have a separate self-identity, a self that does not include sun and wind, earth and water, creatures and plants, and one another.
– Joan Halifax
There is a moment after you move your eye away when you forget where you are because you’ve been living, it seems, somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky. You’ve been stopped being here in the world. You’re in a different place a place where human life has no meaning. You’re not a creature in a body. You exist as the stars exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity.
– Louise Gluck, Telescope
Like the terrestrial crust of the earth / which is proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul / is a miracle of mutual pressures.
– Anne Carson
She tells her love while half asleep…
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers…
Despite the falling snow.
– Robert Graves
As long as I’m alive, I will continue to try to understand more because the work of the heart is never done.
– Muhammad Ali
HOPE
The poetry does not know:
The air conditioner
Worn out in the winter
It’s just like my hopes
A little bit in, a little bit out,
Green on the white wheel,
Good at just throwing it away
A Long Shadow
In the bright street light.
– Jack Kerouac
Poetry isn’t a place of answers and easy solutions. It’s a place where we can admit to an unknowing, own our private despair, and still, sometimes, practice beauty.
– Ada Limón
The hardest thing to teach a student—and the hardest thing to believe consistently—is that there is nothing ‘out there’ to go and get. There is no part, no career, no opportunity for which you should be searching and scrounging and coveting. All of the preparation is within, and you keep yourself mentally and physically fit; you remain generous with yourself and others; you stay deeply in study about your craft. Whatever is yours will then arrive.
– Marian Seldes
I want what we all want… To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.
– Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet
If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The soul that longs for God will never thirst for the world.
– Ibn Gabirol
What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.
– Kurt Vonnegut
I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The society in which we live includes forms of coercion and oppression by which those who suffer from them are all too often overwhelmed; it includes the most grievous inequalities and unnecessary miseries.
– Simone Weil, The Power of Words
Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realize what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do.
– Oscar Wilde
When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death…The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life.
– Huey P. Newton
If you’re a cheap tipper, by the way, or rude to your server, you are dead to me. You are lower than whale feces.
– Anthony Bourdain
A short saying often contains much wisdom.
– Sophocles
I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.
– Hugo Wolf
Will you forgive my storms and blizzards — My trash, my poetry and gloom?
– Alexander Blok
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
– Kurt Vonnegut
A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it’s there complete in the mind, if only at the back.
– Virginia Woolf
After first assessing the full implications, one should either begin or not begin. Surely, not beginning is better than turning back once one has begun.
– Śāntideva
When the powerless seek their own sense of control, ‘crime’ is what an unjust system produces.
– Maurice Broaddus, Buffalo Soldier
Democracy requires inclusion, the recognition that every person’s voice and dignity matter. Diversity is not a “side issue” or a “political correctness” distraction; it is — as Ronald Reagan pointed out (ironically) — the very mechanism that keeps democracy alive.
– Thom Hartmann
The eternal destiny of human beings will be measured by how much or how little solidarity we have displayed with the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, and the oppressed. In the end we will be judged in terms of love.
– Leonardo Boff
Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively towards days yet to come.
– Richard Wright, The Outsider
Whatever you want in life, other people are going to want it, too. Believe in yourself enough to accept the idea that you have an equal right to it.
– Diane Sawyer
There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination.
– William Godwin
The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are clever as he.
– Karl Kraus
Working hard is important. But there is something that matters even more – believing in yourself.
– Daniel Radcliffe
I finally know what distinguishes man from the beasts: financial worries.
– Jules Renard
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.
– Viktor Frankl
You must learn to be comfortable with psychological disturbance. If your mind becomes hyperactive, just watch it. If your heart starts to heat up, let it go through what it must. Try to find the part of you that is capable of noticing. That part is your way out.
– Michael Singer
All novels are sequels.
– Michael Chabon
In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.
– Sun Tzu
We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
– Mary Catherine Bateson
No country should be able to attack a neighbor, slaughter its people, and steal its lands at will. This concept preserved decades of relative peace compared to the horrors of the early twentieth century, but it is a concept that is currently under attack as autocrats increasingly reject the idea of a rules-based international order and claim the right to act however they wish.
– Heather Cox Richardson
Conformity begins the moment you ignore how you feel for acceptance.
– Shannon L. Alder
Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to.
– Epictetus
Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.
– Elizabeth Cady Stanton
I don’t want to be remembered for my smile. I want to be remembered for my voice.
– Elif Shafak
You wanna hurt me? Go right ahead if it makes you feel any better. I’m an easy target. Yeah, you’re right. I talk too much. I also listen too much. I could be a cold-hearted cynic like you, but I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings. Well, you think what you want about me. I’m not changing. I like me. My wife likes me. My customers like me. ‘Cause I’m the real article. What you see is what you get.
– John Candy
If we collide and it ends up being tragic, I’m not going to crumble and allow you to feast on my broken pieces, as if I were nothing more than a source of temporary nourishment until your next meal.
– James McInerney
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
It is futile to try and convince the heart of anything. The heart does not reason, it just knows. The heart can be taught however, and it is capable of embracing a new comfort zone.
– Vadim Zeland
Desire makes everything blossom, possession makes everything wither and fade.
– Marcel Proust
Theatre is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place.
– Martha Graham
As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.
– Dostoyevsky
Start by pouring gentle understanding into the dim corners of my heart. Add a measure of kindness, and stir it slowly. Sprinkle the sugar of your words, whisk it with your faithful hands, until love begins to breathe like a small, unfurling leaf of green.
– Priyanka Jaiprakash
“Write about what you know” is the most stupid thing I’ve heard. It encourages people to write a dull autobiography. It’s the reverse of firing the imagination and potential of writers.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.
– C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you, and you’ll never learn.
– Ray Bradbury
When I graduated from high school… I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for ten years.
– Ray Bradbury
The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them.
– Edgar Allan Poe
A government that silences or excludes women, Black people, immigrants, and other marginalized voices is no longer democratic and no longer looking or striving toward the future. It is frozen, stale, hierarchical, authoritarian, and fragile.
– Thom Hartmann
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.
– Winston Churchill
We MUST instill will into the African mind to reclaim itself.
– Professor John Henrik Clarke
The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.
– Tom Waits
…I’m someone who’s mostly dead inside but still has a hope for something extraordinary, which, as I said, is the worst breed of human, because it means I know everything is bullshit, but that I secretly hope for the day when it might not be.
– Nick Miller
There’s really nothing an agnostic can’t do if he really doesn’t know whether he believes in anything or not.
– Graham Chapman
Once you have that inner feeling of certainty, don’t ask me to confirm it. What would it matter what I think?
– Neville Goddard
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
– Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light
I saw an iridescent biosphere teeming with life, I didn’t see the economy. But since our human-made systems treat everything, including the very life-support systems of our planet, as the wholly owned subsidiary of the global economy, it’s obvious from the vantage point of space that we’re living a lie.
– Ron Garan
We are on the verge of surrender: surrender of the human race in the face of the task of learning and educating ourselves in order to live with greater dignity.
– New Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy for a Common World, Marina Garcés
You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.
– William Burroughs
What the world is trying to be is a wraparound place where “belongance” is afforded to all.
– Greg Boyle SJ
Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
– Douglas Adams
Most practical problems can be solved by sufficient audible prayer or meditation.
– Emmet Fox
I have a feeling that inside you somewhere, there’s somebody nobody knows about.
– Alfred Hitchcock
It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.
– Katie Kitamura
if i do not submit to the conventions of society, if in my dress i do not conform to the customs observed in my country and in my class, the ridicule i provoke, the social isolation in which i am kept, produce the same effects as punishment.
– Émile Durkheim
While you are alive, what recourse do you have but to live.
– Victor Frankenstien (Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstien)
When a sudden ray of sun or a moonbeam falls on a dreary street, it makes no difference what it illumines-a broken bottle on the ground, a fading flower in a field, or the flaxen blonde hair of a child’s head. The object is transformed and the viewer is transfixed. Celebrate that moment of beauty and take it with you in your memory. It is God’s gift to you.
– Luci Swindoll
I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
– John Cheever
My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.
– Stephen W. Hawking
Spirituality distinguishes itself from materialism with the mantra:
“Less is more”
– Rowan Davis
I am whole, untouched by distortion, radiant from my own source.
– Matt Kahn
Bring back the days when the sun setting was our only notification.
– @nature_org
Psychiatry reduces a person’s suffering to a fixed diagnosis, while Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) reveals that distress is a signal that integration has been disrupted. This disruption can result from trauma, chronic stress, lack of safe connection, or unmet biological and relational needs, not a defective brain or chemical imbalance. IPNB does not see human suffering as pathology, but as an understandable response to overwhelming conditions.
– TraumaAwareAmerica
If your spirituality doesn’t include politics, then it’s bullshit. You cannot bypass the world we actively live in. You cannot bypass or ignore the suffering and pain and devastation. We are here to have a human experience. Politics are a part of that experience.
– Keisha Beal
I feel sorry for this country having lost a decade (decades?) of life and joy to this thing of a person.
– Kyle McMillan
We have become more cerebral, and retreated more and more from the senses—especially from smell, touch and taste—as if repelled by the body; and sight, the coolest of the senses, and the one most capable of detachment, has come to dominate all.
– Iain McGilchrist
The tragedy and comedy of the human condition is that we spend most of our lives thinking, feeling, acting, perceiving and relating on behalf of a non-existent self.
– Rupert Spira
here comes a time when the ferocity of craving palls, you are drained dry by it, no longer do you want this savagery.
– Lesley Stern
Why be ashamed of reusing your own phrases? Monet didn’t paint only one haystack.
– Monica Youn
There are still some who kneel before images, making small offerings and promising big ones, begging for their heart’s desire and watching the painted plaster face for miraculous smiles or tears. But most of us modern Christian idolaters worship gadgets instead of images.
– Joy Davidman
We keep counting time. We have the sensation time is running out, and we bug ourselves with this. Time is nothing but an abstract measure of motion. We are living in an eternal Now.
– Alan Watts
People pay to see others believe in themselves.
– Kim Gordon
IN AN OLD LAND
Grey among dead leaves deep
The sad November fires
Burn in a land asleep
All among old desires.
In the chill hush near night
A spark suddenly clear
Glows with its lonely light,
Fades, and the night is here.
So in the people’s sleep
A dream flashes out plain;
The years cover it deep,
And they are mute again.
– Lord Dunsany
Outside the leaves were falling as they died
A wind had blown away the sun
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Try this for a couple of weeks and see how it changes your reality: Whatever you think people are withholding from you – praise, appreciation, assistance, loving care, and so on – give it to them. You don’t have it? Just act as if you had it, and it will come.
– Eckhart Tolle
Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
– Alain de Botton
A metaphysical being does not as a rule speak through the telephone to you; it usually communicates with man through the medium of the soul, in other words, our unconscious, or rather through its transcendental ‘psychoid” basis.
– Jung
There’s a burning coal inside of us—the poet’s job is to unearth it.
– Edward Hirsch
Human beings living in crowded cities are becoming violent. Where there is no space, outwardly and inwardly, every form of mischief and degeneration is inevitable.
– Krishnamurti
We live on other people’s ideas, we never read the book, which is ourselves.
– J. Krishnamurti
According to a fragment first published in 1959 by Helmut Sembdner, Heinrich von Kleist proposed dividing humanity into two classes: “(1) those who are adept at metaphor, and (2) those who are adept at formula.” Those capable of both were too few to constitute a class to Kleist.
– Alina Stefanescu
The art of letting things happen, action through non-action, letting go of oneself, as taught by Meister Eckhart, became for me the key opening the door to the way.
– CG Jung
When you see the world you see God. There is no seeing God, apart from the world. Beyond the world to see God is to be God.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Affects always have a disturbing influence on consciousness, as they place undue emphasis on feeling-toned thought-processes and thus obscure any others that may be present.
– Jung
Over time, Jung concluded that there was within each of us a deep resilience guided by some locus of knowing, independent of ego consciousness; a center that produces our dreams to correct us, symptoms to challenge us, and visions to inspire us.
– James Hollis
soon they have occupied it with their glorious proclamations. And the only password they recognize, and how could that word, which even today stands for the future, be anything but Ivan.
It’s Ivan. Ivan, again and again.
– Ingeborg Bachmann
We’re being trained through our incarnations…
trained to seek love, trained to seek light,
trained to see the grace in suffering.
– Ram Dass
Know the male, yet keep to the female, and become the valley of the world.
– Tao Te Ching
No half-heartedness and no worldly fear must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
– Eugène Ionesco
At the cardiac plexus … there in the center of the breast, we have a new great sun of knowledge and of being … Here I only know the delightful revelation that you are you. The wonder is no longer within me, my own dark, centrifugal exultant self.
– D. H. Lawrence
Thank God I am in charge of next to nothing. Mostly I take care of the garden and pets these days.
– Anne Lamott
When you’ve nothing to give
But, the love within your heart
A gentle touch
Is everything.
– Athey Thompson
Frankenstein… is a parable for our time, an enduring prophecy, a remarkably acute diagnosis of the lethal nature of denial: denial of responsibility for one’s actions, denial of the shadow-self locked within consciousness.
– Joyce Carol Oates
Worldliness, we might as well admit, doesn’t seem to be working so well. Perhaps it is time to revive otherworldliness?
– Joy Davidman
What is purification of the mind? No thought. This thoughtless mind, sattvic mind, no mind, can be called Consciousness itself. Self itself.
– Papaji
I don’t like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.
– A. S. Byatt
The cultural era of Europe, and that includes America, is finished. The next era belongs to the technician; the day of the mind machine is dawning. God pity us!
– Henry Miller
Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.
– Erwin Schrödinger
I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
– G.K. Chesterton
I want to move forward, no, not move, rather play forward in life.
– Tove Jansson
The unconscious mind is a favorite modern scapegoat; whatever may really be in it, many of us have mastered the trick of excusing, as ‘unconscious drives,’ behavior whose true motives we know only too well.
– Joy Davidman
SPECTACLES
I was visiting my mom and dad recently who together
Are nearly two hundred years old, and they savor naps
In the afternoon. We believe we have earned our naps,
As my dad says with a smile, and when they lay down
They remove their respective spectacles and fold them
Ever so carefully and place them on their night-tables,
In exactly the same places every day and night, so that
Their hands can reach out slowly gently hesitantly but
With a quiet confidence to find them when they awake.
We think that there are small things and small gestures
And insignificant daily stuff, but that is the most arrant
Nonsense. I saw the dignified hesitancy of their hands,
The calm way their hands went to meet their spectacles,
The spectacles waiting patiently. The brilliance of craft
And creativity that invented the spectacles. The sinewy
Of the hands, the lean yearn of them, the runes of scars.
I could watch their hands arise from abed, and go quest
For that which allows the shepherds of the hands to see,
I could watch that every day, watch them stir and smile
And don spectacles and say Time for tea, do you think?
– Brian Doyle
One thing’s for sure: it’s impossible to ignore the gaps where reality used to reside.
– Murphy, C.
Don’t look for a form of practice which makes things easy. Actually you want to look for a form of practice, not necessarily which makes things harder—that’s not so productive—but brings you in touch with where you are most confused.
– Ken McLeod
Between where you are now and where you’d like to be there’s a sort of barrier, or a chasm, and sometimes it’s a good idea to imagine that you’re already at the other side of that chasm, so that you can start on the unknown side.
– David Bohm
Run ragged
by A. R. Ammons
I said I don’t want to be older, but it’s be older
and older or nothing, right: and day by day
it’s been older every day since the beginning:
still, there was a bracket of young years
within which one could say, these are not the
older years or the baby years: there are, as
Shakespeare said, groups of time, the
transitions from one group to another usually
unalarming: people who have nothing to say
should say nothing: they should drum syllables
or squeeze verbs (or nouns) or cast them like
die, craps, creeps: for example, I don’t
feel at home in this universe and it may be
the only one: that is so pathetic: I think
that is so heartrending with content:
how can the place you come from not be your
home: is the only way to make a phrase
interesting to make it sound like it’s not a
phrase: or it could be two phrases or go two
different ways when you are really going nowhere
well, the human race needs a better track,
the track itself worn or grown over.
Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented.
– C.S. Lewis
I would venture out and walk through the empty downtown streets, dressed in my old finery. A long fur military coat with lost buttons. Worn boots. Boatneck shirt. All somehow out of place, as if I was cut out of an old magazine, a bohemian paper doll walking upright, no one around. I could exist for hours, even entire days, enveloped in silence.
– Patti Smith
Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn’t see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will. At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.
– Chuck Palahniuk
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line ‘Ne pain ne voyent qu’aux fenestres’ *by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience.
– George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
*[Which I think means something like “(those who) see bread only through shop windows.” Which brings to mind the lyric of Bertolt Brecht: ”Make sure those who are now starving, get proper helpings when we all start carving.”]
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession —as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyment and realities of life— will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with
a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.
– John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,
Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
– William Shakespeare
Figure out what it is in life you don’t do well, and then don’t do it.
– Doug Coupland
A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.
– Ocean Vuong
Again, we are daily forced to choose between depression and anxiety. Depression results from the wounding of the individuation imperative; anxiety results from moving forward into the unknown. That path of anxiety is necessary because therein lies the hope of the person to more nearly become an individual. My analyst once said to me, “You must make your fears your agenda.” When we do take on that agenda, for all the anxiety engendered, we feel better because we know we are living in ‘bonne foi’ [good faith] with ourselves. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the perception that some things are more important to us than what we fear.
– James Hollis
America, the government isn’t giving you money/tests/resources. It probably isn’t even right to say you’re “receiving” it. You’re ACCESSING your own funds &/or getting what you already paid for. It’s called the promotion of our general welfare.
Watch your language (& theirs). You’ll be accessing it the way Chuck Schumer & Mitch McConnell have been accessing our money & resources their entire adult lives. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. We don’t say banks give & we receive. Let’s not fall for the rhetoric of shame. Slow the tape.
We pay for drone strikes, libraries, roads, golf trips, bailouts, public schools, electric chairs, naval carriers, a big White House, statues, etc. Directing our resources to the direct care of one another’s health is one way of attempting actionable patriotism. Watch closely. Tip: Instead of saying, “The government” or “Trump,” say, “We, the people.” We, the people, are cutting checks, making decisions, funding research, setting prisoners free, demanding due process, etc. Policy is liturgy. In America, it’s ours. Of, for, & by us people.
– David Dark
Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace is transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender.
– Eckhart Tolle
All of us realize that war requires action. What is sometimes harder for us to realize is that peace and neutrality also require action.
– Lyndon B. Johnson
HERE DEAD WE LIE
Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.
Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.
– A E Housman
Human Mind
by Mavis Staples
I dealed in love, baby
In good words, baby
From above
Ain’t always easy to supply
But I ain’t giving up, baby
Burning hillsides
Children dying by machines of war
And I know every tear that I’ve cried
Through the worst in my life
Was love in full supply
God bless the human mind
Who would dream the sweet design?
Even in these days I find
This far down the line
I find good in it sometimes
God bless the human mind
Find a reason, Lord
To keep on trying
With every tear you cry
You find good in it sometimes
I dealed in loss, daddy
I am the last, daddy
Last of us
Ain’t always easy to believe
I miss my family, daddy
Spinning B-sides
Singing “By and By”
Will mean once more and I
Know everyone can still fly
The best in my life
Is love in full supply
God bless the human mind
Who would dream the sweet design?
Even in these days I find
This far down the line
I find good in us sometimes
God bless the human mind
Find a reason, Lord
To keep on trying
With every tear you’ve cried
You find good in us sometimes
Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain’t no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.
– Junot Díaz
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.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
Addiction often begins as self-prescribed medicine for an overwhelmed nervous system. That’s why nearly half of trauma survivors develop substance issues.
– Brad Schipke
Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.
– Carl Sagan
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
– Galileo Galilei
We are to beware of all men who would turn the tasks and the necessities of the nation to their own private profit or use them for the building up of private power.
– Woodrow Wilson
The task of art is to expand the scope of the game. It is to show us that there are possible moves that are not included in the official rules. All art is a kind of fiction, an imagining of what could be but does not yet exist.
– Suli Qyre
The poet still writes of love, even after it burned everything she believed in.
– Vandana
Awareness has nothing to do with how old the body is or how one is feeling personally; awareness transcends the conditioned.
– Ajahn Sumedho
Don’t underestimate something because you think it’s too old.
– Whoopi Goldberg
Don’t become a slave to technology – manage your phone, don’t let it manage you.
– Richard Branson
The more I observe nature, the less likely I am to consider any statement about her to be completely impossible.
– Pliny the Elder
If we ask each other not ‘What is your practice’ but ‘What are you growing,’ people will stop and think and reflect, and then it becomes a whole different kind of world we live in.
– Gil Fronsdal
It did not kill me,
and it did not make me stronger.
Instead, it came the way
the weather will come~
in its own shape,
with indomitable arrival:
mercy,
and loss.
Afterwards,
the world went on.
People went to work,
children played.
The trees dappled rain
and leaned, slow and wise,
into the light.
A small sparrow
sang on
from the neighbour’s balcony.
Nothing changed,
despite the apocalypse.
And I went on too,
carrying the scent of it—
the way the smoke of housefire
can never quite be lifted
from the curtains,
the way the earth nurses
the painful memory of devastation
beneath her bark.
The price of loss
and love:
a quiet, endless ache,
beneath
Life’s green.
– Rachel Alana (R.A. Falconer)
BEAUTY IN TIME PASSING
At this time of year, the dying can be so beautiful. The scarlet maple leaves, the golden hue of the aspen, the burnt umber of the grasses in the meadow bowing like monks at prayer. To find beauty in time passing is the reason d’être. If we hasten, we miss it. Slow down, endure where you are, savor the way time creeps by.
Linger and take the world in through your senses. When we cease the rush and scramble, everything appears steady and true. The world will no doubt barrel ahead, rocking and rolling, careening through time. Underneath the spin is a great stillness and silence. Let it in!
– Tias Little
So let me just say this. There are ways. You already know that because, in your life, there have been High Kindness periods and Low Kindness periods, and you know what inclined you toward the former and away from the latter. Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition — recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us. It would be strange and self-defeating to fail to seek out these wise voices from the past–as self-defeating as it would be to attempt to rediscover the principles of physics from scratch or invent a new method of brain surgery without having learned the ones that already exist.
– George Saunders
Metaphors and similes are based not only on the likeness or closeness of the things compared, but even on their remoteness from each other. It is this that makes it possible for us to indulge our fantasies by means of language—stare hard enough into the obscure depths of some object and it will grow a funny little face. It is such little faces, claws, wings, tails, tongues, fleetingly glimpsed in things, that probably attract me most about metaphors—they can turn the drab page of an exercise book into a flowing, ornamental pattern, full of wild beasts.
– Andrei Sinyavsky
After a time I found that I could almost listen to the silence,
which had a dimension all of its own.
I started to attend to its strange and beautiful texture,
which of course, it was impossible to express in words.
I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence,
which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there.
Without the distraction of constant conversation,
the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self.
They were no long expressing ideas
that were simply interesting intellectually,
but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity.
– Karen Armstrong
You feel like you can jump from one idea to the next, searching for a kind of aggregate meaning. You know that if you break them and reposition them and unravel them and remove their gears you will able to access their truths in a way you couldn’t before. There is so much to be gained from inverting the gestalt. Back up, cross your eyes. Something is there.
– Carmen Maria Machado
To recreate yourself: powder, fiber, wound. To lose yourself: gesture, contact, oblivion.
– Blanca Varela
Dances aren’t steps. They’re thinking, they’re thoughts.
– Twyla Tharp
Hospitality goes beyond invitation. With invitation we expect a guest to arrive without surprise. Hospitality requires absolute surprise. We are unprepared or prepared to be unprepared, for the unexpected arrival of any Other. Hospitality is the receiving or welcoming which has no power, protocol or law. It is an opening without the horizon of expectation where peace can be found beyond the confines of conflict.
– Marko Zlomislic
Insomnia […] is not just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.
– Marina Benjamin
The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
– Anne Carson
The family therapist David Freeman once concluded a public lecture on intimacy and relationships by saying that if there was any one thing he hoped his audience would remember from his talk, it was the awareness that one does not know his or her spouse, his or her children. We may believe we have a perfect idea of why they act as they do, when in reality our beliefs reflect no more than our own anxieties. Whenever we ascribe a motive to the other person, as in “you are doing this because…,” we discard curiosity and immobilize compassion. The person who knows has nothing to learn, has given up on learning.
– Gabor Maté
…Lay your shoulders to the wheel; … Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it. Say not that thousands are gone, turn out your tens of thousands; throw not the burden of the day upon Providence, but “show your faith by your works…
– Thomas Paine
God help the culture that pretends that earlier stupidities never happened and tries to eradicate all evidence of them.
– George Saunders
Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.
– Marcus Aurelius
There’s also everything that I haven’t read, all the shelves of possibility. Poetry is a big city. It’s important that it’s full of strangers as well as people you’re already in love with.
– Sal Randolph
If the mind is the directive force behind action, the mind and its vision of life must be healed before action can be anything but conflict.
– Alan Watts
Life would be unbearable if it were real. As a dream, it is a mixture of charm and terror to which we gladly abandon ourselves.
– E. M. Cioran (tr. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston)
Love fulfills its destiny simply by being itself.
– Alan Cohen
In That Other Fantasy Where We Live Forever
by Wanda Coleman
we were never caught
we partied the southwest, smoked it from L.A. to El Dorado
worked odd jobs between delusions of escape
drunk on the admonitions of parents, parsons & professors
driving faster than the road or law allowed.
our high-pitched laughter was young, heartless & disrespected
authority. we could be heard for miles in the night
the Grand Canyon of a new manhood.
womanhood discovered
like the first sighting of Mount Wilson
we rebelled against the southwestern wind
we got so naturally ripped, we sprouted wings,
crashed parties on the moon, and howled at the earth
we lived off love. It was all we had to eat
when you split you took all the wisdom
and left me the worry
see the mountains
beyond the limits of
human understanding
– Dogen
For power left to itself can achieve nothing but more power, and violence administered for power’s (and not for law’s) sake turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate.
– Hannah Arendt
Mercy means that we soften ever so slightly, so that we don’t have to condemn others for being total shits, although they may be that. (Okay: are.)
– Anne Lamott
The hurricane does not roar in pentameter.
– Kamau Brathwaite
Yield and become whole.
Bend and become straight.
Empty and be filled.
Wear out and be renewed.
– Laozi
Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you.
By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a distinct border of white, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses: the hum of the fluorescent lights, the ambient noise in a large room, the places your chair presses against your legs or back, your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw, the map of the cool and warm places on your body, the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawn-mower, the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision, a chirp of a bug or whine of a kitchen appliance.
– Alexandra Horowitz
There is too much emphasis on genre vis-à-vis the prose poem. For me the spirit of the prose poem is writing without genre; to go naked with only one’s imagination.
– Russell Edson
We are here for one reason and one reason only: to get closer to the divine force that governs the universe, whether you call that force God, Spirit, Love, or Higher Power.
– Debbie Ford
so pretty
so beautiful
poison mushroom
– Issa
We all want the same thing
from this world:
Call me nobody. Let me live.
– Amorak Huey
I am for the ones who represent sense, and so was Jane Austen.
– Mary McCarthy
Truth is not a reward for good behavior, nor a prize for passing some tests. It cannot be brought about. It is the primary, the unborn, the ancient source of all that is. You are eligible because you are. You need not merit truth. It is your own.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
His spiritual sight is stereoscopic…he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also.
– G.K. Chesterton
Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
– Susan Sontag
I’m not a fan of living in cities but they are the best place to get steps in without even thinking about it.
– Dan Go
I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.
– Lucille Clifton
Without images you could not even speak of divine experiences. You would be completely inarticulate. You only could stammer “mana” and even that would be an image. Since it is a matter of an ineffable experience the image is indispensable.
– C.G. Jung
The imagination cannot be consumed by fire, for it is fire; the burning bush of God which never exhausts its material.
– Northrop Frye
It’s crazy how certain events in your life change everything forever. In one moment, everything is different. Suddenly you’re in the exact same place in the world but nothing is the same. And no one really knows what that means but you.
– Nika Solé
At the border of writing, always having to live without you.
– Maurice Blanchot
A whole new world will come alive from you simply moving different and taking your power back.
– Nika Solé
The child is both a hope and a promise for mankind.
– Maria Montessori
A reading is strong … to the extent that encounters and propagates the surprise of otherness. The impossible but necessary task of the reader is to set herself up to be surprised.
– Barbara Johnson
Life is in the detail. Just look at a flower or an ant, how intricately every piece of creation is engineered!
– Sadhguru
Jung took the opposite approach to that of the behaviorists, that is, he did not observe people from the outside, did not ask how we behave, how we greet one another, how we mate, how we take care of our young. Instead he studied what we feel and what we fantasize while we are doing those things.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
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
Each generation has its own task and need not trouble itself unduly by being everything to previous and succeeding generations.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be, among many other things, our most violent form of nostalgia.
– Adam Phillips, Missing Out
It is more necessary for the soul to be cured than the body; for it is better to die than to live badly.
– Epictetus
I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty… or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity – creation.
– Henry Miller
If you were a woman you would certainly find your mother’s life hanging over your head like a sword and you would be asking yourself what progress you had made, other than to double for yourself the work she had been expected to do and receive three times the blame for it.
– Rachel Cusk
To fully commit to life, one must wrestle with the energies of death.
– Francis Weller
Theatre is the only institution in the world that has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed.
– John Steinbeck
A reader can buy one coincidence, but when you start throwing in coincidence after coincidence…it becomes very difficult.
– M.C. Eberhardt
In the law of God, there is no statute of limitations.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
Take it easy. Enjoy life reasonably as you go along. You are really in eternity now, and in eternity no wise man hurries.
– James Allen
In a world of mindless violence, be mindful kindness.
– @positivethreadsonly
If we don’t even know we’re doing things by rote, when will we be restless enough to try to make them better?
– Seth Godin
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
The greatest barrier to the emergence and spread of these movements is not the overwhelming power of capital. It is the conviction, held by millions of people, that change is impossible. The moment we let go of our collective belief in the inevitability of the current system is the moment we start to build a new one.
– Grace Blakeley
How does every person not cry out all the time? Yes, it was good to eat doughnuts. Yes. I was blessed by many days of joy. A rabbit in the driveway. A rosemary bush with a sorcerer’s cloak of spiderwebs. Brian Eno.
– Gabrielle Calvocoressi
If the Swatstika is an emblem of racial oppression, the Stars and Stripes are equally so.
– Kelly Miller
Accept the possibility that there is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them.
– Walter Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of The Dead
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
– William Shakespeare
Wherever there is power, there is resistance. People always find ways to resist attempts to control their behavior and exercise their autonomy. Time and time again throughout history, people have demonstrated their extraordinary capacities to cooperate in pursuit of a higher purpose. And it is through these examples of resistance and solidarity that we can find the springs of a new world order emerging.
– Grace Blakeley
Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.
– Helen Keller
I know that I can’t get along without writing.
– Jorge Luis Borges
The house you live in will never fall down if you pity the stranger who stands at your gate.
– Gordon Lightfoot
i’m proud of the scars in my soul. they remind me that i have an intense life.
– paulo coelho
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
– Abba Eban
And I think Lincoln understood the balance, that balance required in a democracy. Freedom and other word, Responsibility. He wrote and spoke that work “Responsibility” nearly as often as he did the word “Freedom”. You can’t have one and not the other. Too many forget that.
– Carl Sandburg
Abraham Lincoln talked about a government of the people, by the people, for the people. I think it is absolutely fair to say that in America today, you have a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires.
– Bernie Sanders
When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing that you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again.
– Ernest Hemingway
I consider it poor historical form to make fun of ancestral mistakes without respecting the eros that was linked to them. We are no less in bondage to the zeitgeist; folly is handed down, we merely don a new cap.
– Ernst Jünger
[We’re all going to hell in a while]
by Patrizia Cavalli
Translated by Gini Alhadeff
We’re all going to hell in a while.
But meanwhile
summer’s over.
So come on now, to the couch!
The couch! The Couch!
To read, in fact, is a labor of language. To read is to find meanings, and to End meanings is to name them; but these named meanings are swept toward other names; names call to each other, reassem- ble, and their grouping calls for further naming: I name, I un- name, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a tireless approximation, a metonymic labor. —With regard to the plural text, forgetting a meaning cannot therefore be seen as a fault. Forgetting in relation to what? What is the sum of the text? Meanings can indeed be forgotten, but only if we have chosen to bring to bear upon the text a singular scrutiny. Yet reading does not consist in stop- ping the chain of systems, in establishing a truth, a legality of the text, and consequently in leading its reader into “errors”; it consists in coupling these systems, not according to their finite quantity, but according to their plurality (which is a being, not a discounting): I pass, I intersect, I articulate, I release, I do not count. Forgetting meanings is not a matter for excuses, an unfortunate defect in performance; it is an affirmative value, a way of asserting the irresponsibility of the text, the pluralism of systems (if I closed their list, I would inevitably reconstitute a singular, theological meaning): it is precisely because I forget that I read.
– Roland Barthes
Sometimes we are asked
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.
Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing
is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.
– Tony Hoagland
For the Insurance Executives
Who Deny Mental Health Care
May you also fall
through the winds of
the abyss
and hear
someone ask you
what your plan is.
Your plan.
– Joseph Fasano
Ah, kindness. What a Simple way to tell another struggling soul that there is love to be found in this world.
– Alison Malee
“kids these days have it easy” THAT’S THE POINT.
that’s literally the whole point- we are here to make it better
for whoever comes after us
– Anne Lisa
I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe. Our destruction[…] will be from […] the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence. […] I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing.
Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy.
– Daniel Webster
Poetry is carried into a region which is far beyond truth and error, which is sounder and more necessary than being beyond good and evil.
– Denis Saurat
The timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.
– Khalil Gibran
From Breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
When you hurt good hearted people, they won’t scream, they’ll keep their pain inside. They will gently and silently drift away never to return. They won’t stop being good, they’ll never trust you again. This is exactly when you lost them.
– Emanuela Laura Grigoriu
Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. And you should know what your myth is because it might be a tragedy and maybe you don’t want it to be.
– Carl Jung
Fixity in the Self is your real nature. Remain as you are. That is the aim.
– Ramana Maharshi
Like love, mourning affects the world – and the worldly – with unreality, wit importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me (…) The world depresses me.
– Roland Barthes
kite tail
so much of myself
left behind
– Nitu Yumnam
Nothing of petty calculation and nothing of rational judgment of common existence should complicate the tension of my inner whirlwind, my pain, and my twilight.
– Emil Cioran
Human nature is not noble, not divine, not elevated. It is hunger, lust, envy, and fear dressed up in polite rituals. Civilization does not erase our savagery, it only disguises it. Scratch the surface of anyone and you will see the beast, staring back.
– Thomas Hobbes
The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.
– Terry Pratchett
It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Every- thing that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
– Henry Miller
The most important fact about the subject of education is that there is no such thing. Education is not a subject and it does not deal in subjects. It is instead the transfer of a way of life.
– G.K. Chesterton
Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.
– Marshall McLuhan
There is a hug
so ancient and round,
so empty and deep it has
no name, a hug that absolved
the moon and stars before creation,
a hug that encircled you
before you were conceived,
when the whisper of your soul
had not been spoken.
A hug that clasped your form
when mountains were inside wind
and wind was the sap in a pine,
and the blues of the sky
had not gleamed from your pupils,
and the sun had not yet
burst its golden seed in your heart.
Why have you forgotten
to hug yourself this way?
Why do you shrink from the honey
that was already poured
before your cells
were shaped to contain it?
Don’t you know that you cannot
embrace another
until you hug each
centreless electron
of your own flesh?
Sink into the sweet dark well
of your body,
the abyss of never having needed
to be forgiven.
You think this is foolish?
It’s what angels fell here to feel.
Run into the garden
this very moment,
whatever the weather may be.
Immerse in the sting of wet grass.
Spread your arms and
hug the horizon.
Hug whatever happens
from sunrise until the burgundy rim
of tomorrow.
Carry the earth
like a newborn child.
– Fred LaMotte
A graceful taunt is worth a thousand insults.
– Louis Nizer
Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.
– Werner Herzog
So much of what we need, so much of what we want,
is to be savored, cherished, cared for and cared about.
So much of what is missing is tenderness.
– Julia Cameron
The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.
– Banksy
People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish… but that’s only if it’s done properly.
– Banksy
Spinning like a ghost on the bottom of a top, I’m haunted by all the space that I will live without you.
– Richard Brautigan
At first a yogi feels his mind
Is tumbling like a waterfall;
In mid-course, like the Ganges
It flows on slow and gentle;
In the end, it is a great
Vast ocean, where the Lights
Of Son and Mother merge in one.
– Tilopa
Never before has a civilization known so much about the forces undoing it—or worked so hard to deny them. How is it that, despite all the scientific data and even the evidence of our own experience, so many people continue to believe that climate change is a hoax?
The simple answer is that fossil-fuel money turned denial into an industry. For decades, public-relations firms have flooded the media with carefully crafted doubt, transforming an empirical question into a cultural battle. Climate change has become less about carbon molecules than about identity, loyalty, and belonging.
Yet the roots of denial run deeper than propaganda. They lie in how human beings construct meaning. We do not perceive the world as it is, but through the lenses of culture and language. Our understanding of reality—and even what we count as evidence—is shaped by cultural logics that organize experience, emotion, and belief. These logics give coherence to our lives, but they can also make us blind to facts that threaten them.
An anthropologist I know who worked with Amazonian peoples once told me a story that captures this perfectly. He had lent his motorized canoe to some hunters to go downriver. On their way back, they ran out of fuel. Unfamiliar with outboard motors, they reasoned—based on its sound and the petrol’s color—that it must run on alligator blood. They killed an alligator and poured its blood into the tank. Of course, it didn’t work.
It would be easy to laugh at this, yet their reasoning was coherent. Their logic was structured by analogy and inference—the same cognitive tools science relies on. Their premises were cultural, not empirical—yet their reasoning was rational within that frame. The deeper lesson is that all reasoning operates within the boundaries of belief.
Now imagine they persisted—believing the outboard ran on alligator blood—and explained its failure as the result of a missing spell or divine interdiction. At that point, they would have crossed from hypothesis to conviction. Evidence would no longer matter. This is where cultural meaning hardens into ideology.
Every society faces uncertainty and risk. Cultures manage these by imposing order—by creating systems of knowledge, ritual, and morality that render the world predictable. Science and religion both perform this work, but through different logics. Science grounds knowledge in evidence and predictive power; religion anchors meaning in faith, ritual, and revelation.
Scientific knowledge is always provisional, open to revision. Religious belief, by contrast, rests on premises that cannot be proven or disproven: that God or the gods exist, that creation has purpose, that human rituals, prayers, and offerings are efficacious. Those premises give life moral coherence, but they also sanctify other ideas: that authority is divinely ordained, that power signifies virtue, that prosperity is a sign of favor. When belief fuses with identity, it becomes impermeable to evidence.
Climate change denial arises not from ignorance but from refusal—the insistence on preserving meaning against a truth that demands moral reckoning. Science challenges the old cosmology of human dominion over nature as a divine exemption from consequence. It reveals that nature operates under immutable laws, that our pretense of mastery has limits, that extraction carries costs, and that the planet itself can rebel. For those whose sense of order depends on human exceptionalism, that is not merely threatening—it is heresy.
Denial becomes a symbolic defense. It protects a moral and social order built around fossil fuels as emblems of prosperity, freedom, and masculinity. The internal logic runs deep: oil is abundance; regulation is tyranny; environmentalism is elitism. To accept climate science would be to admit complicity in harm and to question the premise of an economy that equates consumption with virtue.
Viewed anthropologically, denial performs the same function that ritual once did. It preserves a sense of stability when material reality no longer supports it. It transforms refusal into righteousness and disbelief into belonging. Within that logic, carbon becomes both pure and polluting—the fuel of prosperity and the stain of guilt. Denial restores purity by turning guilt into pride, indulgence into patriotism, and exploitation into faithfulness.
These meanings are not spontaneous. They are cultivated and financed. The fossil-fuel industry long ago learned that defending profits required defending the worldview those profits depended on. Its public-relations campaigns built an entire moral cosmology around carbon—freedom, growth, destiny—offering coherence in a world of uncertainty. By the time politicians joined the chorus, the theology was already in place.
This logic is powerful because it tells people who they are and who their enemies are. It replaces the complexity of climate systems with a moral drama in which faith, freedom, and prosperity are under siege by godless elites. In that story, every hurricane, wildfire, or drought becomes a test of conviction rather than evidence of change.
Historically, this cosmology descends from the Western theology of dominion—the belief that mastery over nature was proof and purpose of divine favor. It survived the Enlightenment by merging with industrial capitalism and the Protestant ethic that linked salvation to productivity. Climate denial is its late-industrial offspring, clinging to the moral promise that exploitation is destiny. The flames consuming the planet are the afterlife of a theology that mistook power for virtue.
Climate change denial, then, is not simply the rejection of science. It is the preservation of meaning in a world that feels morally unmoored. It defends a collapsing cosmology by doubling down on the myths that built it. Facts alone cannot dissolve that grip. What might is a new story—one that speaks to the same need for order and belonging, but grounds it in interdependence, care, and accountability. To change minds, we must first change meanings.
– James Greenberg
No one knows you like a person with whom you’ve shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.
– Alice Hoffman
Neurologically, contemplative moments are pauses in the automatic activity of conditioned brain-cell patterns. Psychologically, they are transient suspensions of compulsion. Philosophically they are “naked intuition,” the momentary direct perception that happens before we begin to think or react. Spiritually, they are tastes of freedom for love …, the spaciousness of salvation.
– Gerald G. May M.D.
The Continuous Life
What of the neighborhood homes awash
in a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
from day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
have run their course? O parents, confess
to your little ones the night is a long way off
and your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
your worship of household chores has barely begun;
describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
that one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
explain that you live between two great darks, the first
with an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
of hours and days, months and years, and believe
it has meaning, despite the occasional fear
you are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
to prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
that your search goes on for something you lost – a name,
a family album that fell from its own small matter
into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
you don’t really know. Say that each of you tries
to keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
the careless breathing of earth and feel its available
languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
small tremors of love through your brief,
undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.
– Mark Strand
Nobody was mean to you. Somebody was mean to what he or she thought was you, but not to you. Nobody ever rejects you; they’re only rejecting what they think you are. But that cuts both ways. Nobody ever accepts you either. Until people come awake, they are simply accepting or rejecting their image of you. They’ve fashioned an image of you, and they’re rejecting or accepting that.
– Anthony de Mello
The house of your beliefs, of your properties, of your attachments and comforting ways of thinking is constantly being broken into.
– Krishnamurti
Companionship with the good is like walking through dew and mist; although they do not drench your clothing, in time it becomes imbued with moisture. Familiarity with evil increases false knowledge and views, creating evil day and night. You experience consequences right away, and after death you sink. Once you have lost human life, you will not return ever again, even in ten thousand eons. True words may offend the ear, but do they not impress the heart? If you cleanse the mind and cultivate virtue, conceal your tracks and hide your name, preserve the fundamental and purify the spirit, then the clamor will cease.
– Guishan Lingyou
Reality is a battle of opposing metaphors playing out/in the canvas of the collective mindscape.
– Miles Hingston
Certainly our cultural fallback position seems to be that our technologies will get us out of everything they have got us into.
– Paul Kingsnorth
Words create worlds.
– Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel
Everything can be explained to the people,
on the single condition that you want them to understand.
– Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Just slow things down and it becomes more beautiful.
– David Lynch
The world’s intelligence is not selfish…Look how it subordinates, how it connects, how it assigns each thing what each deserves, and brings the better things into alignment.
– Marcus Aurelius
Knock, and he’ll open the door. Vanish, and he’ll make you shine like the sun. Fall, and he’ll raise you to the heavens. Become nothing, and he’ll turn you into everything.
– Rumi
People are not as beautiful as they look and talk. They are only as beautiful as they love, as they care, as they share.
– Ritu Ghatourey
The happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts, and the happy delivery of it another.
– Mark Twain
I am so done with
being told you
can’t call stupid
things stupid
and racist things
racist and fascist
things fascist.
The whole
problem is that
we have politely
held the door
open for Nazis.
Call things what
they are.
– Matt Haig
As if this were a drug you’ve just taken, as if this were a prophecy, as if this were a canvas, the canvas of a sail, a veil, a veiling, a re-veiling, a reveal, What are we opening to revelation if not ourselves. Oursails, ourveils. Our marvels and marveling. Where had it gone, all that astonishment?
– Sal Randolph
Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You’ll have that readership. Keep going until you know you’re doing work that’s worthy. And then see what happens. That’s my advice.
– Philip Levine
At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love – just enough to feed the birds.
– Henry Miller
Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
– Robert A. Heinlein
We are obliged to destroy not only the oppressor but also those who serve him, whether they do so out of ignorance or out of constraint
– Simone de Beauvoir
Ada was thrashed by everything she had loved. Winds battered her, rains flooded her. Soon there was no distinction between water and air. There was no up or down, no depth or height. Ada spun and spun, tumbling end over end. When she awoke, she was no longer a bird and no longer a boat. She was a cloven thing, a half-thing. Something like a person.
– Sal Randolph
The Spirit is the protagonist of the mission, the Spirit drives us forward, multiplying our talents, restoring us in our labours…
– Leo XIV
The script is not fixed. It has infinite possibilities, albeit each with varying probabilities. And we have an incredible gift: the freedom to choose our perspective, the way we see.
– Nikki Mirghafori
There was something about poverty that was a little like war. Either you had been there or you hadn’t, and it wasn’t really possible to explain it to anyone who hadn’t.
– T. Kingfisher
I don’t think we can have a good society if we don’t have good poetry.
– Octavio Paz
The rich are richer than the gilded age and half of all US children are living in poverty.
– Lee Camp
When people disagree in our complex world of politics, religion, and culture, the causes are simple, even if the resolutions are not. We all wield different portfolios of knowledge. We possess different values, different priorities, and different understandings of all that unfolds around us.
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
Through my writing I began to grow, I began to think.
– Ernest Gaines
So you will have to know something about the time and place where I came from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my life.
– Zora Neale Hurston
Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor the antithesis of Capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed, It would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed, It’s like our visit to the moon or to that other star, I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.
– Leonard Cohen
Some people just are that cruel. There is no design. They are not giants. They don’t do it for any reason, they just like it. And the rest of us have to survive them.
– R. F. Kuang
An activist is someone who cannot help but fight for something. That person is usually not motivated by a need for power, or money, or fame, but in fact driven slightly mad by some injustice, some cruelty, some unfairness—so much so that [they are] compelled by some internal moral engine to act to make it better.
– Eve Engler
It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown the rich as convenient rulers of society. It is not certainly un-Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor.
– G.K. Chesterton
Without healthy boundaries, everyone is a potential villain in your story.
– Lysa TerKeurst
As long as corporations and billionaires are legally allowed to pay off politicians, we will never have a government that works for us.
– Melanie D’Arrigo
If something engages or provokes you, chances are it will do the same for others, and the process of exploring your own reactions to something—an author, a show, an issue, a candidate—may resonate, thereby illuminating the avenues of connection that are the objective of all art. Or at least, all art that matters to me.
– Jason Warburg
Zarathustra says to go back to the body, go into the body, and then everything will be right, for there the greatest intelligence is hidden.
– C.G. Jung
Because intuition needs to look at things a little bit from afar or vaguely in order that it may function, you have to half shut your eyes and not look at facts too closely in order to get this hunch from the unconscious.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
But here the irrational obtrudes.
– Joseph Cornell
Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.
– Robertson Davies
Where do the thoughts come from? From nowhere. They’re an optical illusion. They do not exist.
– Robert Adams
Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb.
– Pythagoras
Quitting Time
The hosed-down chamfered concrete pleases him
He’ll wait a while before he kills the light
On the cleaned-up yard, its pails and farrowing crate,
And the cast-iron pump immobile as a herm
Upstanding elsewhere, in another time
More and more this last look at the wet
Shine of the place is what means most to him—
And to repeat the phrase “My head is light,”
Because it often is as he reaches back
And switches off, a home-based man at home
In the end with little. Except this same
Night after nightness, redding up the work,
The song of a tubular–steel gate in the dark
As he pulls it to and starts his uphill work.
– Seamus Heaney
The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations. For the root matter is the mother of all things.
– Carl Jung
Like A Force of Nature
If we never get together again
Forgive me for these fools I’ve been
See if you can remember me when
I was listening to my better angels
It’s like a force of nature
Coming over me
I can’t keep myself from moving
It’s like a force of nature
May your hope always outweigh your doubt
Until this old world finally punches you out
May you always play your music
Loud enough to wake up all of your neighbors
Or may you play at least loud enough
To always wake yourself up
– Todd Daniel Snider
I said to myself that maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, following a path between daily practices and theoretical achievements, learning to see oneself, know oneself, in expectation of great changes. Day by day I grew calmer.
– Elena Ferrante
When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
– Audre Lorde
We were born to discover the power we have to leave this world a better place.
– Caroline Myss
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.
– Simone Weil
Any product or invention is standardized by mass-production and this standardization of the product discourages further experimentation.
– William Burroughs
If a man is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence.
– Bertrand Russell
Everybody prayed; everybody lied about it. Even atheists prayed on airplanes and bingo nights.
– Sherman Alexie
The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.
– Marianne Moore
Trust involves opening oneself to the possibility of betrayal, hence to a very deep form of harm. It means relaxing the self-protective strategies with which we usually go through life, attaching great importance to actions by the other over which one has little control. It means, then, living with a certain degree of helplessness.
– Martha Nussbaum
A wise society teaches inquiry, not obedience.
– John Locke
Mostly, what I have learned so far about aging, despite the creakiness of one’s bones and the cragginess of one’s once-silken skin, is this: do it. By all means, do it.
– Maya Angelou
Orwell’s ‘1984’ convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap away from tyranny. By contrast, Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ suggested that the totalitarian systems of the future might be subservient and ingratiating.
– J. G. Ballard
Every true and deep love is a sacrifice. The lover sacrifices all other possibilities, or rather, the illusion that such possibilities exist.
– CG Jung
If only our passion to understand others were as great as our passion to be understood. Were this so, all our apologies would be truly meaningful and healing.
– Harriet Lerner, Why Won’t You Apologize?
There is no authority in spiritual matters. There is no following, no leader, no guru. One has to find the light for oneself.
– Krishnamurti
The mind that is open for questions is open for dissent. In the totalitarian regime the doubting, inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed.
– Joost Meerloo
A hermit is essential, especially for Western people who tend to neglect or ignore that introverted hermiting part of themselves. At a certain point, you can’t do without your interior hermit.
– Robert A. Johnon
Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
– Alberto Manguel
Peoples of elder cultures often say that the survival of human beings depends on being able to hear the language of the birds and beasts, the language of the river, rock, and wind, being able to understand what is being said in all the tongues of plant, creature, and element. Listening to the garbage as well as the rose with the same ears, the ears of compassionate understanding.
– Joan Halifax
Those who oppose reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.
– Theodore Roosevelt
The craft is mysterious; our opinions are ephemeral, and I prefer Plato’s theory of the Muse to that of Poe, who argued, or pretended to argue, that the writing of a poem is an operation of the intelligence. (I never cease to be amazed that the Classics professed a Romantic theory while a Romantic poet espoused a Classical one.)
– Jorge Luis Borges
Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Abraham Lincoln wrote, “I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice,” which reflects his belief that compassion leads to better outcomes than rigid punishment. Shared in a letter to Joseph Gillespie, it echoes the spirit of Lincoln’s call for healing and empathy after the Civil War.
Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.
– Franklin Pierce Adams
All of us perceive in our own way, but the world does have an objective structure.
– Eleanor Gibson
Neurosis is in a way a positive symptom. It shows that something wants to grow; it shows that that person is not right in his or her present state and if growth is not accepted then it grows against you and produces what might be called a negative individuation.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Those who are against fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of fascism, are like those who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf… They are not against the property relations that engender barbarism; they are only against the barbarism itself.
– Bertolt Brecht
And the play works beautifully, so long as everyone stays in character.
– Alan Watts
This ‘growth’ is the overriding purpose of the ‘global economy,’ which the Machine has built: everything else is of secondary concern. The growth has no specific aim and no end in sight, and can always be justified by pointing to problems—poverty, environmental degradation…
– Paul Kingsnorth
Buddha means awareness, the awareness of body and mind that prevents evil from arising in either.
– Bodhidharma
If a person just refuses to think that he has an inside problem, he’s not going to work the thing out. Nobody can do it for him. You have to learn how to recognize your own depths.
– Joseph Campbell
Long hours, hard labor, or burning the midnight oil will not produce a Milton, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven. People accomplish great things through quiet moments, imagining that the invisible things from the foundation of time are clearly visible. You can imagine.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
– Arthur Conan Doyle
You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it.
– Naval Ravikant
It is not contemplation of the result but visualization of the process that moves you towards your goal.
– Vadim Zeland
What is split off, not felt, remains the same. When it is felt, it changes.
– Wilhelm Reich
Just knowing your rights will never be enough if you are powerless to force someone else to respect them.
– Alice Wong
And yet, there is a personal test which every critic applies to poetry, the test of involuntary memorizing. If one remembers a poem, or part of a poem, without making a conscious effort to do so, one is probably dealing with a genuine poet.
– Northrop Frye
Write what should not be forgotten.
– Isabel Allende
Her essence is a poem written by courage, curiosity, and quiet rebellion.
– Angie Weiland-Crosby
the Librarian dropped on him like the descent of Man.
– Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
Life’s too short to worry
Life’s too long to wait
It’s too short not to love everybody
Life is too long to hate
– Todd Snider
It’s hard to imagine worse humans than the ones currently in charge of The United States of America.
– Stinson Carter
Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it, but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.
– Thomas Paine
Republicans claim to be America’s best Christians, but Jesus was pretty explicit about what would happen to people who denied aid to “the least among us”: they go straight to Hell. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.
– Thom Hartman
The many identities you hold and your lived experiences are not in conflict with each other; they make you sharp, whole, and extraordinary.
– Alice Wong
You can’t publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism.
– Julian Paul Assange
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
– T.S. Eliot
Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have winkles.
– George Eliot
Liberation is not about replacing white rulers with Black rulers. It’s about transforming the nature of power itself.
– Amilar Cabral
When something can’t be fixed then the question is what can we build instead?
– Alice Wong
There is so much that able-bodied people can learn from the wisdom that often comes with disability. But space needs to be made. Hands need to reach out. People need to be lifted up.
– Alice Wong
And because you’re a dream, I sleep a lot.
– Mahmoud Darwish
The males of the species are territorial and aggressive, renowned for their teeth, their claws, and their fury. They rip things apart. They are beautiful, but they spend much of their lives alone and are nearly extinct.
– Matthew Olzmann, Constellation Route
You can’t help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.
– Margaret Atwood
Learning how to live a quiet life is an important art, especially in a world that carelessly assaults us with noise.
– Thomas Moore
If truth sounds like propaganda to you, maybe you’re just allergic to honesty…
– Mike Tomlinson
Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.
– Mitch Albom
To say that nothing is sacred is sacrilegious, and it also means at the same time that we should revere nothing, from the vast empty expanses of the universe to the void within ourselves.
– Viet Thanh Nguyen
The frame of the novel and of the world is anthropocentric. But if I have to choose between the universe without a frame and mankind with a frame, I would choose mankind.
– László Krasznahorkai
Advocacy is not just a task for charismatic individuals or high-profile community organizers. Advocacy is for all of us; advocacy is a way of life. It is a natural response to the injustices and inequality in the world.
– Alice Wong
Don’t be so heavenly minded that you neglect to do any Earthly good.
– James 2:26
Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases.
– Stephen Hawking
Is there such a thing as an alternative silence? Form is contingent upon the means by which it traverses a territory.
– Bhanu Kapil
On an other level, there are also different clarities. Some things are not meant to be clear; obscurity is their clarity. We should not underestimate obscurity. Obscurity is as rich as luminosity.
– Etel Adnan
Someone condemned, descending without light,
At the edge of an abyss.
– Baudelaire, The Irredeemable
All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged.
– C.S. Lewis
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
by Ted Berrigan
In Africa the wine is cheap, and it is
on St. Mark’s Place too, beneath a white moon.
I’ll go there tomorrow, dark bulk hooded
against what is hurled down at me in my no hat
which is weather: the tall pretty girl in the print dress
under the fur collar of her cloth coat will be standing
by the wire fence where the wild flowers grow not too tall
her eyes will be deep brown and her hair styled 1941 American
will be too; but
I’ll be shattered by then
But now I’m not and can also picture white clouds
impossibly high in blue sky over small boy heartbroken
to be dressed in black knickers, black coat, white shirt,
buster-brown collar, flowing black bow-tie
her hand lightly fallen on his shoulder, faded sunlight falling
across the picture, mother & son, 33 & 7,
First Communion Day, 1941—
I’ll go out for a drink with one of my demons tonight
they are dry in Colorado 1980 spring snow.
Hope is not an inclination or an emotion; it’s a duty.
– Susan Neiman
…since the symbol derives as much from the conscious as from the unconscious, it is able to unite them both, reconciling their conceptual polarity through its form and their emotional polarity through its numinosity.
– Jung
Let’s face it — artists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are. They are like plants growing in winter. You can’t see the fruit, but it is taking root below the earth.
– André Gregory
Relax to your heart’s content on the sofa, this kind of furniture is made to laze on, not weep on. That, at least, is the opinion of your Franz.
– Franz Kafka, 1912.
To create is always to speak about childhood. It’s always nostalgic. In any case, in my writing, and in most modern writing. When I was very young I quickly understood that everything in life was blocked to me. I went to school until I was thirteen, to the local primary school. The most I could hope for was to become an accountant or a petty official. So I put myself in a position not to become an accountant, not to become a writer – I didn’t know what I was doing then – but to observe the world. I created in myself, at the age of thirteen or fifteen, the observer that I would be, and thus the writer that I would become. And this work that I did on myself, then, remains; it’s there.
– Jean Genet
It is significant that the Latin word “templum” originally meant a vast space, open on all sides, from which one could survey the whole surrounding landscape as far as the horizon.
– Henry Corbin
My three-year-old refers to his imagination as “my magic,” and this is why children are the best.
– Joseph Fasano
Most of you don’t realize that 99% of your problems would go away if you slept from 10pm-6pm.
– Dan Go
an autumn butterfly
clinging onto
a scarecrow
– Issa
He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.
– Denis Johnson
a hot bath
in a secluded house
cicadas in the pines
– Issa
The stars
have already opened
their autumn eyes
– Ozaki Kōyō
To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.
– Sylvia Plath
When we are calm, unhurried, and free from stress and distractions the brain slips into a richer, more nuanced mode of thought. Some call this Slow Thinking, and the best minds have always understood its power.
– Carl Honoré
Without books the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing.
– James Salter
My only unconditional passions have been books and music. And, perhaps as a logical consequence of all this, I gradually became a solitary person.
– Haruki Murakami
What I feel for
you—it beats
words. It beats
worlds. I promise.
– Katherine Mansfield
Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
– William Butler Yeats
When spiritual understanding is lived, not just learned, it begins to transform the inner world. The soul gains a quiet strength, and peace becomes a natural state rather than a momentary feeling.
– Brahma Kumaris
The source of all abundance is not outside you. It is part of who you are.
– Eckhart Tolle
Minds are not conquered by force, but by love and high-mindedness.
– Baruch Spinoza
I have never counted on the masses. I have never counted on anything but an elite of lucid volunteers, those few who see clearly in the disorder & are ready to act without hesitation. It is always from a small number that the energy of an age is born.
– Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Great Harmony is called the Way. It embraces the nature of opposing movements…
– Zhang Zai
Writing has been a torture for me. A pleasure, never. Now it’s not so painful—I’m used to the process, and I don’t suffer as much as I used to. But for years and years I’d feel the world filling up with mist, fog—death—seeping in through the windows.
– Vivian Gornick
An activity possesses trajectory, and, anticipating a form, trajectory anticipates an end.
– Donald Revell
I love being by myself because I don’t like to hurry. I like to take my time. Soak it all in. Feel the totality of wherever I am. There’s so much magic when you’re in your own energy.
– Nika Solé
When the mind, which is the cause of all cognition’s and of all actions, becomes quiescent, the world will disappear.
– Ramana Maharshi
Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
– Will Durant
Every. Single. Time. we consciously or unconsciously give to someone, help someone, it improves circulation, moves the blood, opens the heart, and creates a clear path for inner peace. When we are at peace, we are ageless, timeless, priceless.
Most Importantly- it (this beautiful energy) translates as pure, unassuming kindness and it liberates our soul – inside out.
– Debbie Lynn
But the poem is also a power of speech to be possessed in his own way by the reader, and some death and rebirth process has to be gone through before the poem revives within him, as something now uniquely his, though still also itself.
– Northrop Frye
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts, perhaps fear of a loss of power.
– John Steinbeck
When Heaven’s nature is in man, just as water’s nature is in ice… though the light received may be great or small, bright or dim, its capacity to reflect is never divided.
– Zhang Zai
Like a spreading virus one perceives on the hands of men who enlighten themselves in the name of Progress both the stain of the gravedigger and the snot of the accoucheur.
– René Char (translated by Paul Mann)
Synchronicity: A phenomenon where an event in the outside world coincides meaningfully with a psychological state of mind.
– Daryl Sharp
The question is, then, What the fuck do we do with our history? Do we try to hide it, like we’ve done so many times?
– Javier Cercas
For me poems are almost the only reality … they are buoys in a wide sea. I swim from one to the next. And without them I would be nothing.
– Anselm Kiefer
Whichever method suits you use it. Do not allow a day to go by where you do not give up your identification with the world. Either through surrender, or through Self Inquiry, or through mindfulness, or through observation.
– Robert Adams
In relationships, conflict arises when one seeks to assert power rather than presence.
– Eckhart Tolle
The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt – they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.
– Sergei Rachmaninoff
Sometimes you often feel tired.
Not because you’ve done too much,
but because you’ve done too little of
what sparks a light in you.
– Alex Heijer
As the strongest bodies are those which can equally well support the extremes of heat and cold, so the noblest minds are those which prosperity does not render insolent and overbearing, nor ill fortune depress.
– Aemilius Paulus
Our natural magic is but the ancient religion of the world—the ancient worship of nature.
– W.B. Yeats
If a man hopes that
a woman will be an angel
in his life, he must first create
a paradise for her:
angels do not live in hell.
– Frida Kahlo
Without
a map, we begin
singing
– Mark Irwin
Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.
– Jhumpa Lahiri, The Third and Final Continent
Some of the Questions to Consider
by Kim Addonizio
Is it better to offer your heart to the wolf
or wait for the wolf to tear it out of you?
It’s hard to know which is worse,
the nightmare of approaching tornadoes
or waking from the dream your parents were alive in.
Enter the ominous music announcing the shark.
It is best to disappear into one’s work.
Best to be ceaselessly drunk, Baudelaire suggested,
mentioning other things besides wine but most people
ignored that part, because who wants to be drunk on virtue?
Misreadings are best. Misunderstandings are also best
but to be misunderstood is not the goal.
I don’t need drugs, I am drugs, Dali famously said,
and drew his wife’s face exploding into spheres.
What do all these wildflowers mean? Just look,
said a famous American painter who, drunk, drove his convertible
off the road into the trees and flew headfirst into an oak.
We’re all afloat in the same solution.
Would you like to trade some molecules with me?
Better to sketch a few atoms than fire neutrons at them
to create a chain reaction. The adult human body contains
7 octillion atoms and one picnic table. Is it time to go?
Not yet, not yet. Let’s meet for an aperitivo.
Let’s build a pineapple from all this fresh snow.
Giving to others is really giving to oneself.
– Ramana Maharshi
We’re all so small, and have such little time, unable to envision the majority of the world.
– Mieko Kawakami
Some single mind must be master, else there will be no agreement in anything.
– Abraham Lincoln
Let us be enraged by injustice, but let us not be destroyed by it.
– Bayard Rustin
Evil comes step by step, and therefore you shouldn’t be indifferent.
– Marian Turski, Holocaust survivor
To put this in Nietzschean-sounding parlance: There are no Men and Women, only different degrees, different shades of masculinity and femininity.
– Alenka Zupančič
If you put a message in a bottle, be sure to empty the liquid first.
– Mother Theresa
But it would be an empty universe indeed if it were not for the people I love, and who love me. Without them, the wonder of it all would be lost on me.
– Stephen Hawking
I don’t even call it violence when it’s in self-defense; I call it intelligence.
– Malcolm X
Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but where there are millions, that is where serious politics begin.
– Vladimir Lenin
The pendulum swing from this era is going to be amazeballs.
– Jennifer Lane
Okay, yes. We are bored. We are all bored now. But has it ever occurred to you that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may be a self-perpetuating unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money, and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks?
– Andre Gregory
The sky seemed to rip apart from end to end to pour fire down upon me.
– Albert Camus
I don’t want to write for adults. I want to write for readers who can perform miracles. Only children perform miracles when they read.
– Astrid Lindgren
I’ve heard countless stories of what I’ve come to think of as ‘axis mundi’ experiences: encounters that have pulled someone into a deep experience of felt belonging upon the tiny bit of Earth that they find themselves upon.
– Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
I love the fitful gust that shakes
The casement all the day,
And from the glossy elm tree takes
The faded leaves away,
Twirling them by the window pane
With thousand others down the lane.
I love to see the shaking twig
Dance till the shut of eve,
The sparrow on the cottage rig,
Whose chirp would make believe
That Spring was just now flirting by
In Summer’s lap with flowers to lie.
I love to see the cottage smoke
Curl upwards through the trees,
The pigeons nestled round the cote
On November days like these;
The cock upon the dunghill crowing,
The mill sails on the heath a-going.
The feather from the raven’s breast
Falls on the stubble lea,
The acorns near the old crow’s nest
Drop pattering down the tree;
The grunting pigs, that wait for all,
Scramble and hurry where they fall.
– John Clare
And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence”
– Bertrand Russell
For years, there were opportunities that I didn’t fully accept because I didn’t know how, but there were people saying, You can do it.
– Hilton Als
In actual life, it requires the greatest
art to be simple.
– C. G. Jung
The magic is in the wild, and it is also inside us. We are the wilds, and we are the hearth. Come along, won’t you? All the world is waiting, and you are waiting too, and there is so much joy, and power, and there is so much work to be done. Let’s get to work.
– Alice Tarbuck
The degree to which I have no interest in your writing if you used AI to help you write it cannot be overstated.
Trust yourself. Your mind is beautiful and it’s enough.
– Ethan Nichtern
When our LGBTQ+ friends aren’t welcome at the table, then we don’t feel welcome either, and that not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people.
– Rachel Held Evans
Here is the wind bending the reeds westward,
The patchwork of morning on gray moraine:
Had I words I could tell of origin,
Of God’s hands bloody with birth at first light,
Of my thin squeals in the heat of his breath,
Of the taste of being, the bitterness,
And scents of camas root and chokecherries.
And, God, if my mute heart expresses me,
I am the rolling thunder and the bursts
Of torrents upon rock, the whispering
Of old leaves, the silence of deep canyons.
I am the rattle of mortality.
I could tell of the splintered sun. I could
Articulate the night sky, had I words.
– N. Scott Momaday
To a large extent, creativity is self-generated in areas of the mind beyond or beneath the individual’s willful, conscious control. All he can do is discipline his consciousness to accommodate the needs of the creative process.
– Ingo Swann
I am the voice speaking softly.
I exist from the first.
I dwell within the Silence,
Within the immeasurable Silence.
I descended to the midst of the underworld
And I shone down upon the darkness.
It is I who poured forth the Water.
I am the one hidden within Radiant Waters…
I am the Image of the Invisible Spirit.
I am the Womb that gives shape to the All
By giving birth to the Light that shines in splendour.
– The Trimorphic Protennoia, The Nag Hammadi Library,
Ed. James M. Robinson, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1977 (extracts only).
Quoted in Anne Baring’s, The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul
The world is big, but inside us it is as deep as sea, wrote Rilke. We travel through space, through new cities to escape the archaeological sites of our inconstancy. We inhabit the space between the monument and the moment, between the itinerancy and the eternity. The cities of memories are built upon the foundations of our ruined personal longings and dreams.
– Nikola Madžirov
At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.
– Gore Vidal
Gratitude is medicine for a heart devastated by tragedy. If you can only be thankful for the blue sky, then do so.
– Richelle E. Goodrich
[…] he would see that birth and death were only two tremendous moments in an eternal waking, and his face would glow with amazement as he understood this; he would feel – gently he grasped the copper handle of the door – the warmth of the mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would discover the hidden depths of human existence, would finally understand that the unbreakable ties that bound him to the world were not imprisoning chains and condemnation but a kind of clinging to an indestructible sense that he had a home; and he would discover the enormous joys of mutuality which embraced and animated everything: rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste of fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his anxieties and bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast required by the live roots of his past and the rising airship of his certain future, and, then – he started opening the door – he would finally know that our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day’s-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars.
Suitcase in hand, he stepped into the room and stood there blinking in the half-light.
– László Krasznahorkai
Unfortunately, the reason some folks like heaven is because some other folks don’t get to go there.
– Todd Snider
In science it is a service of the highest merit to seek out those fragmentary truths attained by the ancients, and to develop them further.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
– Alan Watts
History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.
I attest to this: the world is not white; it never was white, cannot be white. White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank.
– James Baldwin
If I don’t live by the praises of man, I won’t die by their criticisms.
– Bill Johnson
It’s not bad people I fear so much as good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel- he believes in punishment.
– Clarence Darrow
I did think, let’s go about this slowly.
This is important.
This should take some really deep thought.
We should take small thoughtful steps.
But, bless us, we didn’t.
– Mary Oliver
Thinking can either be a useful tool or just habitual proliferation.
– Ajahn Sumedho
For a country to have a great writer … is like having another government. That’s why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The unlimited individual freedom that neoliberalism offers us is nothing more than an illusion. We no longer live in a disciplinary society, where everything is regulated through prohibitions and mandates, but in a society of performance.
One imagines that one is free, but in reality, what one does is exploit oneself voluntarily and with enthusiasm, until collapsing. That is a mirage of freedom. Self-exploitation is much more effective than being exploited by others, because it arouses that deceptive sensation of freedom.
– Byung-Chul Han
As for the current world, everything I love is under siege, and poetry is one way I feel alive under those conditions. It’s not about transcendence as much as presence.
– Sal Randolph
We are all human and we all want to be connected.
– Gabrielle Bernstein
If psychiatrists were honest: “You were never chemically broken.”
– Brad Schipke
I know an author whose book was optioned for a movie, on the condition that the main character be made a much younger man. When the wind is right I can almost hear his screams.
– William Goldman
society is not a decision making unit or an institution taking action.
– Friedrich A. Hayek
In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Everything worthwhile is uphill. Our problem is, we have uphill hopes but downhill habits.
– John C. Maxwell
The slenderest knowledge that may be attained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge attained of lesser things.
– Saint Thomas Aquinas
The truth often has to push through a thousand obstacles before people finally accept it.
– George Lichtenberg
It is a part of the intellectual’s tragedy that the things he most values about himself and his work are quite unlike those society values in him.
– Richard Hofstadter
A diamond with a flaw is worth more than a pebble without one.
– Confucius
The need for connection and community is primal, as fundamental as the need for air, water, and food.
– Dean Ornish
Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
– W. B. Yeats
It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We must not, for a moment, ever think that our exploration of discourse is free, complete; rather, those explorations are always policed by discourses already set in place.
– Samuel R. Delany
What happens in one part of the world has repercussions on the entire planet. This allows me to reiterate two convictions that I repeat over and over again: ‘Everything is connected’ and ‘No one is saved alone.’
– Pope Francis
It wasn’t until high school, when I took my first creative writing class, that I began to sense trouble. I realized, with shock, that I wasn’t good at creative writing. I was good at grammar and arguing, at remembering things people said, and at making stressful situations seem funny. But it turned out these weren’t the skills you needed in order to invent quirky people and give them arcs of desire.
– Elif Batuman, Either/Or
Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am – and what I need – is something I have to find out myself.
– Chinua Achebe
We often have these kind of black and white ideas about which spaces are conservative and which spaces are progressive.
And one thing that you will quickly realize, if you’re on the margins within the margins, is that some of the spaces that we think may be the most progressive also have systems of oppression.
– Raquel Willis
Consider frequently the connection of all things in the universe and their relation to one another. For things are somehow implicated with one another, and all in a way friendly to one another.
– Marcus Aurelius
When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured.
– Hermann Hesse
Language is to the human experience what spectography is to light: Every word holds a tiny infinity of nuances, a genealogy, a social set of possible users, and that although a writer must sometimes pretend to use language lightly, they should never actually do so—the stuff is near sacred.
– David Mitchell
A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.
– Chinua Achebe
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.
– Henry David Thoreau
Tender Buttons [Breakfast]
by Gertrude Stein
A change, a final change includes potatoes. This is no authority for the abuse of cheese. What language can instruct any fellow.
A shining breakfast, a breakfast shining, no dispute, no practice, nothing, nothing at all.
A sudden slice changes the whole plate, it does so suddenly.
An imitation, more imitation, imitation succeed imitations.
Anything that is decent, anything that is present, a calm and a cook and more singularly still a shelter, all these show the need of clamor. What is the custom, the custom is in the centre.
What is a loving tongue and pepper and more fish than there is when tears many tears are necessary. The tongue and the salmon, there is not salmon when brown is a color, there is salmon when there is no meaning to an early morning being pleasanter. There is no salmon, there are no tea-cups, there are the same kind of mushes as are used as stomachers by the eating hopes that makes eggs delicious. Drink is likely to stir a certain respect for an egg cup and more water melon than was ever eaten yesterday. Beer is neglected and cocoanut is famous. Coffee all coffee and a sample of soup all soup these are the choice of a baker. A white cup means a wedding. A wet cup means a vacation. A strong cup means an especial regulation. A single cup means a capital arrangement between the drawer and the place that is open.
Price a price is not in language, it is not in custom, it is not in praise.
A colored loss, why is there no leisure. If the persecution is so outrageous that nothing is solemn is there any occasion for persuasion.
A grey turn to a top and bottom, a silent pocketful of much heating, all the pliable succession of surrendering makes an ingenious joy.
A breeze in a jar and even then silence, a special anticipation in a rack, a gurgle a whole gurgle and more cheese than almost anything, is this an astonishment, does this incline more than the original division between a tray and a talking arrangement and even then a calling into another room gently with some chicken in any way.
A bent way that is a way to declare that the best is all together, a bent way shows no result, it shows a slight restraint, it shows a necessity for retraction.
Suspect a single buttered flower, suspect it certainly, suspect it and then glide, does that not alter a counting.
A hurt mended stick, a hurt mended cup, a hurt mended article of exceptional relaxation and annoyance, a hurt mended, hurt and mended is so necessary that no mistake is intended.
What is more likely than a roast, nothing really and yet it is never disappointed singularly.
A steady cake, any steady cake is perfect and not plain, any steady cake has a mounting reason and more than that it has singular crusts. A season of more is a season that is instead. A season of many is not more a season than most.
Take no remedy lightly, take no urging intently, take no separation leniently, beware of no lake and no larder.
Burden the cracked wet soaking sack heavily, burden it so that it is an institution in fright and in climate and in the best plan that there can be.
An ordinary color, a color is that strange mixture which makes, which does make which does not make a ripe juice, which does not make a mat.
A work which is a winding a real winding of the cloaking of a relaxing rescue. This which is so cool is not dusting, it is not dirtying in smelling, it could use white water, it could use more extraordinarily and in no solitude altogether. This which is so not winsome and not widened and really not so dipped as dainty and really dainty, very dainty, ordinarily, dainty, a dainty, not in that dainty and dainty. If the time is determined, if it is determined and there is reunion there is reunion with that then outline, then there is in that a piercing shutter, all of a piercing shouter, all of a quite weather, all of a withered exterior, all of that inmost violent likely.
An excuse is not dreariness, a single plate is not butter, a single weight is not excitement, a solitary crumbling is not only martial.
A mixed protection, very mixed with the same actual intentional unstrangeness and riding, a single action caused necessarily is not more a sign than a minister.
Seat a knife near a cage and very near a decision and more nearly a timely working cat and scissors. Do this temporarily and make no more mistake in standing. Spread it all and arrange the white place, does this show in the house, does it not show in the green that is not necessary for that color, does it not even show in the explanation and singularly not at all stationary.
Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.
– Blaise Pascal
We sometimes come to God, not because we love him best, but because we love our possessions best; we ask Christ to ‘save Western civilization,’ without asking ourselves whether it is entirely a civilization that Christ could want to save.
– Joy Davidman
cold air
for the homeless
moon over the bridge
– Issa
Pure poetry is hieroglyphic: decipherable only by the key of destiny.
– Cristina Campo
oh / poetry help us understand less much better
– Zach Savich
Tolstoy, a ruthless judge of others, fell and stayed in love with Chekhov, and so do most of us.
– Harold Bloom
With a simple breath you can release stress and replace it with what you need. Turn anxiety into peace, anger into joy, tension into love, fear into faith, guilt into trust. Take a moment right now to take a breath.
– Iyanla Vanzant
And there are stars, but none of you, to spare.
– June Jordan
Working on leaving a trail
of goodness and compassion
wherever I go.
– Steven Stepe
The thinker is a fictitious entity, an illusion of the mind.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
The intelligence consists not only in the knowledge but also in the skill to apply the knowledge into practice.
– Aristotle
We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique.
– C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Painters have a knowledge which goes beyond words. They are where musicians are. When someone blows the saxophone the sky is made of copper. When you make a watercolour you know how it feels to be the sea lying early in the day in the proximity of light.
– Etel Adnan
Alchemists, mystics, and poets—those pilgrims of direct experience—have always recognized that the link with the divine is through the transmutation of intense affect in the body…
– Veronica Goodchild
Never talk about someone else’s Karma – take charge of Yours.
– Sadhguru
Everyone steps on the cosmic banana peel sooner or later.
– Anne Lamott
A man becomes a Buddha the moment he accepts all that life brings with gratitude.
– Osho
Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs.
– Charlie Munger
Beyond the human flat earths
which, policed by warm language, wreathed
in the fog the limits of the world,
far out in space you can breathe
the planet revolves in a cold book.
– Les Murray
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
– Frank O’Hara
The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people.
– Charles Bukowski
Harmony is not in the things we see, but in the seeing itself.
When the seer is clear, all is harmonious.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Defects of style betray defects of content. There are always defects. Everybody has things they can say well and things they can’t say. And that, of course, has to do as much with society as with a writer’s individual life choices.
– Fredric Jameson
Oh, your mouth is a diver’s bell; / it takes me down untold fathoms.
– Susan Glickman
I burned so long
so quiet you
must have
wondered
if I loved you
back. I did, I did,
I do.
– Annelyse Gelman
John Ruskin to George MacDonald:
If I had a son, I would rather he took his lessons in literary taste under you than under any person I know, for you would make him more than a scholar, [you would make him] a living and thoughtful reader.
Our fundamental destiny is not to exist and survive, as we think: it is to appear and disappear.
– Baudrillard
And yet all our sciences are no more than tools to increase our power of getting whatever we already want.
– Joy Davidman
Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals
with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants
– Frank O’Hara
Anyone who thinks a sound culture can be built on a history of trauma should look at the current state of Israel.
– Susan Neiman
The best time to expand is when no one else dares to take risks.
– Andrew Carnegie
I want to do something absolutely different, or perhaps nothing at all: just stay where I am, in my home, and absorb each hour, each day, and be alone; and read and think; and walk about the garden in the night; and wait, wait…
– Rosamond Lehmann
The face of time is destroyed. Life is lived to pieces.
Ugly is it, the time. But true.
– Joseph Roth, The Face of Time
Until you can manage
your emotions, don’t
expect to manage
money.
– Warren Buffett
Within formality, we can find our perfect informal freedom. As our practice matures, we are able to find that freedom in every circumstance and make it available to others as well.
– Sojun Mel Weitsman
The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all.
– Kurt Gödel
It’s hard to sincerely occupy feelings that are fully oppositional to yours—to be able to look at yourself from that other position and think, What a twit!
– Mary Gaitskill
In any work of art, perspective is of overriding importance. It determines the course and content; it draws together the threads of the narration; it enables the artist to choose between the important and the superficial, the crucial and the episodic. The direction in which characters develop is determined by perspective, only those features being described which are material to their development. The more lucid the perspective—as in Molière or the Greeks—the more economical and striking the selection.
– György Lukács
OUTSIDE
We know things
but explain our motives like textbooks
each day another exercise
We speak until our voices
exhaust themselves
There is too much to say but
what is said
always the same
The truest passion
is the sycamore outside
renewing itself
easily
without a word
– Paul Blackburn
I have always longed to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to town a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.
– J. A. Baker
Whatever is seen is transient.
That which sees is timeless.
– Wu Hsin
If you don’t write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.
– José Saramago
Keeping Going
by Seamus Heaney
The piper coming from far away is you
With a whitewash brush for a sporran
Bobbling round you, a kitchen chair
Upside down on your shoulder, your right arm
Pretending to tuck the bag beneath your elbow,
Your pop eyes and big cheeks nearly bursting
With laughter, but keeping up the drone
Inside your nose, between catches of breath.
The whitewash brush. An old blanched skirted thing
On the back of the byre door, biding its time
Until spring airs spelled lime in a work bucket
And a potstick to mix it in with water.
Those smells brought tears to the eyes, we inhaled
A kind of greeny burning and thought of brimstone.
But the slop of the actual job
Of brushing walls, the watery gray
Being lashed on in broad swatches, then drying out
Whiter and whiter, all that worked like magic.
Where had we come from, what was this kingdom
We knew we’d been restored to? Our shadows
Moved on the wall and a tar border glittered
The full length of the house, a black divide
Like a freshly opened, pungent, reeking trench.
Piss at the gable, the dead will congregate.
But separately. The women after dark,
Hunkering there a moment before bedtime,
The only time the soul was let alone.
The only time that face and body calmed
In the eye of Heaven.
Buttermilk and urine,
The pantry, the housed beasts, the listening bedroom.
We were all together there in a foretime,
In a knowledge that might not translate beyond
Those wind-heaved midnights we still cannot be sure
Happened or not. It smelled of hill-fort clay
And cattle dung. When the thorn tree was cut down
You broke your arm. I shared the dread
When a strange bird perched for days on the byre roof.
That scene, with Macbeth helpless and desperate
In his nightmare, when he meets the hags again
And sees the apparitions in the pot—
I felt at home with that one all right. Hearth,
Steam and ululation, the smoky hair
Curtaining a cheek “Don’t go near bad boys
In that college you’re bound for. Do you hear me?
Do you hear me speaking to you? Don’t forget.”
And then the potstick quickening the gruel,
The steam crown swirled, everything intimate
And fear-swathed brightening for a moment,
Then going dull and fatal and away.
Gray matter like gruel flecked with blood
In spatters on the whitewash. A clean spot
Where his head had been, other stains subsumed
In the parched wall he leant his back against
That morning just like any other morning,
Part-time reservist, toting his lunchbox.
A car came slow down Castle Street, made the halt,
Crossed the Diamond, slowed again and stopped
Level with him, although it was not his lift.
And then he saw an ordinary face
For what it was and a gun in his own face.
His right leg was hooked back, his sole and heel
Against the wall, his right knee propped up steady,
So he never moved, just pushed with all his might
Against himself, then fell past the tarred strip,
Feeding the gutter with his copious blood.
My dear brother, you have good stamina.
You stay on where it happens. Your big tractor
Pulls up at the Diamond, you wave at people,
You shout and laugh above the revs, you keep
Old roads open by driving on the new ones.
You called the pipers’ sporrans whitewash brushes
And then dressed up and marched us through the kitchen.
But you cannot make the dead walk or right wrong.
I see you at the end of your tether sometimes,
In the milking parlor, holding yourself up
Between two cows until your turn goes past,
Then coming to to the smell of dung again
And wondering, Is this all? As it was
In the beginning, is now and shall be?
Then rubbing your eyes and seeing our old brush
Up on the byre door, and keeping going.
At the moment, the official voice of the US government is a rancid mixture of trolling, cruelty, propaganda, and crass jokes about the human suffering they’re creating.
– Anna Merlan (MOTHER JONES)
What you have is this desire to get people to buy into the fun of sadism…What they’re offering people is not health insurance or economic security. They’re offering them delight in the torture of others.
– Jason Stanley
But no matter how much evil I see, I think it’s important for everyone to understand that there is much more light than darkness.
– Robert Uttaro
Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannize but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
Most Americans have no culture or education; they only have entertainment.
– Gore Vidal
Marx is simultaneously a bourgeois and a revolutionary prophet. The latter is better known than the former
– Albert Camus
There’s nothing wrong with getting old, provided that you have wisdom to show for it.
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
Without sounding too cliche, the Internet really is the birth of global mind.
– Terence McKenna
If you have control over yourself, you have no desire to control others.
– Miya Yamanouchi
You can’t sustain a civil society with completely contradictory accounts of the past.
– Jill Lepore
There are exactly three chords worth of difference between a freeloader and a free spirit.
– Todd Snider
The French made maps, the Brits made maps, the Germans made maps, we made maps. We are using more maps in this film than all the other films – combined.
– Ken Burns, The American Revolution
We might want to hold onto the ball, to halt the world, but eventually we must let it go. That’s the exhilarating truth, the terrifying truth. We must let it leave our fingertips and spin out into space and then, in that interminable moment, we can only await the results.
– Andrew Forbes
You received without payment, now give without payment.
– Matthew 10:8
I have told my people they can have what they say, but my people are saying what they have.
– Charles Capps
It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.
– John Joseph Powell
The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.
– Confucius
It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
The sensitive one will be the artist that’s most in tune.
– Eddie Murphy
The fact that commercial culture always panders to the lowest common denominator of awareness and taste should not stop us in our personal revolution to become real human beings.
– Martin Prechtel
Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
– C. S. Lewis
There is a way to provide against the onslaught of poverty. It is the recognition of the power of the mind.
– A. G. Gaston
Thought cannot do
good or bad.
It is thought.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
larkspur blooming
in the meadow
I keep my grief to myself
– Julie Anne
I find it rather hard to communicate with other members of the human race at the best of times.
– Iris Murdoch in a letter to David Morgan
A white face goes with a white mind. Occasionally a Black face goes with a white mind. Very seldom a white face will have a Black mind.
– Nikki Giovanni
THANKFUL
Make me
sweet
again,
fragrant and
fresh and
wild,
and thankful
for any
small event.
– Rumi
It’s not so much that I want
to know God
As to be close to the spiral
in the seashell,
To feel the wind
as my own breath,
To let birdsong all the way in
to my being,
let my bones
be the ledger lines
for its dancing song.
It’s not so much
that I want to know God
as to be reacquainted
with the intimacies of the stars
through remembering
they’ve always shone from within
the expansiveness of my own chest
It’s not so much that I want
to please any Cosmic Authority
as to be strong enough
to finally hold every little girl still inside of me
as she weeps old tears
that were never held.
It’s not so much that I need a particular
place of worship—
I want to flee less
the majesty of each moment
that the humble door
of my ancient heart
be more willing to open
to the wide beauty
of the world.
My only prayer is to be excommunicated
from ideology
and join the congregation of morning dew
shimmering with enlivened mystery
It’s not so much
that I want to worship God
as for my devotional practice
to be opening
my body to the living scripture
of Life’s movement
as She dances Her desires
through me
and to remember
to say thank you
with deep recognition
for every small act of love
that finds me.
It’s not so much that I believe in God
as it’s been taught
but that all I desire
is to serve
the One Great Heart
that lives within us all.
– Chelan Harkin
I don’t need
to be remembered.
I hope the music
will be remembered.
I try to
transcend the ordinary
adding poetry.
– Jeff Buckley
when somebody else tries
to tell you how you should grieve
smile and forgive them
through your watering eyes
and then imagine
how lonely it must be
to be the person who
audits the tears
of other people
the well intended
will tell you how
long you should miss
your beloved
but
~~~you take your time
grief is a hedge maze
and being lost inside of it
is more than okay
don’t race through
your heartache
because you might
just miss a miracle
or two
in the teardrops rolling
down your face
don’t grieve quickly
just to make somebody
else feel better
if you need to,
let your grief
become a coral reef
let the algae of your hurt
slowly form over the years
into the softest violet hue of heaven
it can take two lifetimes to recover
when our beloved becomes
an empty chair
it’s okay
take as much time
as you need
your healing is your healing
and the scars of absence
will itch longer than you can imagine
but that is because you
risked to love so deeply
and that is far better than
the alternative
I am proud of you
and the courage it
takes for you to grieve
so fearlessly
don’t listen to those
who want you to go back
to normal
normal will never exist again
for those of us who have
lost a part of our heart
if the moon broke in half
would it feel normal?
~ to hell with normal
normal was their scent on your collar
normal was their voice resting in your ear
normal was their touch on your skin
you have a new normal now
it’s looking at the shape of clouds
for messages from the great beyond
that your beloved is fine
you have a new normal now
it’s building a cabin in
the woods of your memory
where you and your beloved
can meet for lunch
you have a new normal now
it’s crying and laughing
at the same time
whenever their favorite
song plays on the radio
grief isn’t the enemy
of life
numbness is
don’t become numb to your suffering
welcome your grief
inside and let it wrap you
up like a blanket
whenever shows up
at your door
~ it’s okay
I swear
~ it’s okay
your beloved misses you just
as much as you miss them
and someday
you two will
get all tangled up
together again
someday
you two will
push each on a
swing again under
a shower of falling blooms
and someday
you two will ride
comets together
on the edge of everything
and someday
you two will giggle
at all of the people
who tried to tell you
how to grieve
– john roedel
The poet Rumi writes, ‘Find the real world, give it endlessly away, grow rich flinging gold to all who ask. Live at the empty heart of paradox. I’ll dance there with you—cheek to cheek.’
– Gregory Boyle
Yes, just like everyone else,
I had to deal
With the strong feelings
That moved through my body
Like sheets of rain
Embossed
With navy blue diadems.
– Bhanu Kapil
If a neuropsychologist had to choose three things to characterize most clearly the functional contribution of the right hemisphere, they would most probably be the capacity to read the human face, the capacity to sustain vigilant attention, and the capacity to empathize.
– Iain McGilchrist
Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.
– Wendell Berry
—where I know nothing except
I love you and that, too, arrives with its sadness, a glass of black water
held by your hand that seems so full of light.
– Rebecca Seiferle
We are crucified on one plane, while the world is many-dimensional. We are aware of that and are tormented by our inability to know the truth.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
During a late-night walk near Dublin harbor, Beckett found himself standing on the end of a pier in the midst of a winter storm. Amid the howling wind and churning water, he suddenly realized that the “dark he had struggled to keep under” in his life—and in his writing, which had until then failed to find an audience or meet his own aspirations—should, in fact, be the source of his creative inspiration. “I shall always be depressed,” Beckett concluded, “but what comforts me is the realization that I can now accept this dark side as the commanding side of my personality. In accepting it, I will make it work for me.
– Mason Currey
The word shimmer
did not originate
with light.
It was brought over
from the blackbirds
as they quivered up
from the fields. They
themselves stole it
from the shadows
of wind-struck trees.
Shimmer leaked up
from the underworld—
coalmines and limestone
caves. Up from hidden fault
and shatter, the quake
of breakage and baritone
rattles in the hills.
Shimmer is what the dark
does when light
saunters up, all brightness
and warmth.
Shimmer is the ragged
breath dark takes
– Prartho Sereno, What the Dark Does
I should have known but the water never told me. It sealed its blue lips after swallowing you, it licked my ankles like a dog. I won’t lie and say the ocean begged for forgiveness; it gleams unchanged in the sun. Some things are so big they take and take and remain exactly the same size.
– Leila Chatti
Sweetie, no one is coming. To see how good we have done/are doing. It is just us. Forever. Until a flood gets us or the air or food stops coming. What a joke, the way we live. The worry, the suspicion, the stress, the meanness. I keep dreaming that these dead are telling me what they would do if they could come back. What nobody has said so far: Rat out more folks and kick harder when asked.
– George Saunders
When we awaken to a new possibility in our lives, we often see it first in another person. A part of us that has been hidden is about to emerge, but it doesn’t go in a straight line from our unconscious to becoming conscious. It travels by way of an intermediary, a host. We project our gold onto someone, and suddenly we’re consumed with that person. The first inkling of this is when the other person appears to be so luminous that he (or she) glows in the dark. That’s a sure sign that something is changing in us and we are projecting our gold onto the other
person.
When we observe the things we attribute to the other person, we see our own depth and meaning. Our gold goes first from us to them. Eventually it will come back to us. Projecting our inner gold offers us the best chance for an advance in consciousness.
– Robert A. Johnson
The whole of life lies in the verb seeing.
– Teilhard de Chardin
Anytime you think of vibration, replace vibration with sound and the idea of vibration will become easier to grasp, because we can understand sound. It’s less mysterious. And we already accept that music is created by wielding an instrument to make different sounds at different notes in an octave. Music is the arrangement of vibration. The same goes for all of life. Our sensory organs vibrate within a specific bandwidth of frequency so we cannot see all of the different dimensions that vibration or sound creates. The majority of vibration is invisible to the human perception.
– Sarah Elkhaldy
We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious – the people, events, and things of the day – to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious…
– Annie Dillard
It is harder to kill something
that is spiritually alive
than it is to bring the dead
back to life.
– Herman Hesse
How shall we hold on, when everything bright falls away?
How shall we know what calls us
when what’s past remains what’s past
And unredeemed,
– Charles Wright
The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived.
– Irvin Yalom
The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we’d lived through and didn’t want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprisingly pleasures. No, we can’t live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it.
– Louise Erdrich
Jung has said that to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation.
It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realize that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong.
This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision.
Naturally, if a man says, “Oh well, then I shall just let everything go and make no decision, but just protract and wriggle out of [it],” the whole thing is equally wrong, for then naturally nothing happens.
But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally because of the insolubility of the conscious situation, the Self manifests.
In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God.
In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man’s life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self.
When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell.
Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Emily Dickinson put it best: “Instead of getting to heaven at last / I am going all along.” The Reign of God is being realized on earth as in heaven—step by step. We move on pilgrimage, which is both moving with God and toward God, trusting God on a path that is mysterious and unknown in advance. The mystery of the path means that we need to stay alert, for the Holy One may appear at any time, and at any place.
– Tilden Edwards
Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
If any man cannot grasp this matter, let him be idle and the matter will grasp him.
– Henry Suso
We need to acknowledge that it is not our discriminating and reflexive self-consciousness that makes us human, but rather the ability to move beyond this self-consciousness to engagement and beholding, the irruption of our core silence into everyday life.
Robert Bringhurst notes, “If you divide the world into them and us, and history into ours and theirs, or if you think of history as something only you and your affiliates can possess, then no matter what you know, no matter how noble your intentions, you have taken one step toward the destruction of the world.”
Life really does hang in the balance in every moment. It hovers horizontally between the past, which cannot be changed, and the future, which is refulgent with potential but fraught with our projections. It is poised vertically between self-conscious rationality, which is the source of these projections, and deep silence, where we touch reality directly.
We need to recover the ability to live at the intersection: in the present moment, energized by the upwelling from deep silence where, in Christian terms, our shared nature with God becomes manifest.
– Maggie Ross, Silence: A User’s Guide
Saint John wrote that if you want to climb Mount Carmel, you cannot let yourself be frightened by the beasts you may encounter along the way, neither can you stop to pick any flowers. This description beautifully captures the essence of spiritual maturity. You are not freaked out by the weirdness, and you’re not decorating yourself with cool stuff either.
– Shinzen Young, The Science of Enlightenment
There is no less holiness at this time – as you are reading this – than there was on the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the 30th year, in the 4th month, on the 5th day of the month as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Cheban, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of god. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree at the end of your street than there was under Buddha’s bo tree. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in trees.
– Annie Dillard
Solitude is the human condition, the universal vocation to be human. It is the willingness, with love indwelling, to go to the heart of pain to find new life and share it with the world even though you may be separated from it physically. It is from this commitment to be focused through the narrow gate of solitude that self-emptying love is out-poured, and the heart of the community, the heart of its pain, is transformed into the heart of joy.
– Maggie Ross
There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond
its reach.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Once or twice in his life, a man
is peeled like apples. What’s left is a voice
that splits his being
down to the center.
– Ilya Kaminsky
We lived north of the future, days opened
letters with a child’s signature, a raspberry, a
page of sky.
– Ilya Kaminsky
The sun will stand as your best man
And whistle
When you have found the courage
To marry forgiveness
When you have found the courage
to marry
Love.
– Hafiz
This Life is not here to serve this body, mind, or emotion. This body, mind, and emotion are here to serve Life.
– Sadhguru
the knot
obliterates
inside out,
literalizing
inside out
so that
beautiful
questions
appear to
reappear.
we speak
of knot
or knots
instead of
speaking in
knotting.
– Fred Moten
I begin with an idea then it becomes something else.
– Pablo Picasso
Is it possible to break away from the whole pattern of authority? Can we break away from all authority of any kind in ourselves?
– Krishnamurti
In every era, the same thing happens:
The noise of the world becomes louder, and the individual mistakes it for importance.
The actual inflation is the shrinking of one’s inner life.
– Shaun Jeter
My Journalism Philosophy:
They don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty.
They drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.
– Andrew Shepherd
Dalai Lama: “I am a Buddhist and I believe in praying. But humans have created this problem, and now we are asking God to solve it. It is illogical.”
We really screwed things up!
Those [imperial colonial] systems don’t have the power to define the richness of our cultures, our people, or the everyday experiences that make us whole. They don’t have the last say.
– Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire
The truth has a
hell of a way of hanging in there.
– Jim Acosta
When I work more than an hour on one project, I get irritated.
– Donald Hall
How much corruption, how much deceit, how many assaults on truth can a republic endure before its citizens stop believing that justice still matters?
– Thom Hartman
We don’t win by silencing voices we disagree with, we win by understanding them better than they understand themselves.
– Barak Obama
She has been found. What? – Eternity. It’s the sea gone with the sun…
– Rimbaud
I once read Plan B as planb
like lamb. No, it was worse;
I emphasised the b like Banff
but in that case the ff not the b.
Closer maybe to iambic,
as in pentameter but without
giving the ic. I guess what
I’m saying is: not only is there
no such word as planb there
isn’t even a word similar to planb.
And I still said it.
– Ewen Glass
Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else’s
garden now.
– Mary Cornish
Think twice before you speak and about a week before you write.
– Kin Hubbard, Abe Martin Sayings, 1916
Never forget that intelligence rules the world and ignorance carries the burden.
– Marcus Garvey
I talk to God but the sky is empty.
– Sylvia Plath
I don’t say we ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.
– Orson Welles
Politics, as I never tire of saying, is for social and emotional misfits, handicapped folk, those with a grudge. The purpose of politics is to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power.
– Auberon Waugh
Do not rely completely on any other human being, however dear. We meet all of life’s greatest tests alone.
– Agnes McPhail
Suddenly my wings no
longer carried me.
I fell.
– Anais Nin
My language is so impercise. I am thrashing in what I can’t tell you.
– Roxane Gay
Inspiration, like all of us, appreciates being appreciated. Inspiration will overhear your pleasure, and will send ideas to your door as a reward for your enthusiasm and loyalty. More ideas than you could ever use. Enough ideas for ten lifetimes.
– Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic
Sleep is the gateway to the soul’s rehearsal.
– Mystic Proverb
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
Choosing love we also choose to live in community, and that means that we do not have to change by ourselves.
– bell hooks
When grief presses so heavily that breathing feels like a betrayal, romanticizing becomes a small rebellion.
– Huy Nguyen
The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.
– Garry Kasparov
Nothing can destroy iron but its own rust. Likewise, nothing can destroy you except your own mind.
– Ratan Tata
A false teacher protects the people’s comfort. A true teacher protects the people’s covenant. And history shows clearly: the second is always despised by the first.
– James Gillispie
Breath and emotion are linked. When you are shocked, your breathing changes. When you are full of rage or passion of any kind, your breathing changes. When you are at rest, your breathing changes. So, the goal here is to make your breathing regular, to calm the mind.
– Joseph Campbell
The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better.
– Charlie Munger
History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.
– Dr. Carter G. Woodson
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
– Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
We don’t choose to meditate only when despair is defeated, we meditate so hope can be generated from the process itself.
– Mary Fuoco
Because romanticizing isn’t about making things prettier than they are. It’s about trusting they might already be beautiful—if only for a moment, if only from a certain angle, if only because we’re paying attention.
– Huy Nguyen
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The mind is that which is roused and directed by itself. It makes of itself what it chooses. It makes what it chooses of its own experience.
– Marcus Aurelius
Satan hasn’t a single salaried helper;
the Opposition employs a million.
– Mark Twain
What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
– Ecclesiastes 1:3
Reclaim your own power—do what you can with where you are, now, starting now. Put more love and healing into our dear world and take out some of the aggression and casual, speedy, destructive selfishness.
– Waylon H. Lewis
There is so much loneliness in that gold.
The moon of every night is not the moon
That the first Adam saw.
The centuries
Of human wakefulness have left it brimming
With ancient tears. Look at it. It is your mirror.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Perhaps that was what happened to everyone, and they all learned to swallow what hurt they felt as their children tired of them.
– Abdulrazak Gurnah, The Last Gift
Human language, Winston thought, was not adequate for spiritual union.
– Olga Zilberbourg
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.
– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent‚ no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.
– Seneca
Today, an ideology of ‘aristocracy’ justifies the fabulous wealth and control of government by an elite that increasingly operates in private spaces that are hard for the law to reach, while increasingly using the power of the state against those it considers morally inferior.
– Heather Cox Richardson
To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.
– Karl Barth
We can do anything we want to do if we stick to it long enough.
– Helen Keller
All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.
– Lao Tzu
They pretend to be seekers after God in order not to have to face the truth that they are ordinary egoists.
– Carl Jung
Those for whom tradition means mere knowledge and book-learning will not be able to interpret the past as the living present.
– Carl Jung
The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality… to define what is real.
– Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension
The kingdom that Jesus preached and lived was all about a glorious, uproarious, absurd generosity.
– N. T. Wright, Luke for Everyone
Light breaks forth: the burst of light, the dispersion that resonates or vibrates dazzlingly — and in clarity clamors but does not clarify. The breaking forth of light, the shattering reverberation of a language to which no hearing can be given.
– Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
I had gone into neuroscience… not because I wanted to help people, but because it seemed like the hardest thing you could do, and I wanted to do the hardest thing. I wanted to flay any mental weakness off my body like fascia from muscle.
– Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom
Set me free from the laziness that goes about disguised as activity when activity is not required of me.
– Thomas Merton (A Book of Hours)
It has always seemed strange to me…The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.
– John Steinbeck
The more up to date the Book is, the sooner it will be dated.
– C.S. Lewis
The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did…they always will. They will have the same effect here as elsewhere, if we do not, by the power of government, keep them in their proper spheres.
– Gouverneur Morris
The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.
– Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs
Stupid is knowing the truth, seeing the truth, but still believing the lies!
– Morgan Freeman
When my number is up, I want a new one.
– Judy Garland
Real change happens when we work collectively.
– Malala Yousafzai
When writing, always proofread to make sure you didn’t any words out.
– William Safire
Time moves slowly but passes quickly.
– Alice Walker
That we are divorced is to me very clear. The only question is concerning the proper time for making an explicit declaration in words. Some people must have time to look around them, before, behind, on the right hand, on the left, then to think, and after all this, to resolve. Others see at one intuitive glance into the past and the future, and judge with precision at once. But remember you can’t make 13 clocks strike precisely alike at the same second.
– John Adams, The American Revolution
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park. / This is peace and contentment. It’s new.
– Wendy Cope
America has always had a two-tiered economy, but for the last 80 years, the middle class has been in the upper tier along with the wealthy, while the working class and poor have been in the lower one.
Now, the middle class is joining the lower tier. This new reality has huge implications both for the economy and for American politics.
– Robert Reich
But if … a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me.
– Oscar Wilde
No matter what the weather is, I wish for all of you blue skies and golden sunshine internally all along the way.
– David Lynch
A pencil-written word is tentative and erasable, and has none of the fatal decisiveness of words punched out on a keyboard.
– Richard Wilbur
Yang means the positive, and yin, the negative. Yang is identified with the south or sunny side of a mountain; yin, with the north or shady side. And note, this moment, that you cannot have a one-sided mountain.
– Alan Watts
The paths are bordered with nethergreen.
– Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we are transformed. It is no accident that in Shakespeare’s comedies, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn & change. it is where you travel to find yourself … by getting lost.
– Roger Deakin
I want to go back to you,
who when you were dying said
There are one or two people you don’t want to
let go of. Here too, where I don’t let go of you.
– Jean Valentine
The unique function of idols is to make God and our true lives inaccessible.
– Christophe Lebold
Writing is not a recreational activity, it’s the way I process my life, how I move from day to day. It’s breath.
– Patricia Smith
Show me where you spend your time, money and energy and I’ll tell you what you worship.
– John Wimber
[Growing up,] there were always one or two kids whose friendship saved us, fed us, and one or two teachers who got us, who got it, who shared the truth that life was amazing but also hard and weird.
– Anne Lamott
Your reality is where it’s always been, right where you are, this moment. It is you. There is not reality and you. You are That, pure awareness, just the way you are.
– Robert Adams
The first step to mystical realization is the leaving of such a defined god for an experience of transcendence, disengaging the ethnic from the elementary idea, for any god who is not transparent to transcendence is an idol, and its worship is idolatry.
– Joseph Campbell
Did I say it before? I’m learning to see — yes, I’m making a start. I’m still not good at it. But I want to make the most of my Time.
– Rilke
Dumb people admire complexity.
Smart people admire simplicity.
– Stijn Noorman
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Because no one is here
to love me, I make tea for
myself
and leave the radio playing.
– Lelia Chatti, Tea
What will perforate deeply will also recall
The bitter taxidermy of the flipped-out
Rainfalls.
– Noelle Kocot
Writing comes from listening. But writing also comes from knowing how to be at odds with the world
– Teju Cole
When I turn down my mind and close my eyes, it’s you that I find.
– Nika Solé
We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.
– George Eliot
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found it best to fast the opposite way:
Eat an early dinner instead of skipping breakfast.
Better for appetite regulation, building muscle, and aligns you with your circadian rhythms.
– Dan Go
fall, cherry blossoms–
stop up
their foul mouths!
– Kobayashi Issa
CHRISTIAN WIMAN on prose, heresy, and (heart throbbing)
one of my favorite thinkers Once after a reading a woman stood up amid a very large crowd, read a passage out of some prose I had written, and said, “How do you feel about being a heretic?” What I should have said is that there are no heretics, or that there are only heretics; that humans- mere and mirrored creatures that we are move toward god in language, and to speak language is to profane him. I should have said that I grew up in a land god held in the very palm of his hand, lifting us all up lovingly to the light, breathing over us his tender winds, and then, almost as an afterthought, periodically crushing it all to dust. I should have said how does one praise a god in whom one does not believe, and how does one believe in a god whose only evidence of existence is one’s insatiable and perhaps insane desire to praise. I should have said that “no human being possesses sureness of self: this can only mean being bounded and unbounded, selved and unselved, sure’ only of this untiring exercise. Then, this sureness of self, which is ready to be unsure, makes the laughter at the mismatch between aim and achievement comic, not cynical; holy, not demonic. This is not love of suffering, but the work, the power of love, which may curse, but abides. It is power to be able to attend, powerful or powerless; it is love to laugh bitterly, purgatively, purgatorially, and then to be quiet.” The quote is from the English philosopher Gillian Rose. The book is Love’s Work.
Spirit can never be studied by reason, for reason’s modes are not ecstatic.
– Henry David Thoreau
The nice thing about egotists is that they don’t talk about other people.
– Lucille S. Harper
It may seem difficult at first, but everything is difficult at first.
– Miyamoto Musashi, Dokkōdō
Mankind is as tough as war
yet delicate as flowers.
We can endure agonies
but we open fully only to warmth and light.
– Daniel Mead
The room had taken on an unutterable familiarity, like the truthful familiarity of dreams. And, as in dreams, what I can’t reproduce for you is the essential color of its atmosphere. As in dreams, the “logic” was something else, was one that makes no sense when you awaken, since the dream’s greater truth is lost.
– Clarice Lispector
The most personal is the most creative.
– Martin Scorsese
there’s one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on: whether it happens in a hundred years, or a thousand years, or a million years, eventually our sun will grow cold, and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us, it’ll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-tsu, Einstein, Maruputo, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes – all of this. All of this was for nothing, unless we go to the stars.
– J. Michael Straczynski
The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don’t know where that elsewhere is.
– Emil Cioran
There is a time for
departure even when there’s
no certain place to go.
– Tennessee Williams, Camino Real
To be self-obsessed is simply not o.k. for the most important country in the world, the United States, which affects every other country in the world.
– Christiane Amanpour
You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.
– Mary Oliver
I started to commit the worst of all sins for my sort of writer—I tried to imagine the requirements of the ordinary commercial publisher. A fatal question—what are people reading these days?
– Gerald Murnane
When negative feelings are suppressed, positive feelings are suppressed too…and love dies.
– John Gray, PhD
Gratitude doesn’t ask us to look away from injustice. It asks us to keep our eyes open long enough to see the whole table and help make sure that everyone has a seat at it.
– Cheryl Melody
Jesus has not yet uttered his last Word.
– Karl Barth
We have it in our power to begin the world again… the birthday of a new world is at hand.
– Thomas Paine
A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy.
– John Sawhill
I stand up on my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way.
– Robin Williams
On my good days I shake my fist at the sky. On my better days I don’t make a fist at all.
– Todd Snider
When you see a good person, think of becoming like them. When you see someone not so good, reflect on your own weak points.
– Confucius
As long as we do not leave behind the realm of the possible, the realm of accountancy, we can neither conceive of nor lay claim to Paradise.
– Fr. Nicolae Steinhardt, The Journal of Joy
Money’s a horrid thing to follow,
but a charming thing
to meet.
– Henry James
Is the artist a liar, or simply one for whom even a fact is not a fact?
– Ned Rorem
And a few men talked of freedom, while England talked of ale. [The Secret People]
– Gilbert Keith Chesterton
truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
– Winston Churchill
The history of culture is the history of the misunderstandings of great thinkers. So we always have to go back to zero and begin differently.
– László Krasznahorkai
My poems always begin in rhythm and sound. I hear the lines first, write in long-hand in a notebook, put them aside, come back later, transcribe them multiple times, begin to revise them, type them up, continue revising, rinse, and repeat.
– Ethel Rackin
Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!
– Allen Ginsberg
Ive seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why God ain’t put out the sun and gone away.
– Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark
But there is so much rascality, so much venality and corruption, so much avarice and ambition, such a rage for profit and commerce among all ranks and degrees of men, even in America, that I sometimes doubt whether there is public virtue enough to support a republic.
– John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren
The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.
– Clarence Day
A vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of history.
– Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
How could America condemn in Germany that which she commits, just as brutally, within her own borders?
– W.E.B. Du Bois
The revolution comes in nevertheless, but it only comes in to write the conclusion under a complete set of premises.
– Joseph Schumpeter
Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges – on gifts, trades, loans – and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.
– Margaret Atwood
No beliefs and no concepts are true. Throw them all out and let the flame of silence burn you awake.
– Adyashanti
It’s just really important that we start celebrating our differences. Let’s start tolerating first, but then we need to celebrate our differences.
– Billie Jean King
for those who came to
Earth to win and compete
will be terribly disappointed
when they find out
that life isn’t
the Olympics
it’s a gathering place
my love,
when we die we don’t get
handed a bunch of trophies
by angels wearing stopwatches
there is no medal ceremony
in the hereafter
there is just a campfire circle
where we make s’mores and
share our stories from Earth
the only game we play in
the afterlife is the one
where we take turns
listening to each other
~ and everyone always wins
– john roedel
Hell is the concretization of your life experiences, a place where you’re stuck, the wasteland. In hell, you are so bound to yourself that grace cannot enter.
– Joseph Campbell
People daily speak a quilt of words, and continents and nations and tribes and even enemies dance all over your mouth when you speak. The tongue seems to know no race, no affiliation, no breed, no caste, no order, no genus, no lineage.
– Luis Alberto Urrea, Nobody’s Son
You develop courage by doing courageous things, small things, but things that cost you some exertion — mental and, I suppose, spiritual exertion.
– Maya Angelou
Understanding is half the war. Comprehension is half the battle. Peace is the end of the war.
– Julian Roderick
Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinction. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
– Thomas Paine
The sound of their points of view stab eratically, maliciously slicing at every dormant neurosis I’ve spent years silencing.
– D. Hartnett
To me the four walls of my miserable room are both prison cell and far horizon, both bed and coffin. My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savor my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.
– Fernando Pessoa
lexicon
ordinary, I keep saying it,
she says, not saying she’s not,
so, I try to translate, saying
the y means the same as joy–
it’s like when you say normal,
I say, isn’t that ordinary?
when what we both mean
is love, like this, everyday
– Alec Finlay
PRACTICE
This is not a time to live without a practice. It is a time when all of us will need the most faithful, self-generated enthusiasm (enthusiasm: to be filled with god) in order to survive in human fashion. Whether we reach this inner state of recognized divinity through prayer, meditation, dancing, swimming, walking, feeding the hungry or enriching the impoverished is immaterial.
We will be doubly bereft without some form of practice that connects us, in a caring way, to what begins to feel like a dissolving world. In addition to contemplating the Hopi message: know your garden and where is your water, we must also ask: What is my practice? What is steering this boat that is my fragile human life?
– Alice Walker
The power of any particular case of desire/love has to do with the ways it taps into — embodies or seems to transcend — conscious and unconscious fantasies. Another way to say it: where love and desire are concerned, there are no adequate examples; and all of our objects must bear the burden of exemplifying and failing what drives our attachment to them.
– Lauren Berlant
Desire is about vanishing. You dream of a bowl of cherries and next day receive a letter written in red juice.
– Anne Carson
Let me call my anxiety, desire, then.
Let me call it, a garden.
Maybe this is what Lorca meant
when he said, verde que te quiero verde—
because when the shade of night comes,
I am a field of it, of any worry ready to flower in my chest.
– Natalie Diaz
Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.
– Anne Carson
Those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it. They are never rationally reconciled to civilization. Instead, they bow to it, secretly accepting the identity of reason and domination, of civilization and the ideal, however much they may shrug their shoulders. Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity. These people willingly embrace or force themselves to accept the rule of the stronger as the eternal norm.
– Max Horkheimer
Dangerously close. Beautifully close. And uncomfortably close is exactly where we need to be if we want to transform this culture of scarcity and fundamental distrust. Distance is a liar. It distorts the way we see ourselves and the way we understand each other… I have learned that the best way to find light in the darkness is not by pushing people away but by falling straight into them.
– Brené Brown
I would like to bring to people something like happiness. I would like to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start right away to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I’d like to play a certain song and he will be cured; when he’d be broke, I’d bring out a different song and immediately he’d receive all the money he needed.
– John Coltrane
You are trapped in you, the beam said.
Yeah, well, who isn’t? she thought.
– George Saunders
The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.
– Tom Robbins
Things We’re All Too Young To Know
by Faith Shearin
We’re all too young to know when we will die,
or what will cause it, too young to discover how little
our lives matter, how no amount of planning
or caution will save us. We are too young
to know this is the last vacation we will take
with our grandfather: this one by the shore
where the wind blows only from the east.
We’re too young to have grown children
or arthritis or thin hair, too young to choose
a spouse or profession, to drive a car safely
through the narrow streets of winter.
We’re always too young to have someone
we love tell us they are leaving. We’re too young
for root canals and retirement, too young
for sex, or even the pictures that suggest
its intimate details. We’re too young to play
with matches or to understand why chocolate
is usually eaten after dinner. We’re certainly
too young to know who we will be when
we grow up, to know that the sky’s blues
and grays are indifferent to our luck.
We’re too young for taxes or childbirth,
for dead pets, or the day when we no longer
have parents. We’re too young to find
our own faces foreign: the happiness and sorrow
visible, our skin folded like paper. And we’re
definitely too young for high heels and lipstick,
too young to sit at a bar with a glass of something hard.
Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
– Terence McKenna
Thus Barrès says, “Why words, this brutal precision that mistreats our complexity?”
Upon reading this sentence, I understand so well what I had already guessed, that my words damage the feelings that they intend to define; satisfaction to see someone adequately explain and define a rather confused idea that becomes precise and gains even more strength in me, and then satisfaction to see someone share one of my ideas; the sentence comes into my life; I assimilate it.
Bergson tells him, “The brutal word suppresses or at least masks the delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness.” […] It causes the intelligence to intervene in a region of the self that likes to remain obscure and unconscious. […]
– Simone de Beauvoir
This is one superpower of being old: You know that things are probably going to work out without your tense, controlling input. Maybe you won’t get your way, which I hate, but the roiled ponds of misunderstanding and hurt will settle. Older age gives us the knowledge of how powerless we are — not helpless so much but with little control over life’s results. I don’t love this. You come to forks in the road where you think, I can’t bear this, I can’t do this, I can’t fix this; I see no reason for hope. Plus, what if Iran gets involved, and what if there’s a nuclear exchange, and what if this is the end? But then, if you are old, you remember countless other falling-outs, other miserable patches with people you love, where peace was restored. I believe in the resiliency of relationships, even if I struggle not to be initially devastated every time I disappoint someone. This is the main advice I give younger people who get troubled and stuck. I say, “Yes, it sounds really awful. Just do one good thing, and then another, and breathe. You’re going to be okay.” I tell them what John Lennon said: “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
– Anne Lamott
At length, before sundown, it begins to rain. You can hardly say when it began, and now, after dark, the sound of it dripping and pattering without is quite cheering. It is long since I heard it. One of those serious and normal storms, not a shower which you can see through, something regular, a fall rain, coincident with a different mood or season of the mind, not a transient cloud that drops rain. Methinks the truly weather-wise will know themselves and find the signs of rain in their own moods, the aspect of their own skies or thoughts, and not consult swallows and spiders. I incline always [to] questions about the weather without thinking. Does a mind in sympathy with nature need a hygrometer?
– Thoreau
i shall grow older by night, like the scent
of jasmine in summer. And you will grow
young when you sleep: all sleepers are young.
But I shall keep vigilance till morning, till
there are patches beneath my eyes. Two threads
of perfect tiredness suffice for me to begin to age.
I shall squeeze a lemon over my belly to disguise
the scent of milk and cotton.
– Mahmoud Darwish, I Wish I Were Younger
(tr. Mohammad Shaheen)
Bring her a drink that tastes of melon. And as the sky
hangs out its starry animals—a fish, a bear,
a canny dog—tell her how long it took to form
these constellations. That human beings have named them.
That anything is possible and you, you are the proof.
– Eleanor Lerman
Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve.
As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant.
So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals.
What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world.
So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.
– Martha Nussbaum
Looking is an innate impulse toward wholeness.
– Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there’s no such thing as perfect.
– Alexander Calder
The goal of this administration seems to be to show that government does not work. The appointment of utter incompetents to positions of high authority, the firings of qualified civil servants, and the elimination of crucial agencies – all this will likely bring epidemics and terror attacks and other disasters. At some point amidst the federal dysfunction the states will have to take on more responsibilities. But why then should their citizens pay taxes to a useless – but oppressive – federal government? ICE provoke people who live in cities; that does not mean that cities will concede. The threat to use soldiers against cities will likely create rifts inside the armed forces and the federal government more broadly. We are not so far away, I fear, from some branches of the federal government turning against other branches of the federal government.
– Timothy Snyder
If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child’s soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man’s wisdom for the child’s.
– Johan Huizinga
Oh, God — the lives people try to lead.
Oh, God — what a world they try to lead them in.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Let love write on you for awhile.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
Madrigal
I inherited a dark wood where I seldom go. But a day will come when the dead and the living change places. The wood will be set in motion. We are not without hope. The most serious crimes will remain unsolved in spite of the efforts of many policemen. In the same way there is somewhere in our lives a great unsolved love. I inherited a dark wood, but today I’m walking in the other wood, the light one. All the living creatures that sing, wriggle, wag, and crawl! It’s spring and the air is very strong. I have graduated from the university of oblivion and am as empty-handed as the shirt on the clothesline.
– Tomas Tranströmer
Our nervous system cares more about safety than it cares about learning. If we wanna level up our life, we’re gonna have to get realistic about what it needs to hear & what it needs us to do to feel safe first—&, spoiler, we’re not gonna force or shame it into feeling safe.
– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
– George Bernard Shaw
If you haven’t got a sense of humor, you’re making your life a hundred times harder.
– Jack Bruce
If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.
– James Baldwin
Feel the feeling but don’t become the emotion.
Witness it. Allow it. Release it.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
This is what a lot of mystical disciplines are after: simply seeing, really being aware.
– Ursula K. LeGuin
Variation on the Word Sleep
by Margaret Atwood
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.
STARS WHEEL IN PURPLE
Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare
as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star
as bright Aldeboran or Sirius,
nor yet the stained and brilliant one of War;
stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;
yours is not gracious as the Pleads are
nor as Orion’s sapphires, luminous;
yet disenchanted, cold, imperious face,
when all the others blighted, reel and fall,
your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid tryst
to freighted ships, baffled in wind and blast.
– H.D.
In the sun that is young only once,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means.
– Dylan Thomas
Blue with Collapse
by Thomas Lux
The devil’s in my neck.
Everything I hear is overviolined,
even the wind, even the wind.
It’s like walking in nurdles up to my chest,
squeaky and slow.
It’s spring, the blooming branches
nearly hide the many dead ones.
A squirrel, digging for a nut, upends my frail
tomato plant and fails
to replant it, even though he has the tools.
I find this kind of squirrely oblivion everywhere.
I was a man filled to the top
of my spine, filled to the lump
on the back of my head, with hope.
Then I read a few thousand history books.
Little, and nothing, perturbs me now.
Even the beheadings, even the giant meat hooks
in the sky, more frequent each day,
bother me not
a tittle, not a jot.
Most of us try to live in some variation of the Serenity Prayer, in acceptance, courage, and wisdom, but our minds and bodies do not always cooperate.
– Anne Lamott
The first rule of learning is to admit you don’t know. The second rule is to never stop asking why.
– Prof. Feynman
Not every thought deserves to be spoken. Internal privacy is how you protect your mind from external distortion. When you keep certain reflections for yourself, you preserve a part of your identity that no one else can influence or dilute.
– @UnmodernmanBot
And we still believe there is one who sifts and holds
the leaves, the lives, of all those softly falling.
– Robin Robertson
it is a joy
sleeping late in autumn
like the ruler of your domain
– Basho
Especially when we are afraid, angry, or confused, we may be tempted to give away bits of our freedom—or, less painfully, somebody else’s freedom—in the quest for direction and order. […] they’d rather have leaders who are strong and wrong than right and weak. Throughout history, demagogues have often outperformed democrats in generating popular fervor […] because they are perceived to be more decisive and sure in their judgments.
– Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning
Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so ‘safe,’ and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail.
– Malcolm X
I’ve found that there is always some beauty left — in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you.
– Anne Frank
It is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
– Virginia Woolf
RAPTURE
Who knows the mysteries of the poppies
when you look across the red fields,
or hear the sound of long thunder,
then the saving rain.
Everything beautiful,
the solitude of the single body
or sometimes, too, when the body is kissed
on the lips or hands or eyelids tender.
Oh for the pleasure of living in a body.
It may be, it may one day be
this is a world haunted by happiness,
where people finally are loved
in the light of leaves,
the feel of bird wings passing by.
Here it might be that no one wants power.
They don’t want more.
And so they are in the forest,
old trees,
or those small but grand.
And when you sleep, rapture, beauty,
may seek you out.
Listen. There is
secret joy,
sweet dreams you may never forget.
How worthy the being
in the human body. If
when you are there, you see women
wading on the water
and clouds in the valley,
the smell of rain,
or a lotus blossom rises out of round green leaves,
remember there is always something
besides our own misery.
– Linda Hogan
I have always believed it my right to have a locked door between me and the world, and to hold the key myself.
– Mihail Sebastian
And until we understand that the forms projected at us by our technology are greatly more informative than the verbal messages they convey we are going to go on being helpless illiterates in a world we made ourselves.
– Marshall McLuhan
I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.
– Joy Harjo
It is clear that ‘higher’ always means and implies ‘more inner,’ ‘more interior’, ‘deeper’, ‘more intimate’; while ‘lower’ implies ‘more outer’, ‘more external’, ‘shallower’, ‘less intimate’ … the more interior a thing is, the less visible it is likely to be. The progression from visibility to invisibility is just another facet of the great hierarchy of Levels of Being … we do not understand that life, before all other definitions of it, is a drama of the visible and the invisible.
– E.F. Schumacher
Real faith means holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery which we encounter in every sphere of our life which cannot be compressed in any formula.
– Martin Buber
The meaning of it all is unfolding right under our noses, all the time, but we can’t see it. We don’t pay any attention. We were taught from childhood to avert our gaze, lest we be considered fools. So now we seem to live in some kind of collective trance, lost in a daze. The likes of which have probably never before been witnessed in history. We feel the gaping emptiness and meaninglessness of our condition in the depths of our psyches.
But, like a desperate man thrashing about in quicksand, our reactions only make things worse: we chase more fictitious goals and accumulate more fictitious stuff, precisely the things that distract us further from watching what is really happening. And, when we finally realize the senselessness of such reactions, we turn to ‘gurus’ doling out pill-form answers instead of paying attention to life, the only authentic teacher, who is constantly speaking to us.
There is no literal shortcut to whatever it is that the metaphor of life is trying to convey. There is no literal truth. The meaning of it all cannot be communicated directly. There are no secret answers spelled out in words in some rare old book. The metaphor is the only way to the answers, if only we have patience and pay attention. Look around: what is life trying to say?
– Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney
Whatever the message is, may I survive the delivery of it. Is letting go a process or a price? What am I paying for, not seeing sooner? Learning at the edge? Letting go of something precious but no longer needed
– Audre Lorde
Any damage that’s been done, you have to fix yourself because it needs fixing and there is nobody else to do the work. Blame may well be justified, but it’s not going to move you forward in your life.
– Augusten Burroughs
They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.
– Gabriel García Márquez
You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation… and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.
– Hermann Hesse
A republic cannot succeed, till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honor.
– Charles Darwin
Children of This Age
We are the children of this age,
this age is political.
All your, his, our
day and night-time affairs
are political affairs.
Whether you like it or not
your genes have a political future
the colour of your skin is political
your eyes have a political dimension.
Whatever you say has its echo
whatever you keep quiet about
is political regardless.
Apolitical poems are political too
the moon in the sky does not look like the moon.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
What question, tell me, my darling?
The political question.
You need not even be a human being
to acquire political importance.
It is enough just to be oil
fodder or recyclable material
or a conference table, the shape of which
can be on an agenda for months.
All this time people have been dying
animals have been starving
houses have been burning
fields have been turning fallow
just as in far off distant
less political ages.
– Wislawa Szymborska
wind-kissed color
delicately sown within
an autumn garden
– Basho
Have patience. Go where you must go, and hope!
– Gandalf (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers)
We suffer to get well.
We surrender to win.
We die to live.
We give it away to keep it.
– Richard Rohr
Nobody’s so damn well educated that you can’t learn ninety percent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten percent is decoration.
– Kurt Vonnegut
A man with nothing to worship is a man in a vacuum, and the false gods will rush in.
– Joy Davidman
TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.
– Douglas Coupland
I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.
– W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge
Like caryatids
our lifted arms
hold up time’s granite load
– Miroslav Holub, (tr. Ian Milner & George Theiner)
Children grow by observation and involvement, not by teachings and philosophies. Become a living example of the person you want your child to be.
– Sadhguru
We try to come from a place of mercy because it is good practice; no one is very good at it, especially when someone doesn’t deserve it and knows exactly which of our buttons to push.
– Anne Lamott
The person you take yourself to be is only a temporary appearance in consciousness.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?
– Gilbert Sorrentino
It’s not that I’m curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.
– Frank O’Hara
Excellence withers without an adversary.
– Seneca
I’m proud that I’ve helped contribute to what’s happening today. It’s hard to say that kind of stuff about oneself without sounding like you’re bragging, but it’s true.
– Rita Dove
At the time of his writing the Red Book Jung wanted to find out what happened when he switched off ordinary consciousness and allowed expression to remote parts of his psyche. The “spirit of the depths” pointed him toward the recovery of his soul.
– Murray Stein
In the beginning of the era I called the era of the Castrated Men, there was nothing but a generalized apprehension that made me suspect everyone, especially lovers of contemporary art.
– Cristina Rivera Garza
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
– Bertrand Russell
Women were definitely not supposed to write the poems I write. Definitely not.
– Sharon Olds
My overpoliticized 1960s generation claims to have brought a new humanism to scholarship but created this rapacious careerism instead.
– Camille Paglia
I am glad that you
wrote me. I thought
I had died or
something.
– Anne Sexton
I was full of letters
I hadn’t sent you,
– Anne Sexton
As long as you believe you are the body, then karma exists for you also, for karma only exists for the body. Karma does not exist for the Self. Karma only exists for the body and the mind.
– Robert Adams
Try to be still most of the time. Try not to get into heated discussions, heated debates about anything. The mind always wants to accomplish something, wants to do something, wants to be the doer. Discourage the mind by becoming the witness to its actions.
– Robert Adams
Grand ideas kill first efforts. Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret.
– Louise Erdrich
I am learning to speak my pieces, to inject into the living world my convictions about what is necessary and what I think is important without concerns (of the enervating kind) for whether or not it is understood, tolerated, correct or heard before.
Although of course being incorrect is the always the hardest, but even that is becoming less important. The world will not stop if I make a mistake.
– Audre Lorde
In a country
where all people
are created equal
racism is treason
– john zbigniew guzlowski
It’s strange to feel change coming. It’s easy to ignore. An underlying restlessness seems to accompany it like birds flocking before a storm. We go about our business with the usual alacrity, while in the pit of our stomach there is a sense of something tenuous. These moments of peripheral perceptions are short, sharp flashes of insight we tend to discount like seeing the movement of an animal from the corner of our eye. We turn and there is nothing there. They are the strong and subtle impressions we allow to slip away.
– Terry Tempest Williams
Prose is only as good as its approximation of the condition of poetry.
– Francine du Plessix Gray
Like most poets there are times I mistake a spot for a leopard, write an extended treatise on that spot, odes to the spot, ardent social media posts about it and love poems for it, too, even disappointed or exhausted condemnations of it, and then realize in embarrassment that I’ve missed the cat. But as unsure as I am about poetry, I am fairly certain that politics is not what occurs in hearts. Politics is what occurs in the arrangement of the world, and that is necessarily not an individual pursuit, but a collective one.
– Anne Boyer
The beggar is a poor man who, impatient with adventures, has abandoned poverty in order to explore the jungles of pity.
– Emil Cioran
All of the wealth inherent in our globalized economy has come at the expense of degraded landscapes.
– Joe Brewer
What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.
– Albert Pike
As long as you believe in karma, then karma will always grab you, and turn you in all directions. But when you ask “For whom is there karma?” and realize it’s only for the personal ‘I’, then there is no longer any karma.
– Robert Adams
Your energy decides nearly everything about your life. You probably want to spend some time to get that right.
– Nika Solé
life in this world
just like a temporary shelter
from a winter shower
– Sogi, (tr. Makoto Ueda)
The universe is not created by something separate from it — it is the spontaneous outpouring of the Imperishable, as natural as breath, as intimate as your own heartbeat.
– @thestillpoint_
Itʻs in the blackness, itʻs in the cloudiness, itʻs in the times that arenʻt easy that you grow, that you become the best.
– Nainoa Thompson
Green Card :: Evidence of Adequate
Means of Financial Support
by Ae Hee Lee
I needed money. There’s no poetic way to say this.
Even so, when you touched my face, brought my
cheeks to the nook of your neck, I burrowed into it—
a firefly seeking shelter from winter, far
underground. Then,
you told me there’s no application form that can hold
the entirety of a life, because our days constantly spill like wine.
Imagine that, you said, apricot tones all over the page!
you told me about your ferns, bejeweled with jade dew,
their coiled fiddleheads full of unfulfilled,
twirling futures, and I forgot about my fixation with earning
people’s respect, among other things for which
I’d been told it was proper to plead
until granted.
you told me, if immigrants could enrich a country,
you didn’t want to know
our melting point and whether we would shine
brighter than gold.
you told me how I could stop confusing belonging
with belongings, good with goods, by sharing
the way our hearts continue to beat
resilient, even without an assurance of worth.
you told me there can be solace in a dead end, in knowing the sea
still collapses, still runs and soars carrying its broken
shells, somewhere out there. And then,
you buried a kiss in the dark
earth of my hair. I believed it all.
What else could I do?
He set his steps upon an untrue way,
pursuing those false images of good
that bring no promise to fulfillment-
– Dante, Purgatorio
The sun blooms, it is a geranium.
– Sylvia Plath
In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.
– G.K. Chesterton
FAITHFUL REPLICA
We make a replica of our belief
and there, as fact, it is. A rough job
but look at it there. We must have been right all along.
Time passes. Euphoria awhile.
– William Bronk
How did writing come to me? As goose-down on my window in winter.
– René Char
If one [pecan] tree fruits, they all fruit-there are no soloists. Not one tree in a grove, but the whole grove; not one grove in the forest, but every grove; all across the county and all across the state. The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
No one should ever go out of their way to write a poem. A poem is the recognition of something in reality that came into view along the way.
– Mark Bittner
Ernest Hemingway believed that the defining quality of a real writer was an unwavering ability to recognize truth on the page. He often spoke about the need for a kind of internal compass—an instinct that could instantly detect anything false, overwritten, or insincere in one’s own work. To him, this wasn’t just a tool but a form of artistic integrity, a toughness of mind that separated genuine storytelling from mere performance. A writer had to be willing to cut through ego, strip away pretension, and confront the work with absolute honesty. Only by doing that, he felt, could a piece of writing become authentic, alive, and worthy of a reader’s time.
Some people are magic, and others are just the illusion of it.
– Beau Taplin
Directive
by Robert Frost
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there’s a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods’ excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone’s road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.
First there’s the children’s house of make believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny’s
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
This is a practice for every soul: to listen to and affirm the underlying reality of life while bringing that resource to the life of others.
– Mark Nepo
Good, I will come to an end. One would perhaps have to advance on spindly legs, like these Giacometti men of whom you speak so well in your letter, but there again, don’t you think, one ends up in the foundations.
– Paul Celan to Gisele Lestrange
I used to tell students…the difference between poetry and you is you look in the mirror and say, “I am getting old,” but Shakespeare looks in the mirror and says, “Devouring Time, blunt thou thy lion’s paws.”
– Jim Harrison
Poetry has no proof nor plan nor evidence by decree or in any other way.
– Susan Howe
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
– C.S. Lewis
The most important step out of the karmic law is forgiveness.
– Eckhart Tolle
Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour. And in addition to this fundamental disability of a creature, is added the Fall, which makes our devices not only fail of their desire but turn to new and horrible evil.
– JRR Tolkien
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing, red-hot iron; it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us.
You cannot stay away from yourself forever. You have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question – whether you can love yourself. And that will be the test.
– Carl Jung
Identification with one’s office or title is very attractive indeed, which is precisely why so many men are nothing more than the decorum accorded to them by society. In vain would one look for a personality behind the husk. Underneath one would find a very pitiable little creature. That is why the office is so attractive: it offers easy compensation for personal deficiencies.
– Carl Jung
The ‘common good’ may become a moloch to which countless individuals are sacrificed, if we forget that all good is in the love of God, and that God comes first.
– Joy Davidman
In my heart a wizard book,
Only love shall ever look:
Darling, when thou readest there,
Wisely falter and forbear
Ere thou turn’st the pages olden,
Deeply writ and deeply folden,
Where the legends of lost moons
Lie in chill unchanging runes.
Trifle not with charm or spell,
Heptagram or pentacle,
Leave in silence, long unsaid,
All the words that wake the dead.
– Clark Ashton Smith
Self awareness is a gift that will help you select who and what gets to be around you. If a person or environment lessens your vibe or has you moving in ways that aren’t true to who you are, you notice it right away. Your loyalty to yourself won’t allow that type of dynamic.
– Nika Solé
What we call ‘education’ today fits the individual to perpetuate the miseries and misfortunes of the ages.
– Manly P. Hall
There was nothing around him but an obscurity in which his gaze was lost, and a silence which engulfed his voice.
– Victor Hugo
What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare?
– Joseph Campbell
State terror is far worse than individual terror, for the obvious reason that states have means of violence that individuals don’t have, or groups.
– Noam Chomsky
All of this talk about ‘my time’ and ‘your time’ is so odd, anyway, when you think about it—as if any time is ours.
– Maggie Smith
If we are to do this work of language, we have an obligation to stand in opposition to any force, including those enacted by our own governments that if left unchecked would happily decimate every principle of free expression and connection that we come here to celebrate.
– Omar El Akkad
Men are like Shakespeare, everything we say is what we mean in the moment. In the presence of, it’s really profound.
Women are more Chekhov, everything is subtextual and internal but just as profound.
– Clayton Runyon
The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness.
– Gregory Maguire
My head is a beautiful place and the center of hell.
– Frederick Phoenix
therapists are just private investigators you hire for yourself.
– Amanda Corbin
I watch a bird fly gracefully and proudly across the purple evening sky, and looking up at those glorious clouds, I feel small. I feel smaller than I have been feeling. That is true freedom, however long it lasts.
– Frederick Phoenix
If you watch Ken Burns’ ‘The American Revolution,’ you will learn what they never taught us in school: that it was terrifying, it was brutal, people fled Boston, it was horrific and took bravery the likes of which we can only gasp at as we watch this honest historical telling. We were taught myths, cute poems, shallow half truths.
– Janice Carlin
I loved you. Hungrily. Obsessively. I loved you enough to make literature weep.
– Frederick Phoenix
It’s to leave something behind. I thought that’s what a legacy was. Putting your name on something. A legacy isn’t a stamp left by the people with ink. It’s not about leaving your fingerprints. It’s about having fingerprints left on you.
– Benjamin Stevenson
My therapist told me: “When trauma gets triggered you don’t act your age, you act the age the wound was created.”
– @safe.journal
A Nation covered in concrete needs an artificial world to take care of.
– the New American Gospel
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
– Karl Marx
The only person who can make you more aware is you. Others can encourage your awareness, they can provide you with opportunities to see more, but it is you who must allow yourself to look.
– Suli Qyre
I don’t just think she is glorious. I think art itself finds home in her.
– Frederick Phoenix
I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.
– Evelyn Waugh
But some people do not understand that humanity is full of as much difference as it is full of uniformity.
– Frederick Phoenix
You fed me love. I fed it expression, I fed it art, I fed it expansion.
– Frederick Phoenix
Self defense is a primary law of nature, which no subsequent law of society can abolish; this primeval principle, the immediate gift of the Creator, obliges every one to remonstrate against the strides of ambition, and a wanton lust of domination, and to resist the first approaches of tyranny.
– Mercy Otis Warren
The flowers have come, and are adorable, dusky, tortured, passionate like you…
– Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West
If you pluck out the heart
To find what makes it move,
You’ll halt the clock
That syncopates our love.
– Sylvia Plath
There was nothing in those notebooks // that needed protection. Nothing private / of the great poet ferried from the otherworld. / All we learned was that he had terrible handwriting.
– Paisley Rekdal
There are two kinds of people: thermometers and thermostats.
Thermometers record the temperature; they go along to get along.
But thermostats regulate it.
Strive to be the thermostat in your environment and set the tone
for goodness, justice, and righteousness in our world.
– Arndrea Waters King
Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
Even at the time – twenty years old – I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day.
There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so.
The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else.
– Isaac Babel
I loved, I failed, I battled my own self. But most importantly; I lived. I did live.
– Frederick Phoenix
The myriad flecks of the plankton were annulled now by the high sun and it was only the great deep prisms in the blue water that the old man saw…
– Ernest Hemingway, Old Man and the Sea
Beautiful things of any kind are beautiful in themselves and sufficient to themselves. Praise is extraneous.
– Marcus Aurelius
Remember in the depth and even the agony of despondency, that very shortly you may feel well again.
– Abraham Lincoln
He was stricken; it may be, after all, he was stricken at Waterloo.
– Gilbert Keith Chesterton
And there’s a loyalty that’s deeper than mere sentiments. And a music higher than the songs that I can sing. The stuff of Earth competes for the allegiance I owe only to the Giver of all good things.
– Rich Mullins
He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
– Thomas Paine
Either you are riding on a donkey
or the donkey is riding on you.
– Chögyam Trungpa
You have to be indestructible to do what you love, and believe you are worth it.
– Kate Winslet
It’s Biblical to own slaves
It’s Christ-like to liberate the oppressed.
That’s the difference.
– Tim Whitaker
A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must inevitably come to grief among so many who are not good.
– Niccolò Machiavelli
It is the heart of US policy, ladies and gentlemen, to use fascism to preserve capitalism while claiming to be saving democracy from communism.
– Michael Parenti
False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
– Plato
The wastepaper basket is your friend [as a writer]. It was invented for you, by God.
– Margaret Atwood
…there is no old way, no new way, there is a way of life. We must live in balance with the Earth.
– John Trudell
No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie [capitalist class] sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.
– Buenaventura Durruti
Ultimately, America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
– Robert Kennedy Sr.
My word for soul is mind, and my work tends toward that axis. I also hope that mine is a poetry very much of the heart. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I hope to achieve by writing poems, and my preliminary answer to that question is: to offer some semblance of recognition, solace, and surprise.
– Ethel Rackin
In English, we say: “We’re strangers now.” But in poetry, we say: “We learned each other by heart, then forgot each other on purpose.”
– @1905soliloquy.poetry
Know that the wallowing heavens are moved by waves of love – if it were not for love, the world would be frozen stiff.
– Mawlana Rumi
It’s everywhere—the melodrama, the question of the real, the feel of things increasingly tinny. But who am I to complain when I’ve had it so good for so long, I respond. Where shall I roam?
– Ethel Rackin, Roam
Separation is an illusion. Behind all forms lies one unbroken force. To live with that awareness is to realize that every thought ripples to the entire field of existence.
– Bohm
I don’t want to sound like a misanthrope, but there’s something wrong with us.
– Ishmael Reed
Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection.
– Paul Kalanithi
For, so long as there are interesting books to read, it seems to me that neither I nor anyone else, for that matter, need be unhappy.
– Selma Lagerlöf
Tolerance will reach such a high level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles.
– Fyodor Dostoyevski
When we can see our enemies as fellow sufferers, we can begin to love them as neighbors.
– Henri Nouwen
The end of all knowledge should be service to others.
– Cesar Chavez
It unfolds as you write it. That’s something I never believed before I wrote a book, but it does.
– Joan Didion
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.
– John Milton, Areopagita
There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil – remain detached from the great.
– Walter Lippman
She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
– Michael Ondaatje
Not everything matters equally, and success isn’t a game won by whoever does the most.
– Gary Keller
If it was creative, I was interested. If it was soulful, I was interested. I am still the same.
– Frederick Phoenix
We’re told that you can’t change what happened in the past, but you can change how you frame it. And we’re offered a range of different lenses: acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude.
– Noelle Oxenhandler
In Icelandic, “Bókfimi” loosely translates to “book gymnastics”—the art of reading multiple books at once, switching between stories like a graceful literary acrobat.
When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist.
– Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message
Men, crumpled like bed-sheets in hospitals,
And women, battered like overused proverbs.
– Vladimir Mayakovsky
My favorite movie as a child was The Wizard of Oz, and I knew that it began with gray clouds just like these. Every time any black-and-white scene with gray clouds appeared on television, I would clap my hands with glee. No number of disappointments could dissuade me; I always thought it was The Wizard of Oz. And life is actually so threaded with hidden enchantment that, one time, it was.
– Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost
Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.
– Voltaire
When we ask for the abolition of the State and its organs we are always told that we dream of a society composed of men better than they are in reality. But no; a thousand times, no. All we ask is that men should not be made worse than they are, by such institutions.
– Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal
The slow-falling leaves contain the space of the story I’m pursuing.
– Rick Bass, Writing in October
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
It’s not unusual for science to catch up to art, eventually. Nor is it unusual for art to catch up to the spiritual.
– Rick Rubin
We don’t want a thing purely for the sake of owning it. We want it, instead, for its utility value.
– Robert Wood
Academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
As Jung said, “Thank God for our neuroses!” It is thanks to them that we learn to confront ourselves and are forced, frequently through exasperating circumstances, to grow.
– Alice O. Howell
We are not divided by race, religion, creed, or political beliefs — we are divided only by the darkness in our own hearts and minds.
– Manly P. Hall
The problem with sweetness is death. The problem
with everything is death. There really is no other problem
if you factor everything down, which I was no good at
– Diane Seuss
serpentine
by devon fulford
if you find yourself belly up in the
high desert around october, thank
the silence. you’re shedding one
needless skin in preparation for
another. you’ll discard it, too,
one day on a lingering horizon
you’ll never see coming. take a
cue from the smoke: a meandering
whisper will serve you well. be still.
watch the hills. yellow and patient,
you will learn every back road just
steers you again toward home.
What we see becoming more precise here is the interdependence and correlation of two Events: the final Sophianic hierogamy of the Apocalypse and the Assumption of the Virgin—the Exaltation of Maria-Sophia.
– Henry Corbin, On Answer to Job
Let it be known: today, the Divine Feminine Is descending to Earth in an incorruptible body. In the unfading light of the new Goddess, Heaven has become one with the depths.
– Vladimir Solovyov
When Winter comes, the winter wild
that hill and wood shall slay;
When trees shall fall and starless
night devour the sunless day;
When wind is in the deadly East,
then in the bitter rain
I’ll look for thee, and call to thee;
I’ll come to thee again!
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Real silence is the cessation of talking — of both the mouth and of the mind. This is not the kind of silence that oppresses us. It is a very elegant kind of silence, a very powerful kind of silence. It is the silence that heals and nourishes us.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Until a man yields himself to God in the consent of total belief, he must inevitably remain a stranger to himself, an exile from himself, because he is excluded from the most meaningful depths of his own being.
– Thomas Merton
To trim oneself. To wither. To wring out
all the marrow, blood, secretion.
Rip out the heart, the bowels, the brain.
– Aleksander Wat, Somatic Verses, (tr. Jakob Ziguras)
The philosophy of mind uploading is so beat.
It assumes that brain activity patterns = who we really are.
It’s a materialistically reductionistic philosophy that makes some truly scary assumptions.
– Vince Horn
If you’re depressed, take walk.
If you’re low energy, take a walk.
If you want to burn fat, take a walk.
If you want a better brain, take a walk.
If you want to become a better human, take a walk.
– Dan Go, Fit Founder
boasting
about the good wind…
reed warbler
– Kobayashi Issa
it comforts me greatly that after years of relentless propaganda most people still lowkey hate artificial intelligence.
– Jonathan Fine
Just as darkness comes upon the earth when it is turned away from the sun, so the darkness of ignorance comes upon the self when it is turned away from its source, the light of pure Knowing.
– Rupert Spira
There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in your heart.
– Chandogya Upanishad
In violence / there is no reciprocity / like rain on soil
– Simon Shieh
And we fear that if we give up the self nothing will be left of us but a dry, empty husk like a dead snail shell. It seldom occurs to us that the Holy Spirit is only waiting till the self is out—waiting to rush in and fill us with luminous splendors.
– Joy Davidman
The source of love is deep in us and we can help others realize a lot of happiness. One word, one action, one thought can reduce another person’s suffering and bring that person joy.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Another difference between Milton [Friedman] and myself is that everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper.
– Robert M. Solow
The domestic and everyday have always been foregrounded in my work. I almost don’t trust poems that avoid these topics, since for me poems need to be experiential, as well as somehow transformative. — There is no revelation without reflection, and reflection seems increasingly rare in the busyness of everyday life. So, I suppose, daily life functions as both the poison and the cure.
– Ethel Rackin
Love is not always fireworks and magic. Often we’ll experience it in the form of patience, acceptance, loyalty, and mutual respect.
– Charles F. Glassman
Higher consciousness is less about how smart you are or how many books you’ve read, and more about inner transformation. To know yourself is to see the world more clearly.
– Nika Solé
Yet whatever the shortcomings of positivism, pragmatism, and behaviorism, and however great their influence…none of these theories assumes that it is possible ‘to transform the nature of man’ as totalitarianism indeed tries to do.
– Hannah Arendt
There’s no such thing as a born writer. It’s a skill you’ve got to learn, just like learning how to be a bricklayer or a carpenter.
– Larry Brown
If people are patient and kind, that’s a lot—something of the spirit is at work. The result of grace. It doesn’t come naturally.
– Anne Lamott
I found the best ideas usually came, not when one was actively striving for them, but when one was in a more relaxed state… I used to take long solitary walks on Sundays, during which I tended to review the current situation in a leisurely way. Such occasions often proved fruitful, even though, (or perhaps because), the primary purpose of the walk was relaxation and not research.
– Paul Dirac
You Belong
The way grass belongs to the meadow—
how without it, the meadow
would not be meadow—
this is the way you belong in my heart.
Not that I’ve made a space for you here,
more that you’ve helped make my heart what it is,
and without you, my heart is not my heart.
I cradle you here as in a nest of wheat—
soft home, humble home, ever rewoven
to fit the changing shape of you.
It’s not true our hearts are our own—
they’re symbiotic as meadows in spring.
The heart exists for who grows in it.
Who am I? Who am I?
You, my sun, my grass, my wind.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Just because the Sun is out, doesn’t mean all the snow melts at once.
– Chinul
Picking something apart philosophically is not the same as understanding it.
It’s a way of understanding things, cognitively.
There are many other important ways of knowing, and each contributes to our net understanding of the thing.
– @VinceFHorn
Never say you know the last word about any human heart.
– Henry James
If you escape from the battle, you have not understood the battle. The battle is you.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
What is most profound in nature is also melancholy; for it too, mourns a lost good, & likewise, such an indestructible melancholy inheres in all forms of life.
– F.W.J. Schelling
as we now come to re-establish our path among the ways of living nations of the earth, we must create a new people, a human people whose attitude toward other peoples is informed with the sense of human brotherhood and whose attitude toward nature and all within it is inspired by noble urges of life-loving creativity. all the forces of our history, all the pain that has accumulated in our national soul, seem to impel us in that direction… we are engaged in a creative endeavor the like of which is itself not to be found in the whole history of mankind: the rebirth and rehabilitation of a people that has been uprooted and scattered to the winds…
– a.d. gordon
The Martyr Poets – did not tell –
But wrought their Pang in syllable –
That when their mortal name be numb –
Their mortal fate – encourage Some –
The Martyr Painters – never spoke –
Bequeathing – rather – to their Work –
That when their conscious fingers cease –
Some seek in Art – the Art of Peace –
– Emily Dickinson
One understands only in proportion to becoming himself that which he understands.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Without a measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed.
– Winston Churchill
The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil – rich, fertile soil.
She wasn’t a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn’t run away from herself. She’d have to stay there and tend to that wasteland. She could plant a forest inside herself.
– Matt Haig
An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff.
– Adlai Stevenson
Leonardo da Vinci said, “Learning never exhausts the mind.” He saw curiosity as life’s engine, believing that knowledge energizes us, while ignorance drains us.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget. For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.
– Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Many desirable states — happiness, attractiveness, spontaneity — are best pursued indirectly, and conscious thought and effortful striving can actually interfere with their attainment.
– Edward Slingerland
O cursed spite,/ That ever I was born to set it right!
– Hamlet
It is always a danger
To the aspirant
On the path
When one begins
To believe and act
As if the ten thousand idiots
Who so long ruled
And lived inside
Have all packed their bags
And skipped town
Or died.
– Hafiz
There’s less and less love,
and less and less daring,
and time
is a battering ram
against my head.
– Vladimir Mayakovsky
Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.
– Aldous Huxley
I’ve developed a new philosophy. I only dread one day at a time.
– Charlie Brown
I don’t worry about what I don’t understand in the Bible. I worry about what I understand but don’t do.
– Paul Washer
The silence was part of the story I wanted to tell.
– Joyce Maynard
If my life wasn’t funny, it would just be true—and that’s unacceptable.
– Carrie Fisher
If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And to make history, young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.
– Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
This is the first rule of deception: repeated often enough, almost any statement, story, or smear can start to sound plausible. The Internet should be an ally of freedom and a gateway to knowledge; in some cases, it is neither.
– Madeleine K. Albright
Your family of origin does not know how to get you to your North Star. They didn’t when you were little, they don’t now, and they never will. It isn’t their job.
– Martha Beck
I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.
– Twan Eng Tan
Every habit he’s ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.
– Margaret Atwood
It is well known that a child learns to walk, to talk, and to know his way around the world just by trying something out and seeing what happens, then modifying what he does (or thinks) in accordance with what has actually happened. In this way, he spends his first few years in a wonderfully creative way, discovering all sorts of things that are new to him, and this leads people to look back on childhood as a kind of lost paradise. As the child grows older, however, learning takes on a narrower meaning. In school, he learns by repetition to accumulate knowledge, so as to please the teacher and pass examinations. At work, he learns in a similar way, so as to make a living, or for some other utilitarian purpose, and not mainly for the love of the action of learning itself. So his ability to see something new and original gradually dies away. And without it there is evidently no ground from which anything can grow.
– David Bohm
To actually become free from all biases, the entire spirit must undergo a purification process. The more this purification process goes forward, the more free and unattached we shall be within. At the same time, this has the effect of eliminating fear and all the other unregulated motives that can lure us to dishonesty. There would no longer be any reason to avoid telling the truth.
– Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle, Living in the New Consciousness
To be fully ourselves it is in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest, that we must advance—towards the ‘other.’ The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis. The same holds good from top to bottom. The true ego grows in inverse proportion to ‘egoism.’ Like the Omega which attracts it, the element only becomes personal when it universalises itself.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The nature rules live in the heart. The society rules and gods are always “out there.” But the source of the lyric is here, in the heart. And that is the sense of the inward=turned meditation. This is where the god is that is dictating to you. This is where the muses live, in your own heart, not out there in some book.
– Joseph Campbell
If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line—starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King’s Highway past appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far.
I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back.
Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.
– Wendell Berry
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
– George Orwell, Animal Farm
In Zen, one is urged to see things with a “beginner’s mind.” In Advaita, to abide as the witness prior to thought. Both point to the same realisation: that clarity arises not by adding more, but by letting go. The world does not need to be understood so much as encountered. When we meet reality without the veil of prior knowing, beauty and truth are not discovered as abstract ideas but felt directly as the living texture of being.
– @thestillpoint_
You are not the role you play — you are the infinite being behind it. The body and mind are avatars through which timeless consciousness evolves and creates, lifetime after lifetime.
– Deepak Chopra
There are those days when everything I see seems to be charged with significance––announcements or prophecies … that touch not only the external events of my existence but also what is happening in my deepest self.
– Italo Calvino
Anyone with just a fragment of common sense will perceive that it would be ludicrously confusing to attribute to me everything [my] poetized characters say.
– Kierkegaard
Ego turns relationships into mirrors of our unresolved selves. But in a sacred relationship, presence replaces possession, and understanding replaces judgment. Two beings recognize the same divine consciousness shining through each other.
– Deepak Chopra
In revenge and in love, woman is
more barbarous than man
– Friedrich Nietzsche
You don’t need everything to make a world,
you need happiness and nothing else.
– Paul Éluard
Don’t stir all the warmth
out of your coffee : drink it.
– Kate Chopin
For the longest time, I thought that poetry was a way of finding answers. It was, in the sense that I learned a lot about myself by writing it, but that was actually a fringe benefit. The big benefit was that I learned it was the questions I was after, not the answers.
– Chase Twichell
No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.
– L. Frank Baum
With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured; the first thought forbidden; the first freedom denied – chains us all, irrevocably.
– Cpt. Jean-Luc Picard
But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me.
– Amal El-Mohtar
The kindest words my father said to me / Women like you drown oceans.
– Rupi Kaur
It charged that he had invaded the rights of the people, sent swarms of officers to harass them, imposed a standing army in peacetime, levied taxes without the colonist’s consent, and was now waging war against them.
A summation of the grievances, Ken Burns documentary, The American Revolution
From the beginning of his [Jesus] life he was a threat to the established and unjust political orders. It was a politician who sought to kill him shortly after birth. It was politicians who finally succeeded in crucifying him. Jesus not die because he talked about lilies of the field and birds in the air. He went to the cross because he talked of thieves in the marketplace, rascals in the statehouse, and a God demanding total allegiance.
– Lovett Weems
Her handwriting was glorious and stellar, obviously done with supreme care and skill. It was one of those types you read that instantly made you want a significant change in your life. But as for her decisions—oh dear. All too disastrous, painfully and beautifully.
– Frederick Phoenix
Even though he had been burned countless times, he allowed a significant part of him to feel. Feeling was both his poison and his antidote.
– Frederick Phoenix
I stick to my firm, unshakeable belief that the black press is an advocacy press, and that I, as a part of that press, can’t afford the luxury of being unbiased when it comes to issues that really affect my people, and I plead guilty, because I think that I am an instrument of change.
– Ethel Payne
I have always loved everything about you. Even what I didn’t understand.
– Albert Camus
It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.
– Thomas Paine
If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it.
– Audre Lorde
May I come quietly to see you then
& listen to music & you & calm my
most hectic & tormented psyche?
– Sylvia Plath, Letter to J. Mallory Wober
The world is full of pain and somehow you are always the balm that makes me bear it all.
– Frederick Phoenix
Capitalism has entered its necrophilic phase. It doesn’t produce; it consumes. It feeds on itself, devouring its institutions, its legitimacy, its illusions. Epstein’s circle represents the metaphysical exhaustion of that class, the point where pleasure becomes cruelty, wealth becomes pathology, and power becomes suicide. Their violence is not strategic anymore; it’s ritualistic. They destroy because they can, because destruction is the only proof they still exist.
– Chris Hedges
Am I a person or am I just a burning bush? A totaled vehicle in motion, a work of art that’s never enough?
– Frederick Phoenix, Endless Travel
Learning how to see our biases is a psychological exercise, but one with immediate theological and social implications. It demands self-knowledge and the crucial need to recognize (1) when we are in denial about our own shadow and capacity for illusion; (2) our capacity to project our own fears and shadows onto other people and groups; (3) our capacity to face and carry our own issues; and (4) the social, institutional, and political implications of not doing this work.
– Richard Rohr
The bigotry against Southerners is really something. Considering we gave the world the blues and jazz, Faulkner and Harper Lee, cornbread and mint juleps, you’d think folks would meet the skepticism with a dash of curiosity. The South is a real good example of how religion in the hands of evil men can taint even the most beautiful thing. “Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)…”
– Cormac McCarthy
We have learned that history is something that pays not the slightest heed to our hopes.
– Oswald Spengler
Music has the power to make me feel good like nothing else does. It gives me some peace for a while. Takes me back to who I really am.
– Gil Scott-Heron
One of the central paradoxes of twenty-first-century capitalist urban planning [is that] planners and policymakers are expected to make cities simultaneously more profitable and more affordable.
– Samuel Stein
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves
and know what another person sees.
– Marcel Proust
I wage war with
myself and I will
destroy myself, or I
will be reborn, that
is all.
– Albert Camus
The intellect seeks, the heart finds.
– George Sand
The positive achievements of the society in which intellectuals live seldom receive attention even remotely comparable to the amount of attention paid to grievances or supposed grievances.
– Thomas Sowell
I met my translator. He didn’t know a single word of Czech. “How did you translate it?” I asked. “With my heart,” he said.
– Kundera, Adventures in Translation
Many of us on the spiritual path are driven to experience something other than what we’re experiencing right now. That’s not a desire for enlightenment. That’s a desire to escape.
– Andrew Holecek
The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.
– Karl Marx
Well, I know now.
I know a little more how much a simple thing
like a snowfall can mean to a person.
– Sylvia Plath
Change. But start
slowly, because
direction is more
important than
speed.
– Paulo Coelho
I get kind of bothered by writers who talk about writing like it’s this deeply arduous thing. I mean, you’re sitting in a room, right? The A/C is on.
– Cameron Engwall and August Thompson
But the real strangeness was that it was all so recognizable, down to the smallest detail.
It was not so much that it ‘came back to me’; I found now that, in a queer sort of way, it had never left me; I had never really forgotten it.
– Lawrence Durrell
As long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas and colors enough to paint the beautiful things I see.
– Vincent Van Gogh
I fear a Man of frugal speech –
I fear a Silent Man –
Haranguer – I can overtake –
Or Babbler – entertain –
But He who weigheth – While the Rest –
Expend their furthest pound –
Of this Man – I am wary –
I fear that He is Grand –
– Emily Dickinson
I’m always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.
– Barbara Kingsolver
You know you in deep into the Ken Burns American Revolution series when your dreams during sleep are now being narrated by Peter Coyote!
– Lynette Marie Williams
Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.
– Henry James Sr.
In darkness are those enveloped by blind gloom. They pass through the land, destroying souls. One who is not attached to the ego cannot be broken by them. In virtue they are brought to the light, diminishing the darkness in others. God establishes balance.
– Isha Upanishad 1:3-4
I don’t want to do anything. I don’t even want to start this day because then I’ll just be expected to finish it.
– Rainbow Rowell
Did you trade your torch
For a silver fork
And a life in the dark?
– Mon Rovîa
Criticism
is prejudice
made plausible.
– H.L. Mencken
I am afraid because I can so clearly foresee my own life rotting away of itself, like a leaf that rots without falling, while I pursue my round of existence from day to day.
– Osamu Dazai
Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.
– William Shakespeare
A noble deed is a dream before it is reality. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul, a beautiful world waits to be realized.
– James Allen
The truth is that we have power. Most of us may not have a lot of power, but we have power. We have power to inspire. We have power to upset, and to depress. We have power for neurosis. We have power for sanity…
– Waylon H. Lewis
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
– Anatole Broyard
If I may trust my personal experience no doctrine is, for the moment, dimmer to the eye of faith than that which a man has just successfully defended.
– C.S. Lewis
Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.
– Marilyn French
Meanwhile, you had been sounding the alarm—each time you came, you detailed the changes. You were deemed a false prophet, a puppeteer, because none of us wanted to hear it.
– Ethel Rackin, The Prophet
Nothing we despise in another is—in itself—foreign to ourselves.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The psychological dilemma plaguing most of humanity is that the archetypes live us instead of us living them.
– Eugene Pascal
Once we realize that the nature of our existence is beyond thought and emotions, that it is incredibly vast and interconnected with all other beings, the separation and fear and hope all fall away. It is a tremendous relief.
– Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
– Robert F. Kennedy
Others disapproved of him because he devoted his whole life to art, and they saw he was not a genius. For them, the nobility of that persistence passed unnoticed.
– John Berger
We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious – the people, events, and things of the day – to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious…
– Annie Dillard
After God has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he does for a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transport its center near to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken has cracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the world.
– Simone Weil
It’s intriguing that poetry, that most evanescent of arts, lasts the longest of all cultural artifacts, while architecture, which one would expect to persist as long as the stones of the hills, tends to disappear relatively quickly from the face of the earth.
Thousands of poems of ancient China still exist, can be read today and, what is more astonishing, they can be understood. […] Little remains today, however, of the architecture of ancient China (or any other ancient culture, for that matter, with the exception of enigmatic Egypt). What does remain are those edifices that have been brought low, literally: burial mounds and underground chambers.
Entire cities with their impregnable palaces have disappeared into dust and mist while a simple poem about the moon continues to shine.
– Mark Frutkin, Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously
That was the summer we had so many clouds we didn’t know what to do with them. They overflowed the sky – they were on our streets, in our homes, in our drawers, and in our cabinets. They were in our cars and in our buses, I even saw them in taxis…They cast long shadows in an unearthly light. Some were blue, some were gray, some black, some white, some were pink, some were lavender, some orange, some a ghastly purple. All cast a trance and silence upon us…
– Mary Ruefle, Among the Clouds
Dreams, memories, the sacred–they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.
– Yukio Mishima
Why was it, she sometimes wondered, that in dreams we can’t do the simplest things?
– George Saunders
The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.
– Peter Shaffer
Sometimes, when you’re tired, what restores is not rest but exertion-sunshine, breath, movement, laughter, coffee.
– Waylon Lewis
I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have.
– Charles Bukowski
History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
– David McCullough
Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the only one who asked why.
– Bernard Baruch
God sleeps in the rock,
dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal
and awakens in the human.
– Ibn Arabi
As it is better to lie straitened for room upon a little couch in health, than to toss upon a wide bed in sickness, so it is better to contract yourself within the compass of a small fortune and be happy, than to have a great one and be wretched.”
– Epictetus
And this is one of the final things I learn about love: it’s found in its purest form, on this imperfect earth, between mothers and young children, because there’s nothing they want except to make each other happy.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Deep pockets and empty hearts rule the world. We unleash them at our peril.
– Stefan Molyneux
Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.
– Sebastian Junger
Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent.
– Bertrand Russell
It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
– George Eliot
No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.
– Jean Paul Sartre
It’s exhausting, the energy it takes to unknow a truth.
– Chuck Palahniuk
…they are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.
– James Baldwin
“it’s been a long while…”
this coastal tree says to me
“…since your last haiku.”
– Mr. Tipton
Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.
– Richard Powers
Vision without execution is just hallucination.
– Henry Ford
One of the main reasons you’re not hearing from God on a matter is that you already know the answer.
– Frank Viola
I get deeply tired because everything touches me. I am never indifferent.
– Anais Nin
Nothing in the world is easier than the comfortable belief that one’s own identity is the norm.
– W.E.B. Du Bois
LETTER TO BORGES FROM HOUSTON, TEXAS
I fell down this morning, Borges. I blamed this on the
pavement outside the hotel.
There is something about falling when you’re blind, a
kind of synesthesia occurs,
I fell slowly into a cold paradise of blue.
It was like falling into the world in the birth wind.
Do you remember that?
Falling like this is certainly a kind of nostalgia.
I had time to think.
“Only God can conceal God,”
That’s what I thought.
My arms were extended like wings.
Joyfully, falling.
I should add that no one was awake to see me.
Borges, did you ever laugh in so much blue?
– Stephen Kuusisto
At this point I am again trying to express something that won’t let itself be expressed.
– L. Wittgenstein
We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other.
– Grace Lee Boggs
Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.
Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?
Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen.
All mortals owe a debt to death.
There’s no one alive
who can say if he will be tomorrow.
Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery.
No one can teach it, no one can grasp it.
Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink!
But don’t forget Aphrodite–that’s one sweet goddess.
You can let the rest go. Am I making sense?
I think so. How about a drink.
Put on a garland. I’m sure
the happy splash of wine will cure your mood.
We’re all mortal you know. Think mortal.
Because my theory is, there’s no such thing as life,
it’s just catastrophe.
– Anne Carson
You forget, you have no memory. You forget, you must repeat, repeat, repeat. You wish to say that you have no power of concentration. It is the same with everybody. This is the aim of the work. If a man could really concentrate for a quarter of an hour only, he would be bigger than your Notre Dame, than Christ. I should ask him to be my teacher. If everybody could do this, everybody would be saints. In three centuries there have been perhaps one and a half saints. You must try to achieve gaining perhaps one second a month by repeating, repeating, repeating.
– Gurdjieff
It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and live for a time in the wilderness. If he is of the proper sort, he will return with a message. It may not be a message from the god he set out to seek, but even if he has failed in that particular, he will have had a vision or seen a marvel, and these are always worth listening to and thinking about…. One must seek, then, what only the solitary approach can give – a natural revelation.
– Loren Eiseley
We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment. We all got to face the nothingness before us and behind. Call it sleep. We all begin in sleep and that’s where we find our end. Even in between, sleep keeps trying to claim us. To stay awake in life as much as possible – that may be the point.
Pain comes to us from deep back, from where it grew in the human body. Pain sucks more pain into it, we don’t know why. It lives and we harbor its weight. When the worst comes, we will not act the opposite. We will do what we were taught, we who learnt our lessons in the dead light. We pass them on. We hurt, and hurt others, in a circular motion.
– Louise Erdrich
The love of God, unutterable and perfect,
flows into a pure soul the way that light
rushes into a transparent object.
– Dante
Yes, we are beginning to encounter ourselves—not always comfortably or pleasantly—as multi-species beings already partaking in timescales that are fabulously more complex than the onwards-driving version of history many of us still imagine ourselves to inhabit. The work of the radical biologist Lynn Margulis and others has shown humans to be not solitary beings, but what Margulis memorably calls ‘holobionts’ – collaborative compound organisms, ecological units ‘consisting of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that coordinate the task of living together and sharing a common life’, in the philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s phrase.
– Robert Macfarlane
Train to return to attention whenever you become aware that you are lost. And then just do it. Place attention and rest. Return and rest. Again and again.
– Ken McLeod
If you remember nothing else, always remember this one great secret of spiritual practice: we don’t have to feel any particular way. We don’t have to have special experiences, nor do we have to be any particular way. With whatever arises, whether it’s pleasing or not, try to remember that all we can do is experience and work with whatever our life is right now. No matter what life is and no matter how we feel about it, all that matters in practice is whether we can honestly acknowledge what is going on, and then stay present with the physical experience of that moment.
– Ezra Bayda
If you are in the dark, it does not mean that you have failed and that you have taken some terrible misstep. For many years I thought my questions and my doubt and my sense of God’s absence were all signs of my lack of faith, but now I know this is the way the life of the spirit goes.
– Barbara Brown Taylor
we could wake up to what we were
— when we were ocean and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not
at all — nothing
before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness
– Marie Howe
But, in fact, impermanence is like some of the people we meet in life—difficult and disturbing at first, but on deeper acquaintance far friendlier and less unnerving than we could have imagined.
– Sogyal Rinpoche
But I cannot possibly penetrate to the core of the enigma of life by my own efforts. Nor can I willfully invent myths or rituals without their being trivial and empty. This is why we have traditions of art, philosophy and, above all, religion. The fetishisation of novelty and the repudiation of history are reflections of a capitalist culture that depends on dissatisfaction with what we have and the constant seeking after new ‘improvements’ in order to fuel demand. It is not only false but obviously immoral in a number of respects. A culture (and the point of religion is to embody the ethos of culture) is of critical importance for a society’s survival. Cultures are living; but precisely because of that can be killed. A plant can be flexibly trained, but it cannot be avulsed from its roots and still live. And if our culture dies, so will we who live in it.
– Iain McGilchrist
We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.
– Teju Cole
But making the ugly hurt part human again is not an exercise for the well-meaning social worker in us. This is the most dangerous work you can do. It is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb. That’s the problem – the awful thing is you. It may be split off and living malevolently at the bottom of the garden, but it is sharing your blood and eating your food. Mess this up, and you will go down with the creature.
– Jeanette Winterson
It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time.
– Marie Howe
We’re all islands shouting lies
to each other across seas
of misunderstanding.
– Rudyard Kipling
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
– Bertrand Russell
Where does such tenderness come from?
And what will I do with it? Young stranger,
poet, in the city of strangers: you and your
eyelashes—longer than anyone’s.
– Tsvetaeva
Poetry takes its form in its endless failure to express what language cannot.
– Lee Seong-bok
Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you’ve no longer been bested by these events.
– Louise Glück
Suffering only shows where you are attached. That is why, to those on the path, suffering is grace.
– Ram Dass
When you understand every opinion is a vision loaded with personal history, you will start to understand that all judgment is a confession.
– Nikola Tesla
Nature is not what you would have it:
No lifeless cast, no mask of death —
In nature there is love, and freedom,
A soul, a tongue, a living breath…
– Fyodor Tyutchev (tr. John Dewey)
A Divining Rod
I have ruined our campsite by
sinking a well. Dowsed for it
with a forked stick that carried
a stone, a pit, a cherry,
and when the pull was strong,
we staked the spot and called the rig.
Never mind that the pull was strong
an equal number of steps from
wherever I began. Meaning
water is everywhere. And fire
is deeper still. And someday
I shall dowse for fire, and not be
satisfied until hell breaks loose.
– Ann Darr
on a path
where not a soul treads
as autumn bids us farewell
– Basho
A mantra is basically a means of talking with your thoughts and feelings. It’s a time-honored method sometimes referred to as prayer, but really it’s an opening of a conversation between the heart and the mind.
– Tsoknyi Rinpoche
I have lived so much without ever having lived. I have thought so much without ever having thought. I feel weighed down by worlds of unenacted violence, of stillborn adventures. I am sick of what I never had nor will have, weary of gods always just about to exist. I bear on my body the wounds of all the battles I did not fight. My muscles are weary from efforts I never even considered making.
– Fernando Pessoa
When your illusions drop, you’re in touch with reality at last, and believe me, you will never again be lonely, never again. Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.
– Anthony de Mello
More and more we embody and incorporate external images that have no inner resonance. In our efforts to accept the roles that society imposes, we live a life of images, ungrounded in our nature.
– Stanley Keleman
What remains of this beautiful and thoroughly bungled story? Only the poetry.
– Milan Kundera
My Twenties
I took the roundabout way to get there. Through
the swim shop, the old-fashioned ice cream
parlor, other women’s kitchens where I brought
my own dish. The coast I knew was no longer a
coast but a waterway, and this soured the whole
affair. I’m not saying I no longer loved you, just
that things had become too much: the salty air,
the almost constant drenching, your anxious
attempts to get me back. We were two sides of
the same person. You, me, everyone we knew.
– Ethel Rackin
What the artist owes the world
is his work; not a model
for living.
– Harry Crews
Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
– Ambrose Bierce
…if I’d sent him a script he might not have accepted. But since there was nothing to go on at all, he said: ‘Ah, I’ve worked like that before with Cassavetes, and honestly I prefer working without a script.’
– Wim Wenders on inviting Peter Falk into Wings of Desire
Literalness is a quality which some words have achieved in the course of their history; it is not a quality with which the first words were born.
– Owen Barfield
You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
– Malcolm X
Since the trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself, it properly has no site—erasure belongs to its structure.
– Jacques Derrida
You may produce a most excellent thing in color or in stone, but if your daily life contradicts that supreme excellence – the total abandonment of the self – then that which you have produced is for admiration and vulgarity.
– Krishnamurti
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say?
– William Butler Yeats
When nations grow old the Arts grow cold
And Commerce settles on every tree.
– William Blake
When you shall say, “As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season.” — then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
– John Updike
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
– Sigmund Freud
The Nobel Peace prize is awarded for peace, not surrender.
– Fareed Zakaria
Spirituality is that attitude which puts life at the center, and defends and promotes life against all the mechanisms of death, desiccation, or stagnation.
– Leonardo Boff
Maybe it’s true, that we are all descendants of the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers, and brawlers. But also the brave, and independent, and generous.
– John Steinbeck
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
– James Joyce
Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
– Carl Sandburg
How often do police accidentally shoot and kill bankers who are committing financial crimes, stealing homes, and plunging the nation into economic instability and recession? The nightmarish truth is difficult to absorb.
– Ralph Nader
Be still:
There is no longer any need of comment.
It was a lucky wind
That blew away his halo with his cares,
A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.
– Thomas Merton
I touched the frame of the painting. And then I placed my whole palm on the dry, rumbling surface of the canvas, simply to prove to myself that there was no god stalking my soul. Time was not immemorial. Things were just things.
– Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Even a painful longing is some form of presence.
– Anna Kamienska
A good conscience welcomes the crowd, but a bad conscience, even in solitude, is disturbed and troubled.
– Seneca
Mass communication .. presents us with a serious danger, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country.
– Rollo May
The world around us is nothing more and nothing less than a mirror of what we have become from within.
– Gregg Braden
I believe that telling our stories, first to ourselves and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act. It is an act that can be met with hostility, exclusion, and violence. It can also lead to love, understanding, transcendence, and community.
– Janet Mock
Stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted, and shaky — that’s called liberation.
– Pema Chödrön
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is the glue.
– Eugene O’Neill
Only through action may we gain fulfillment, even if that action is only the maintenance of our environment. The best people pursue virtue in everything they do, so that they may set an example for the world to follow.
– Bhagavad Gita 3:20-21
But if you understood any world besides your own, you would understand your own much better.—When a heart is really alive, then it is able to think live things.
– George MacDonald
It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.
– Simone Weil
In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyze and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.
– Fernando Pessoa
The past – as something that remains self-identical and is always to be retrieved in the same form – does not exist. Digital memory consists of indifferent – as it were, undead – points of presence. It lacks the extended horizon constituting the temporality of the living. This means that digitalized life lacks animacy. Digital temporality belongs to the undead.
– Byung-chul Han, Psychopolitics
The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.
– Plato
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves…’It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’…Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.
– Kurt Vonnegut
We must bind up the wounds that divide us and make us brothers and countrymen once again.
– Robert F. Kennedy
The wren never repeats the same song twice when he courts. Later he whispers his songs to his mate when she nests.
– Kathryn Nuernberger
There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.
– President Harry Truman
If the machine is a story, then the first step to its dismantling is neither monkey-wrenching nor revolution—it is to stop believing the story. The second step is to stop telling it to others; and the third is to begin the search for a better one.
– Paul Kingsnorth
Conspiracies have generally been set on foot by the great, or the friends of the prince; and of these, as many have been prompted to it by an excess of benefits as by an excess of wrongs.
– Machiavelli
Tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify. The good artist is a vehicle of truth, he formulates ideas which would otherwise remain vague and focuses attention upon facts which can then no longer be ignored. The tyrant persecutes the artist by silencing him or by attempting to degrade or buy him. This has always been so.
– Iris Murdoch
The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit.
– Jim Harrison
All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.
– Joseph Campbell
Buddhism is complicated not because the philosophy nor the Buddha’s intent was complicated, but we as human beings are very complex. In that, we tend to choose what is complex, over what is simple, because we think what is simple, just doesn’t par up with who I am, as a wise individual. And that’s ignorance.
– Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche
All this Americanizing and mechanizing has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines.
– D. H. Lawrence
Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins the journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of the crowd, and by choosing knowledge over veils of ignorance.
– Henri Bergson
I learned something very beautiful today, In French, “bibliothèque intérieure” means your “inner library” the invisible shelf you carry inside, filled with every story that’s ever shaped you.
All the books you’ve loved, the heartbreaks you’ve survived, the random quotes that stuck, the memories that built you. They all live there. Quietly reminding you of who you are and how far you’ve come.
– unknown
I started to understand writing as a kind of sacrament, by which we remind ourselves that the person we happen to be, at this moment, through habit, is not the limit of who we might become.
– George Saunders
Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind
– Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965
It is easy to be conspicuously ‘compassionate’ if others are being forced to pay the cost.
– Murray N. Rothbard
It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world everyday always just exactly fits the newspaper.
– Jerry Seinfeld
It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.
– Mary Wollstonecraft
US credibility in foreign affairs is nonexistent.
– Robert B. Hubbell
Every poem contains within itself an essential difference from ordinary language, no matter how similar to conversational language it may seem at first to be.
– Mary Oliver
The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sunstruck hills every day…. It began as mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
– Diane Ackerman
you, as you later confessed, / wanted to speak about Gorbachev, / the little map on his balding head, / and how that map was the secret / but obvious key to how people live / exiled in their own country.
– Stephen Dunn
I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands.
– Eugene V. Deb
Remember: The oligarchs who control our economy and democracy seek to divide us so they can become more powerful. They want us to turn on each other so we don’t look up and see where all the wealth and power have gone. Don’t fall for it.
– Robert Reich
May I please remind you that it does not say ‘RSVP’ on the Statue of Liberty.
– Cher Horowitz
We often trust others in positions of authority because we assume that those with knowledge, intellect, and skill MUST be trustworthy. But that is not always the case. How often have we seen that the power that comes with knowledge, intellect, and skill can be abused?
– Diane Langberg
The complexity of immigration as an issue begins with a basic human trait: we are reluctant to share.
– Madeleine K. Albright
Our job is to love people. When it hurts. When it’s awkward. When it’s uncool and embarrassing. Our job is to stand together, to carry the burdens of one another and to meet each other in our questions.
– Jamie Tworkowksi
“What one can know about the soul must be supernatural. It must be from grace, for the soul is where god works compassion.” Or, to put it differently, we’re not born with a soul, we have to make it, in a sense. In a sense, you make a soul through living, living joy and living grief, and out of both compassion is born.
– Matthew Fox on Eckhart
Someday, with the right man in the White House, there will be a Department of Jesus, yes and a Secretary of Jesus.… Dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity—“I don’t like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.”
– Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
Well, hold on; isn’t one quality of a harsh system that it deforms the people within it and makes them complicit in their own destruction?
– George Saunders
One of the oldest meanings in Hebrew for salvation is being freed from a trap. God releases us from the traps we make for our selves when our self-consciousness shuts itself off from the deep mind, and gives us hope.
– Maggie Ross
From a certain perspective, I don’t care how you’re doing it—if you’re polishing every visible corner of your life desperately trying to look pristine or snorting crack under a bridge, if you’re apathetic, worn out and done with it all or if you’re burning at both ends trying to create a new way, if you’re a saint with imposter syndrome or married to sin. It’s not that nothing matters, things matter, the way we live matters, but I’m coming from a vantage point right now of being amazed at the bravery of what it takes to be here at all. To be conscious beings aware of our mortality? That is the best, most insanely harrowing plot of all time and we are each living it. And to do it within the container of capitalism and patriarchal madness with a deep inheritance of accumulated trauma that spans lineages to work through? I mean, wow. That we can love so immensely and intensely knowing there’s no way out of losing every form that has held that love and still try somehow, no matter how clumsily, to love anyway, at all. To endure and participate in the great battle of yearning to surrender to love and at once being almost totally unwilling to be humbled by and exposed to all that that means. We are part of an extraordinary odyssey and a Herculean challenge. No matter what shitty and dysmorphic narratives you’ve learned to tell yourself about your worth, from this perspective they could not be less true. No matter what form your life takes, how unimpressive you may judge it to be or how little it measures up to what others have told you it ought to be, if you take even a half step back and look at it with a scrap of perspective, there is some measure of truth that each of us is an inarguable badass beyond measure and there’s good reason to be amazed by pretty much everyone.
– Chelan Harkin
A world without empathy is a world that is dead to others. If we are dead to others, we are dead to ourselves. The sharing of another’s pain can take us past the narrow canyon of selfish disregard and even cruelty and into the larger, more expansive landscape of wisdom and compassion.
– Joan Halifax
The dance of renewal, the dance that made world, was always danced here at the edge of things…
– Ursula K Le Guin
Samsara is not regarded as a nuisance alone, but it has its own potent message that is worthy of respect.
– Chögyam Trungpa
This transcendental bliss, continuity, and beingness is not based on fantasies, ideas, or fears.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Your life has a limit, but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger. If you understand this and still strive for knowledge, you will be in danger for certain!
– Zhuangzi
I swear to you, there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.
– Walt Whitman
The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
– Erich Fromm
Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints…They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint.
– Thomas Merton
The deepest form of slavery is the hunger for being understood.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
He who sees too much, end up not fitting in anywhere.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
As long as one has a garden, one has a future; and as long as one has a future one is alive.
– Frances Hodgson Burnett
The meaning of our life will be found precisely in our capacity to achieve as much of it as is possible beyond those bounds fear would set for us.
– James Hollis
Why should men be allowed to strut under the privilege of their life adventures, wearing them like a breast full of medals, while women went all gray and silent beneath the weight of theirs?
– Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
I want everyone to be smart. As smart as they can be. A world of ignorant people is too dangerous to live in.
– Garson Kanin
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
– Thomas Paine
We live in a culture that celebrates activity. We collapse our sense of who we are into what we do for a living. The public performance of busyness is how we demonstrate to one another that we are important. The more people see us as tired, exhausted, over-stretched, the more they think we must be somehow … indispensable. That we matter.
– Joan Halifax
Poetry humanized us. Made it okay to be broke, okay to live in a lousy apartment complex, okay to come from troubled families, okay to dream…
– Frankie Rollins
What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.
– Ted Hughes
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
– Juan Ramón Jiménez
To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace.
– Malcolm X
You have time to have a life, to see change, to understand a bit how people work, how the world works, how society works, how things shift around, how slippery things can be, everything from politics to personal relationships. It’s a great advantage to have that stuff under your belt when you start to write.
– Annie Proulx
Before you call yourself a Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu or any other theology, learn to be human first.
– Shannon L. Alder
Once there were songs for everything, Songs for planting, for growing, for harvesting, For eating, getting drunk, falling asleep, For sunrise, birth, mind-break, and war. For death (those are the heaviest songs and they Have to be pried from the earth with shovels of grief). Now all we hear are falling-in-love songs and Falling apart after falling in love songs.
– Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise
A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library where he can get it if he wants.
– Sherlock Holmes
I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.
– William F. Buckley, Jr.
A story will help us make sense of anything.
– Philip Pullman
All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.
– Ram Dass
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
– George Orwell
The men who are great live with that which is substantial; they do not stay with that which is superficial. They abide with realities and remain not with what is showy. They discard the one and hold the other.
– Lao Tzu
A person’s right to life means his right to have the free and unrestricted use of all the things which may be necessary to his fullest mental, spiritual and physical unfolding — in other words, his right to be rich.
– Wallace D. Wattles
I had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed.
– Joan Didion
If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.
– Eckhart Tolle
To cure the soul by means of the sense, and the senses by means of the soul.
– Oscar Wilde
What I wished more than anything was that the thing hadn’t happened at all, and I thought that by not mentioning it I’d be doing everyone else a favor.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
Don’t be tempted by the shiny apple,
Don’t you eat of the bitter fruit.
Hunger only for a taste of justice,
Hunger only for a world of truth
‘cause all that you have is your soul.
– Tracy Chapman
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago… had they happened to be in the reach of predatory human hands.
– Havelock Ellis
Nourishment
There is a way to enter
the thoroughgoing stream
of true nourishment.
Night-Sitting
here in Autumn
gazing up at leafless branches
their silhouettes appearing
to reach up to flickering stars.
Only they aren’t
reaching up
to flickering stars.
They hold the posture
of the reverent and waiting.
They reach up to the Sun,
by day,
currently making Her sojourn
on the other side of the world;
and I think it must be
the same with all of us
constantly reaching,
stretching, striving
for God, for Dao, for nourishment.
Yet nourishment is not God
not Dao
not sunlight
not even Earth
but rather that singular point within
that allows true nourishment in.
Nourishment only comes
when we allow it.
Nourishment only comes
when we willingly receive.
Anything else
is a waste —
a woman starving
in a field of plenty,
a man in a desert
dying at the edge
of a deep water spring.
– Frank Inzan Owen
Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we’ve seen, novels we’ve read, speeches we’ve heard, and daydreams we’ve savoured, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. This story may even cause me to sacrifice my life, if that’s what the plot requires. We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.
– Yuval Noah Harari
I follow Plato only with my mind
Pure beauty strikes me as a little thin
A little cold, however beautiful.
I am in love with what is mixed and impure
Doubtful, dark and hard to disencumber
I want beauty I must dig for, search for.
Pure beauty is beginning and not end
Begin with the sun and drop from sun to cloud
From cloud to tree, and from tree to earth itself
And deeper yet to the earth dark root.
I am in love with what resists my loving
With what I have to labour to make live.
– Robert Francis
What Soft – Cherubic Creatures –
These Gentlewomen are –
One would as soon assault a Plush –
Or violate a Star –
Such Dimity Convictions –
A Horror so refined
Of freckled Human Nature –
Of Deity – Ashamed –
It’s such a common – Glory –
A Fisherman’s – Degree –
Redemption – Brittle Lady –
Be so – ashamed of Thee –
– Emily Dickinson
I could not prove the Years had feet –
Yet confident they run
Am I, from symptoms that are past
And Series that are done –
I find my feet have further Goals –
I smile opon the Aims
That felt so ample – Yesterday –
Today’s – have vaster claims –
I do not doubt the Self I was
Was competent to me –
But something awkward in the fit –
Proves that – outgrown – I see –
– Emily Dickinson
You long to be bandaged before you have been cut.
– Margaret Atwood
A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them, and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
– Leonard Bernstein
Purpose does not usually appear as a clearly framed goal, but more likely as a troubling, unclear urge coupled with a sense of indubitable importance.
– James Hillman
Addictions are based on a longing for presence. Addicts somehow believe they can live in the presence of perfection: the perfect body, the perfect man or woman, the perfect nirvana. Addictions are archetypally based on the search for perfection.
– Marion Woodman
Running through his work is a profound and often heartbreaking meditation on the ruinous perversion of goodness and civilization, on the coterminous arising of aching beauty and unblinking malevolence from the same God-given faculty of subcreation.
– Raymond Edwards, On Tolkien
The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.
When, at the wearier end of November,
Her old light moves along the branches,
Feebly, slowly, depending upon them
– Wallace Stevens
Action produces information. If you’re unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it’s the wrong thing. This will give you information about what you should actually be doing.
– Brian Armstrong
Can a timeless moment of consciousness be ever adequately conveyed in a medium that depends on time, i.e., language? This is the mystic’s and the lyric poet’s problem.
– Charles Simic
Prioritize communing with your own spirit each day. Any and all answers that you are searching for will be found in the silence of your own, unique daily practice.
– Panache Desai
Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are over-consuming, the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.
– Aldous Huxley
And in these words, cinders
Even before dawn.
– Yves Bonnefoy
Christianity is everywhere paradoxical, everywhere too difficult for simple black-and-white thinking.
– Joy Davidman
Wherever attempts are made to realize creativity through ambition alone, not much is achieved. Ambition has a sterilizing effect on creativity. So to be creative for reasons of ambition will not work. It requires love, a contribution from one’s feeling side.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Love is not what you want, it is what you are. It is very important to not get these two confused. If you think that love is what you want, you will go searching for it all over the place. If you think love is what you are, you will go sharing it all over the place.
– N. D. Walsch
Mythos looks at the whole rather than the part, and the whole is animated by forces which the part can experience but rarely comprehend.
– David Tacey
Materialistic humanity will destroy itself unless the self is wholly abandoned.
– Krishnamurti
Mind is the root of both bondage and emancipation. When attached to worldly things, it leads to bondage; when detached from everything, it leads to liberation.
– Adi Shankaracharya
…it is on the thunderstone of the Tablets that Western civilization had built its house. If the house is tottering today, we can scarcely steady it by pulling the foundation out from under.
– Joy Davidman
Ears are the eyes on the sides of your head. / Memory lives here,
between these apostrophes.
– Benjamin Garcia
We don’t know why there are galaxies and stars; we don’t know why there’s a universe, but we are beginning to realize that there are certain master patterns in outer matter. There is a directing force. It’s not a chaotic, random thing or phenomenon. Similarly, it looks as if our psychological inner life is also organized by a master pattern. It’s centered somewhere.
– Marie-Louise von Franz and Fraser Boa, The Way of the Dream
The best journals aren’t for the reader. They are for the writer. To slow the mind down. To wage peace with oneself.
– Ryan Holiday
a bird
courageously
flying into the city
– Issa
The ultimate test of man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.
– Gaylord Nelson
Woe to you, O Lord, when your king is a child and princes feast in the morning.
– Ecclesiastes
This country has nothing to fear from the crooked man who fails. We put him in jail. It is the crooked man who succeeds who is a threat to this country.
– Theodore Roosevelt
Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.
– Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
There is nothing – absolutely nothing – in history or in human behavior that guarantees things will get better over time. Progress is not automatic. It is forced, shaped, and secured through deliberate struggle.
– Baba Dr. Amos N. Wilson
You know that your witticisms are not witty, but you are evidently well satisfied with their literary value.
– Fyodor Dostevosky
We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
– Abraham Lincoln
Be humbled; walk softly. Stoop, stoop! it is a a low entry to go in at heaven’s gate.
– Samuel Rutherford
There’s a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don’t believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.
– Dan Simmons
If you want to do something, the most practical thing I can tell you is: weep.
First of all, care enough to weep.
– Fr. William Stringfellow
If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.
– Joseph Wood Krutch
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way did not become still more complicated.
– Poul Anderson
as our island of knowledge
grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
– John Wheeler
There lies a green field between the scholar and the poet; should the scholar cross it he becomes a wise man; should the poet cross it, he becomes a prophet.
– Kahlil Gibran
Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that the mere fact of our existence should keep us all in a state of contented dazzlement.
– Lewis Thomas
There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.
– Theodor W. Adorno
What was amazing about the apartments of long-standing adults was the accumulation of incidental texture. Not: I went and bought this lamp and this poster so I would have a lamp and a poster to furnish my life. But just stuff, so much stuff everywhere, somehow the consequence of a certain amount of time on earth.
– Zadie Smith
There is probably nothing more direct that you and I can do to bring our planet and our society back in to balance than dealing with our fundamental, unexamined, collective fear of death.
– RamDev Dale Borglum
With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.
– Lope de Vega
Man is not at home in the universe, despite all the efforts of philosophers and metaphysicians to provide a soothing syrup. Thought is still a narcotic. The deepest question is why. And it is a forbidden one. The very asking is in the nature of cosmic sabotage. And the penalty is — the afflictions of Job.
– Henry Miller
The opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are called the ‘means’ are increased. The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor.
– Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
– Carl Jung
History rarely has an angel.
– Roger Reeves
THANKSGIVING
For gratitude, as we all know, is not a given but rather a way of being to be cultivated. It doesn’t come packaged like the Stouffer’s stuffing mix nor is it ensured by the name of the holiday. No, real “thanksgiving” requires us to pause long enough to feel the earth beneath our feet, to gaze up into the spaciousness of the sky above, and to stop and take a good, long, loving look at the precious faces sitting across from us at the dinner table.
Life can turn on a dime. Not one of us knows, ever, what fate has in store, or what challenges await just around the bend. But I do know this: nothing lasts. Life is an interplay of light and shadow, blessings and losses, moments to be endured and moments I would give anything to live again. I will never get them back, of course, can never re-do the moments I missed or the ones I still regret, any more than I can recapture the moments I desperately wanted to hold onto forever.
I can only remind myself to stay awake, to pay attention, and to say my prayer of thanks for the only thing that really matters: this life, here, now.
– Katrina Kenison
AT THE EDGE OF WINTER
the bare trees are celebrating winter
as in months past they offered
new leaves to spring, gave blossoms
to summer and in autumn, fruit
heavy light hangs low in gravitas,
the windows steam, clear,
and my heart becomes still
as guardian stones
in the garden wall that wait
to call my name
today I will say less about myself,
not mention one more dreary time
what it’s like to live alone,
but speak instead of silver in the gray
and falling rain, October leaves
splayed scarlet on the path,
the unexpected flare,
the extraordinary
though I go no farther than the mailbox,
and dream of warm ocean beaches,
the narrow cobbled streets of famous cities,
great journeys I am done with,
and if my life seems to mean nothing more
than changing patterns of sunlight
on frosted grass, if my thoughts
wear the discarded fashion of another era,
still there are discoveries, a few loyalties
that stay with me, grace in knowing
I receive more than I can ever give,
some Mystery that claims me,
and I bow.
– Jeanne Lohmann
Much on earth is hidden from us; but to make up for that we have been given a precious mystic sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why the philosophers say that we cannot understand the reality of things on earth. God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His garden grew up and everything came up that could come up. But what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, the heavenly growth will die away in you. Then you will be indifferent to life and even grow to hate it. That’s what I think.
– Father Zossima
Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle — for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.
– Virginia Woolf
I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.
– Twan Eng Tan
I always suggest: work on yourself. Don’t worry about the words; transcend the words. Have the experience for yourself and then there will be nothing to say. But, as long as you are a book reader you never stop reading. There is a time to read, but there is a time to stop also. There’s a time to put the books aside and to intensely practice, and give your life up to the practice.
– Robert Adams
I want to break out – to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become.
– Thomas Pynchon
I remember a man, a very lonely man, coming up to me at the end of a reading and looking into my face and saying, ‘I feel as if I have looked down a corridor and seen into your soul.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘You haven’t.’ You know, Here’s the good news and the bad news: you haven’t! I made something, and you and I could look at it together, but it’s not me; you don’t live with me; you’re not intimate with me. You’re not the man I live with or my friend. You will never know me in that way. I’m making something, like Joseph Cornell makes his boxes and everyone looks into them, but it’s the box you look into; it’s not the man or the woman. It’s alchemy of language and memory and imagination and time and music and sounds that gets made, and that’s different from ‘Here is what happened to me when I was ten.
– Marie Howe
But I cannot possibly penetrate to the core of the enigma of life by my own efforts. Nor can I willfully invent myths or rituals without their being trivial and empty. This is why we have traditions of art, philosophy and, above all, religion. The fetishisation of novelty and the repudiation of history are reflections of a capitalist culture that depends on dissatisfaction with what we have and the constant seeking after new ‘improvements’ in order to fuel demand. It is not only false but obviously immoral in a number of respects. A culture (and the point of religion is to embody the ethos of culture) is of critical importance for a society’s survival. Cultures are living; but precisely because of that can be killed. A plant can be flexibly trained, but it cannot be avulsed from its roots and still live. And if our culture dies, so will we who live in it.
– Iain McGilchrist
When music cries, it is humanity, it is the whole of nature which cries with it. Truly speaking, it does not introduce these feelings in us; it introduces us rather into them, like the passers-by that might be nudged in a dance”. In short, emotion is creative (first because it expresses the whole of creation, then because it creates the work in which it is expressed; and finally, because it communicates a little of this creativity to spectators or hearers).
– Gilles Deleuze
There was such a rush about me: wing, and tangled spray, and colors upon colors and shades of colors that were not colors at all but shifts of white and silver. If light like that were sound, it would sound like the sea on sand, and if my ears were eyes, they would see such a light.
I crouched there, gasping in the swirl of it, and a flood struck me, shallow and swift, turning up and outward like flower petals where it touched my knees, then soaking me to the waist in its bubble and crash. I pressed my knuckles to my eyes so they would open again. The sea on my lips with the taste of tears and the whole white night shouted and wept aloud.
– Theodore Sturgeon
Really, this world of ours, the scheme of things as they call it, is quite intolerable. That’s why I want the moon, or happiness, or eternal life — something, in fact, that may sound crazy, but which isn’t of this world.
– Albert Camus
The world, I started to see, was a different world, depending on what you said about it, and how you said it. By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.
– George Saunders
In your life, you meet people. Some you never think about again. Some, you wonder what happened to them. There are some that you wonder if they ever think about you. And then there are some you wish you never had to think about again. But you do.
– C.S Lewis
I have made mysterious Nature my religion. I do not believe that a man is any nearer to God for being clad in priestly garments, nor that one place in a town is better adapted to meditation than another. When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvelous ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me. Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul. Around me are the trees stretching up their branches to the skies, the perfumed flowers gladdening the meadow, the gentle grass-carpeted earth, …and my hands unconsciously assume an attitude of adoration. …To feel the supreme and moving beauty of the spectacle to which Nature invites her ephemeral guests! …that is what I call prayer.
– Claude Debussy
The Universe is saying: Allow me to flow through you unrestricted, and you will see the greatest magic you have ever seen.
– Klaus Joehle
Let me fall
in love one last time, I beg them.
Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.
– Jack Gilbert
I distrust plot even as I search for non-traditional ways to build it. My work is rarely, if ever, plot-driven. But it’s not plotless, either. In fact I take composition very seriously, I’m just not very interested in traditional form in terms of my own artistic practice and focus. Plot, or the main events arranged in a sequence, can be rendered many different ways. The sequence does not have to be linear or horizontal to convey meaning. It could be nonlinear and vertical, like poetry, which relies more heavily on figurative uses of language like repetition, image, metaphor, or completely abstracted, like in abstract expressionist painting or certain improvisational music. You could say I am always searching for patterns and echoes, emotional intensities and flashes of meaning, tiny jolts and seizures and wounds of pleasure and pain within experience that show us something about ourselves. You could say I like to invent languages and storytelling forms that correspond not to plot, but to our corporeal, lived experiences. Plot is something we bring to experience to help us make sense of it.
– Lidia Yuknavitch
I don’t think anybody ever knows what another person means when they speak, frankly. It’s more than translation, it’s just throwing yourself into the dark. Language is so very, very personal, private. Weird. I guess you could think of it as translation, that seems like a kind of euphemistic metaphor. It’s probably a lot more hopeless than that. But the effort of speaking as a human is the effort to get past that hopelessness with every sentence.
– Anne Carson
Absolutely. For instance, the word intimacy, even in the most radical psychology, doesn’t mean the same thing in the context of the self-care process. Generally speaking, intimacy tends to refer to sharing something personal — perhaps in a felt way, but primarily through information. Intimacy in the context of self-care means opening energetically to another human being — not knowing them as anything other than a radiant mystery.
For me, the greatest fulfillment in doing what I do arises from experiencing another person as a great opening, a huge space. We sit together with the eyes closed and I can feel who they are. This body only appears to be an enclosure. It is actually a passageway — like an entry to a cave or a cathedral. It is quite the opposite of the way we’ve been taught to perceive it.
– Stephen R. Schwartz
When we make a beginning, we get out of our own way and allow the angels to come in and do their job. They can speak to us now and it makes them happy. Eternity … has opened a portal in time. And we’re it.
– Steven Pressfield
Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again.
– Virginia Woolf
The Italian philosopher Vico had this theory that time moves more in a spiral than it does in a line. He believes that’s why we repeat ourselves, including our tragedies, and that if we are more faithful to this movement, we can move away from the epicenter through distance and time, but we have to confront it every time. I’ve been thinking about trauma—how it’s repetitive, and how we recreate it, and how memory is fashioned by creation. Every time we remember, we create new neurons, which is why memory is so unreliable. I thought, “Well if the Greek root for ‘poet’ is ‘creator,’ then to remember is to create, and, therefore, to remember is to be a poet.” I thought it was so neat. Everyone’s a poet, as long as they remember.
– Ocean Vuong
Unlearning to Not Speak
by Marge Piercy
Blizzards of paper
in slow motion
drift through her.
In nightmares she suddenly remembers
a class she signed up for
but forgot to attend.
Now it is too late.
Now it is time for finals:
losers will be executed.
Phrases of men who lectured her
drift and rustle in piles:
Why don’t you speak up?
Why are you shouting?
You have the wrong line,
wrong answer, wrong face.
They tell her she is womb-man,
babymachine, mirror image, toy,
earth mother and penis-poor,
a dish of synthetic strawberry icecream
rapidly melting.
She grunts to a halt.
She must learn again to speak
starting with _I_
starting with _We_
starting as the infant does
with her own true hunger
and pleasure
and rage.
The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and … each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.
– Carl Jung
And shall we at last become the victims of our own abominable lust of gain?
– George Washington
The people are guided in their choice either by what is said of a man by the public voice and fame, even if by his open acts he appears different, or by the preconceptions or opinions which they may have formed of him themselves.
– Machiavelli
If you are ruled by the mind you are king, if by the body you are a slave.
– St. Catherine of Alexandria
Politicians don’t bring people together. Artists do.
– Richard Daley
It’s not that you can’t go home again. It’s that most people know better.
– Daniel Pinkwater
There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.
– Mark Twain
I wished so much then that there was a way I could be at the beginning of something again.
– Kathryn Nuernberger
The earth belongs in usufruct to the living. The dead have neither powers nor rights over it. … Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.
– Thomas Jefferson
A country can never grow with governance by illegality, regardless of who the criminals are.
– Peter Igure
Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.
– Ali Smith
There is no greater
cause for misfortune
than not recognizing
sufficiency
– from Chapter 46
THE HESHANG GONG
COMMENTARY ON
LAO ZI’S DAO DE JING
TRANSLATED BY DANG REID
We cannot heal someone by loosing ourselves.
– Carl Jung
It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
And then they revealed that solids were not solid
That a wall was not solid
That it consisted of molecules fixed and vibrating
Some distance apart, as did the flesh
That solidity was really the likelihood
Of stuff not falling
Between two chairs, down the gaps
And that walking through the wall was not impossible
That it could be like
Slipping between pine trunks into a forest
Which had looked from the road impermeable
But was where something lived
And that one could peer back from the gloom towards the light
A different creature
With tender eyes, with an ear for water
– Frances Leviston, The Gaps
Illness is the night-side of life.
– Susan Sontag
Genius begins great works;
labour completes them.
– Joseph Joubert
Earthly possessions dazzle our eyes and delude us into thinking that they can provide security and freedom from anxiety. Yet all the time they are the very source of anxiety.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Is it possible to create a society in which corruption and misery doesn’t exist? It can be created only when you and I break away from the collective, when we are free of ambition and know what it means to love.
– Krishnamurti
It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.
– Yoshida Kenko
sunlight fading
as the coolness of
the evening settles
– Basho
Your vision is your home.
A closed vision always wants to make a small room out of whatever it sees.
Thinking that limits you denies you life.
– John O’Donohue
Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.
– Arthur C. Clarke
A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.
– Proverbs 15:1
When you look outward you see names and forms. When you look inward you see the Self — the source of all.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Sometimes I experience my soul as a kind of mother—an otter, perhaps, or elephant—and other times like a stoned telegraph operator who is always watching, receiving, decoding, translating.
– Anne Lamott
What I want is to sleep / inside a strange language,
– Jim Carroll
Between the ages of twenty and thirty, I read with a voraciousness unmatched in any other decade of my life. I was trying to become less stupid.
– Jeffrey Eugenides
Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
It is like a priest or a psychiatrist; if you get the wrong one, then you are better off alone. But there are editors so rare and so important that they are worth searching for, and you always know when you have one.
– Toni Morrison
My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.
– Frank O’Hara
You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favor of the ‘best’ people, the ‘right’ food, the ‘important’ books.
– C.S. Lewis
What we’re experiencing now is in some sense a crisis of reproduction of the boomer worldview. What worked for the boomers as a generation is just not working for everybody else, because they were world-historically unique.
– Nic Johnson
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth — and truth rewarded me.
– Simone de Beauvoir
We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
– Gaston Bachelard, (trans. Maria Jolas)
If we all pursued our own spiritual excellence with the same seriousness that we do our wealth, the world would be a completely different place.
– Nika Solé
The proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known not only in formal, logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language.
– David Bohm
I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for.
– Thornton Wilder
I love living alone because I don’t like having people in my energy.
– Nika Solé
I don’t know if we’ve ever lived in a moment when artists were as self-conscious about the state of their own markets.
– Andrew Durbin
while in the midst of horror
we fed on beauty—and that,
my love, is what sustained us.
– Rita Dove
Virtual connection’ cannot replace human relationships.
– Pope Leo XIV
Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.
– Samuel Beckett
If we didn’t read people who were bastards, we’d never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
– Mary Karr
We have to stop policing the borders of our own imagination.
– Dr. Ruha Benjamin
I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear.
– Rosa Parks
However, just as the ruled have always taken the morality dispensed to them by the rulers more seriously than the rulers themselves, the defrauded masses today cling to the myth of success more ardently than the successful.
– Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
A man who is protecting himself constantly through knowledge, is obviously not a truth seeker.
– Krishnamurti
The half-truth is most dangerous form of lie, because it can be defended in part by incontestable logic.
– Manly Hall
When people attain great wealth & power, they also become deaf and blind.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Anger that is motivated by compassion or a desire to correct social injustice, and does not seek to harm the other person, is a good anger that is worth having.
– The Dalai Lama
Just because you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.
– George Carlin
If I live for another ten years I shall probably have written all that I want to write.
– Laurence Housman
My pilgrim’s progress has been to climb down a thousand ladders until I could finally reach out a hand of friendship to the little clod of earth that I am.
– Carl Jung
If the society today allows wrongs to go unchallenged, the impression is created that those wrongs have the approval of the majority.
– Barbara Jordan
May your healed heart seek connection not control, thoughtful presence not performance or perfection.
– Dr. Thema
Love is meeting someone who gives you news of yourself.
(L’amour, c’est rencontrer quelqu’un qui vous donne des nouvelles de vous.)
– André Breton
The standard of the exploiter is efficiency, the standard of the nurturer is care.
– Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.
– Richard Brautigan
Why do you think the old stories tell of men who set out on great journeys to impress the gods? Because trying to impress people just isn’t worth the time and effort.
– Henry Rollins
Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew.
– William James
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything… it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.
– Milan Kundera
We surround ourselves with our own familiar thoughts, so that nothing sharp or painful can touch us. We are so afraid of our own fear that we deaden our hearts.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she’d wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she’d known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.
– Donna Tartt, The Little Friend
The inescapable paradox of fire – of alchemy, of psyche, of intelligent living – consists in this double commandment: Thou shalt not repress / Thou shalt not act out.
– James Hillman
An active and sensate democracy requires that we learn how to read well, not just texts but images and sounds, to translate across languages, across media, ways of performing, listening, acting, making art and theory.
– Judith Butler
DAILY MOOD
I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.
In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A lot of our time is spent trying to tie up loose ends, trying to shape disorder into something recognizably smooth, trying to escape the very limits that hold us close, happily ignoring rough edges and the inevitable. We separate ourselves out into past, present, and future, if only to show that we have changed, that we know better, that we have understood something inherent; if only to draw neat lines from start to finish […].
The problem is that chaos is always only ever sitting just across the table, frequently glancing up from its newspaper, from its coffee cup filled with discolored and imploding stars. Because chaos too waits. Waits for you to notice it, for you to realize it’s the most dazzling thing you’ve ever seen, for all of your atoms to collectively shriek in belated recognition and stare, mouth open, at how exquisitely embedded it is in everything. Because we are not designed to be more orderly than anything else; seams have a tendency to come apart with time—you and the universe are the same in this way, which makes for a delicately overwhelming struggle.
Being riddled head-to-toe with human emotions while trying to come to terms with just how indisputably tiny we are in the grand scheme of things, makes absolutely everything and everyone seem quite ridiculous, entirely farcical. We have heads? Ridiculous! There are arguments about who is in charge here? Ridiculous! The universe is expanding? Ridiculous! We feel it necessary to keep secrets? Ridiculous.
– Ella Frances Sanders
We can get past the slipperiness of words by engaging the self-observing, body-based self system, which speaks through sensations, tone of voice, and body tensions. (…) When you activate your gut feelings and listen to your heartbreak—when you follow the interoceptive pathways to your innermost recesses—things begin to change.
– Bessel van der Kolk
You understand so little of what is around you because you do not use what is within you.
– St. Hildegard von Bingen
The poet, the artist, the sleuth —whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely “well-adjusted,” he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power is manifest in the famous story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” “Well-adjusted” courtiers, having vested interests, saw the Emperor as beautifully appointed. The “antisocial” brat, unaccustomed to the old environment, clearly saw that the Emperor “ain’t got nothin’ on.” The new environment was clearly visible to him.
– Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore
No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice.
– Chuck Palahniuk
Could it be that consciousness is an equally important part of the consistent picture of our world, despite the fact that so far one could safely ignore it in the description of the well-studied physical processes? Will it not turn out, with the further development of science, that the study of the universe and the study of consciousness are inseparably linked, and that ultimate progress in the one will be impossible without progress in the other?
– Physicist Andrei Linde
Let us consider the feeling of grace. At first it is only the perception of a certain ease, a facility in outward movement. And as those movements which prepare the way for others are easy, we are led to find a superior ease in the movements we can foresee, in the present attitudes which indicate and, as it were, prefigure future attitudes.
If jerky movements are lacking in grace, it is because each is self-sufficient and does not announce those which follow. If curves are more graceful than broken lines, the reason is that, while a curved line changes its direction at every moment, every new direction is indicated in the preceding one. Thus the perception of ease in motion becomes the pleasure of the flow of time, of holding the future in the present.
– Henri Bergson
One of the greatest human spiritual tasks is to embrace all of humanity, to allow your heart to be a marketplace of humanity, to allow your interior life to reflect the pains and the joys of people not only from Africa and Ireland and Yugoslavia and Russia but also from people who lived in the fourteenth century and will live many centuries forward. Somehow, if you discover that your little life is part of the journey of humanity and that you have the privilege to be part of that, your interior life shifts. You lose a lot of fear and something really happens to you. Enormous joy can come into your life. It can give you a strong sense of solidarity with the human race, with the human condition.
It is good to be human.
– Henri Nouwen
Here are the essentials of a happy life, my dear friend: money not worked for, but inherited; some land not unproductive, a healthy fire always going; law suits never; the (suit) rarely worn; a calm mind; a gentleman’s strong and healthy body; circumspect candor, friends who are equals; relaxed dinner parties, a simple table, night not drunken, but free from anxieties; a marriage bed not prudish, and yet modest; plenty of sleep to make the dark hours short. Wish to be what you are, and prefer nothing more. Don’t fear your last day, or hope for it either.
– Marcus Valrius Martialis
That’s the nature of grief: It’s a creature with many arms but few legs, and it staggers about, searching for support.
– Yann Martel
Think not of the books you’ve bought as a “to be read” pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.
– Luc van Donkersgoed
We forgive as long as we love.
– François de La Rochefoucauld
Art is an act of love in the face of everything that tries to turn us into machines.
– James Baldwin
You know, the only trouble with capitalism is capitalists; they’re too damn greedy.
– Herbert Hoover
But Kino had lost his old world and he must clamber on to a new one. For his dream of the future was real and never to be destroyed, and he had said ‘I will go,’ and that made a real thing too. To determine to go and to say it was to be halfway there.
– John Steinbeck, The Pearl
Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties. And not to Democrats alone do I make this appeal, but to all who love these great and true principles.
– Abraham Lincoln
You are at your pastoral best when you are not noticed.
– Eugene Peterson
Thanks
by W. S. Merwin
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
The writer should have considered his wit and dried his tears long, long before setting out to evoke similar reactions in a reader… the greatest intensity in art in all its shapes is achieved with a deliberate, hard, and cool head.
– Truman Capote
What I wish for you is to be known and admired only by a delicate but large group of people spread across the world. I hope that you never attain cruel popularity because it invades the sacred intimacy of our hearts.
– Clarice Lispector (tr. Moser)
You won’t be able to see reality clearly until you work through the parts of yourself that are distorted.
– Nika Solé
I do not think the measure of a civilization is how tall its buildings of concrete are, but rather how well its people have learned to relate to their environment and fellow man.
– Sun Bear (Vincent LaDuke)
If you want to be fitter hang around people that are fitter than you.
– Dan Go
Be kind to yourself.
No need to make things
complicated; just stop
creating a world that
doesn’t exist. Within
the heart center your
true self awaits you.
– Robert Adams
The buddha can see with these eyes.
The buddha can feel with this body.
The buddha can speak with this mouth.
– Kenneth Folk
Spiritual practice should be a laxative, not a sedative.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I don’t want to shovel poetry into people like it’s information. I want it to be perceptual, like a dot.
– Eileen Myles
A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.
– Bertrand Russell
In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
– Bertrand Russell
You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.
– Joan Didion
I cling to nowhere till I fall,
the crash of nothing
yet of all.
– Emily Dickinson
You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
– G.K. Chesterton
For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
– George Eliot
Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living within that way of life.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Writers who are new to the form understandably tend to avoid that larger canvas, which can feel daunting.
– Peter Mountford
To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
On sesshin: “first of all nothing will happen
and a little later nothing will happen again”
– Leonard Cohen
I tell you that you and I and the commonest person are all journeying the same way, hemmed in by the same narrow path, leading to the eternal years.
We pride ourselves over our particular superiority; but really there is little difference between us;
And in this journey over the thousand hills and valleys called life, he is wisest who is patient where the way is hard, has faith when he does not understand, and carries into the dark places the light of a cheerful heart.
– Max Ehrmann
To find without seeking, is difficult and rare; to find by seeking, is easy and smooth; but to find, without having any idea of what is to be sought, is impossible.
– Archytas of Tarentum, The Sciences
Love is a cosmic course. For those who stand in it, and behold in it, men emerge from their entanglement in busy-ness (bustle); and the good and the evil, the clever, and the foolish, the beautiful and the ugly, one after another become actual and a You for them.
– Martin Buber (I and Thou)
…contradictions are a ruling principle of the universe.
– Huey Newton, on dialectical materialism
The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
– Aristotle
Culture shock is the growing pains of a broadening perspective.
– Rick Steves
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind, and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.
– James Madison
The Buddha’s enlightenment solved his problem. It didn’t do anything for you.
– Bill Hamilton
You—such as you are—will not know what you are, nor what is— nor anything. In the empire of anguish, only platitude, deception, and trickery escape this definitive defeat.
– Georges Bataille
It’s a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.
– Richard Yates
When faith came to be in writings rather than in hearts, contention grew hot and love grew cold. That which is forced cannot be sincere, and that which is not voluntary cannot please Christ.
– Erasmus of Rotterdam
The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work… Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.
– C.S. Lewis
Much of what remains undeveloped in us, psychologically speaking, is excluded because it is too good to bear. We often refuse to accept our most noble traits and instead find a shadow substitute for them.
– Robert A. Johnson
We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.
– Robert Brault
How privileged you are, to be passionately clinging to what you love; the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.
– Louise Glück, October
I really do think that all of the ladders for many of us who are successful, the American experience, are being pulled up behind us now. It’s very upsetting.
– Prof. Scott Galloway
“I don’t create so much as I collect,” explained the poet. “The world is already so rich. All I do is distill the messiness of human life into a concentrated reading experience.”
– R. F. Kuang, YellowFace
Simply give up contention and soon nothing in all beneath heaven contends with you. It was hardly empty talk when the ancients declared ‘In yielding is completion.
– Laozi, Daodejing, (Hinton tr.)
If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
– C.S Lewis
Sometimes I feel like we’ve just been living on hints. Seeing the world through a keyhole. That’s how it would seem to us when we looked back.
– Marilynne Robinson
five or six people
around a fireplace
with tea and cakes
– Basho
Jung says, “Whoever builds up too good a persona has to pay for it in irritability.”
– Frances G. Wickes, The Inner World of Choice
We indeed are the light of the world
but only if our switch is turned on.
– John Hagee
Gratitude is strongest, clearest, most robust, and radical when things are really hard.
– Diana Butler Bass
Seeing without conclusion
is the open door.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
I don’t think anyone really knows how a story takes shape. When it’s done you try to explain how it happened, but every effort, at least in my case, is insufficient.
– Elena Ferrante
Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another.
– Freud
Gratitude is the great secret of the mystics, the solution to all problems. Remembering these things, not just on Thanksgiving but every day, is the way home.
– Anne Lamott
In the morning, when the new sun rises, the word steps out of my mouth, but is murdered lovelessly, since I did not know that it was the savior. The newborn child grows quickly, if I accept it. And immediately it becomes my charioteer.
– C.G. Jung
It’s the characters who direct me … I never know what any of them are going to say when I’m writing dialogue. Really, it’s up to them.
– Julio Cortazar
Being in a state of gratitude actually creates magnetism, and of course, a magnet draws things to itself. … Your sense of awe at all of the miracles you see around you allows you to think, see, and live more of these miraculous occurrences.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
– George Orwell
When I decided to stop smoking, I didn’t realize I would be dissolving the glue that held me together.
– Deborah Eisenberg
The best stories come out of the air.
– Donald Hall
Enjoy your blessings and show your gratitude by being a blessing to others. Extend a helping hand to those in need.
– Sharon K. Brayfield
Culture and civilization are tested by vital consciousness. Are we more vitally conscious than an Egyptian 3000 years B.C. was? Are we? Probably we are less. Our conscious range is wide, but shallow as a sheet of paper. We have no depth to our consciousness.
– D.H. Lawrence
Detachment is not apathy. You can care deeply and remain unmoved by chaos. True freedom is staying grounded in inner stillness while the world moves around you.
– Deepak Chopra
The alchemists stressed that their opus requires a container, the alchemical vessel. Psychologically this vessel is an inner attitude of commitment to confront & accept whatever is found within oneself…
– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Whoever has once found himself can no longer lose anything in this world. Whoever has once comprehended the human being within himself comprehends all human beings.
– Stefan Zweig
does the cactus
grasp the great truth?
morning frost
– Issa
A wholesome tongue is a tree of life: but perverseness therein is a breach in the spirit.
– Proverbs 15:4
Hiding in this cage of visible matter
is the invisible life-bird, pay attention
to her, she is singing your song.
– Kabir
Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are.
– W. B. Yeats
Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.
– Václav Havel
The law is for those who are unaware, love is for those who are aware. Love is the highest law, law is the lowest love.
– Osho
So what is true dharma? It is experiencing things as they are. It’s nothing fancier than that. It’s very plain.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The all-knowing mind, empty and radiant,
illuminating the world, leaving no shadow,
infinite space soaked in timeless wonder,
weightless and free, a tranquil surrender.
– Haemin Sunim
Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there—where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.
– Ocean Vuong
The entire end-of-October night was beating with a single pulse, its own strange rhythm sounding through trees and rain and mud in a manner beyond words or vision: a vision present in the low light, in the slow passage of darkness, in the blurred shadows, in the working of tired muscles; in the silence, in its human subjects, in the undulating surface of the metaled road; in the hair moving to a different beat than do the dissolving fibers of the body; growth and decay on their divergent paths; all these thousands of echoing rhythms, this confusing clatter of night noises, all parts of an apparently common stream, that is the attempt to forget despair; though behind things other things appear as if by mischief, and once beyond the power of the eye they no longer hang together.
So with the door left open as if forever, with the lock that will never open.
– László Krasznahorkai
These days, all I talk about and think about is the cognitive dissonance required to move through the world. Increasingly, I struggle to disentangle my many selves, to get on with the day. All my selves weep often. I try to have grace. I tell my friends that I’m no longer sure how anyone just drifts through the days, the months, without acknowledging the horrors. I imagine what it must be like to be able to turn off the parts of the world that unsettle you. It must feel like existing in an animated universe that adheres to cartoon physics: you fall from an inconceivable height and, landing, a cloud of dust billows up from the ground, but then you shake yourself off and keep moving.
– Hanif Abdurraqib
If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.
– Anne Carson
David Wright: If I can quote you at yourself, you’ve talked about how literature can hold open human wounds, the wounds of history, how poetry can allow us to see the ruptures in the language, the ruptures in the self, the ruptures in the culture that occur in situations of extremity. It strikes me that the story you were telling about the prison and going to the barrio and being in that room [during her time in El Salvador as a human rights advocates, at the beginning of the Salvadoran Civil War]. That’s not a story you’ve allowed to heal over in any way. It’s a wound that’s supposed to be held open in some way.
Carolyn Forché: Yes. Because I don’t want to lose what I learned there. And I don’t want to move on. And I don’t want closure. And I don’t want to recover. Because I don’t want to lose what happened to me. I don’t want that to be changed back. I don’t want to return to the obliviousness that I had participated in before that. You have to hold things open in order to nurture whatever new awareness was born there.
– David Wright, Assembling Community: A Conversation with Carolyn Forché
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
There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.
– Michael Ondaatje
Taoists and Buddhists both observe the intimate natural connection between breathing and mental state. When the mind is excited, the breathing accelerates; when the mind is calm, so is the breath. The practice of resting mind and breath on each other makes deliberate use of this relationship to calm the mind down and gradually bring it to a state of stillness.
– Thomas Cleary
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
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
There are my sanctuaries: music that stirs, nature that heals, poetry that whispers, and solitude that understands.
– Marina Tsvetaeva
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
riding on a wave of understanding
and like sunlight
arriving without a sound
– Joanne Kyger
I’m unapologetic not because I’m strong-willed or overconfident, I’m unapologetic because this is it; this is my life. There is nothing I can do, no one I can please. I am a person with a strong sense of being, that’s all.
– Jean Seberg
No enemy is worse than bad advice.
– Sophocles
In every single ‘issue’ cooked up for ‘debate’ in the patternbook of the Spectacle, both sides are invariably full of shit.
– Hakim Bey
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph…
– Robert Browning
North of San Francisco
by Yehuda Amichai
Translated from the Hebrew by Chana Blochr
Here the soft hills touch the ocean
like one eternity touching another
and the cows grazing on them
ignore us, like angels.
Even the scent of ripe melon in the cellar
is a prophecy of peace.
The darkness does not war against the light,
it carries forward
to another light, and the only pain
is the pain of not staying.
In my land, called holy,
they wont’t let eternity be:
they’ve divided it into little religions
zoned it for god-zones,
broken it into fragments of history,
sharp and wounding until death.
and they’ve turned in tranquil distances
into a closeness convulsing with the pain of the present.
On the beach at Bolinas, at the foot of the wooden steps,
I saw some girls lying in the sand bare-bottomed.
their heads bowed, drunk
on the kingdom everlasting,
their souls like doors
closing and opening inside them
to the rhythm of the surf.
The wise man builds a refuge within himself.
– Dhammapada
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
– Eric Hoffer
Every person you meet has a lesson to teach, and a story that will change you.
– Robin Sharma
If I were to kiss you and go to hell, I would, so then I could brag with the devils saw heaven without ever entering it.
– William Shakespeare
I am / not ready to hatch. Teach me / to harden in the air
– Dominique Ahkong
The physician’s general rule is that acute illnesses are associated with patterns of Excess,
And chronic illnesses with patterns of Deficiency.
– Ted J Kaptchuk, OMD
The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
she’s begun to dream poems–
they come in couplets
what I worry is
could it be catching?
– Alec Finlay
Pain is the least communicable experience.
– Elaine Scarry
There is a famous Buddhist saying that everyone appears as buddhas in the eyes of the Buddha and everyone appears as pigs in the eyes of a pig.
– The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down
There’s something I have observed about societies that arrogate smartness to themselves. They’re easily the easiest to scam, and one thing about dupping a smart person is that he sacrifices his outrage to repurchase his dignity by suffering in silence.
– Kelechi Deca
Academic writing is a form of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.
– Agnes Callard
Wisdom cannot come by railroad or automobile or airplane or be hurried up by telegraph or telephone.
– John Burroughs
The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to access because, naturally, it is alien to our experience, but it is true: you know far less about yourself that you feel you do.
– Daniel Kahneman
Even the best writing is like taking pot-shots at the Moon, in no way are you likely to hit it.
– Wei Wu Wei
We have lived; our moments are important. This is what it is to be a writer: to be the carrier of details that make up history.
– Natalie Goldberg
The universe is the combination of a thousand elements, and yet the expression of a single spirit – a chaos to the sense, a cosmos to the reason.
– Helena P. Blavatsky
In diversity is life and where there’s life there’s hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.
– Ursula K. LeGuin
But even the most unmissionary soul, unless he pretend he has no emotions, is sometimes faced with a choice between commission and omission. ‘What are they doing?’ abruptly becomes, ‘What are we doing?’ and then, ‘What must I do?’
– Ursula K. LeGuin
Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.
– Marcel Proust
Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die.
– Virginia Woolf
To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the delight of the poem, which consists in the pleasure of guessing little by little; to suggest, that is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the symbol: to evoke an object, gradually in order to reveal a state of the soul or, inversely, to choose an object and from it identify a state of the soul, by a series of deciphering operations… There must always be enigma in poetry.
– Stéphane Mallarmé
Nothing to keep, nothing to lose. No possessions, no security, no concern about possessions, and no concern about security: in this mood it is possible to do exactly what makes sense, and nothing else: there are no hidden fears, no morals, no rules, no undercurrent of constraint, no subtle sense of concern for the form of what the people round about you are doing, and above all no concern for what you are yourself, no subtle fear of other people’s ridicule, no subtle train of fears which connect the smallest triviality with bankruptcy and loss of love and loss of friends and death, no ties, no suits, no outward elements of majesty at all. Only the laughter and the rain.
– Christopher Alexander
Depression may be described as the condition in which, no longer investing desire in daily experience, the conscious organism loses the ability to find meaning in its surrounding world. Actually, meaning does not lie in things, or in the signs of language. It is generated by the endless shift from one interpretation to the next, from the uncertain and ambiguous exchange of gestures. Desire is the energy that enables this continuous activity of interpretation. Meaning is the effect of affective communication among language agents. Since meaning emerges in the dimension of affective conjunction, the possibility of meaningful exchange rapidly dissolves when the community of bodies disaggregates. This is the starting point of depression.
When breathing together grew dangerous, everybody was obliged to breathe alone and the rhythm of individual respiration was obliged to follow the pace of economic competition.
The subatomic self has fractalized, losing the ability to conjoin with the Other. In a lonely dance in which friendship is forbidden, the inner self is obliged to instead synchronize with the pure abstraction of digital time.
– Franco “Bifo” Berardi
If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again — if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.
So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world, and a mouse’s skull; full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand. I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible. Who ever said writing a novel was easy?
– Ursula K. LeGuin
The eternal moment is outside of time, is not a part of our past or our future, and yet it is lived amidst all our everyday activities. It is in the eternal moment that love is born. Love does not belong to time, and its timeless quality is well known to all lovers. The lover has to learn to still the mind in order to catch the moment and stay true to love’s unfolding. Wayfarers tread a path that leads from illusions of time to the eternal moment that belongs to the soul.
– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. First, the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. Second, the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.
– FDR
The nights are filled with explosion and motor transport, and wind that brings them up over the downs a last smack of the sea. Day begins with a hot cup and a cigarette over a little table with a weak leg that Roger has repaired, provisionally, with brown twine. There’s never much talk but touches and looks, smiles together, curses for parting. It is marginal, hungry, chilly – most times they’re too paranoid to risk a fire – but it’s something they want to keep, so much that to keep it they will take on more than propaganda has ever asked them for. They are in love. Fuck the war.
– Thomas Pynchon
Our times are times of mediocrity, of lack of feelings, of passion for ignorance, of laziness, of the inability to start doing something and the desire to have everything already done.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Adolescent
We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment. We all got to face the nothingness before us and behind. Call it sleep. We all begin in sleep and that’s where we find our end. Even in between, sleep keeps trying to claim us. To stay awake in life as much as possible – that may be the point.
Pain comes to us from deep back, from where it grew in the human body. Pain sucks more pain into it, we don’t know why. It lives and we harbor its weight. When the worst comes, we will not act the opposite. We will do what we were taught, we who learnt our lessons in the dead light. We pass them on. We hurt, and hurt others, in a circular motion.
– Louise Erdrich
For a while there was a mantra and it went like this. You are equally capable of hurting and being hurt. You are equally capable of healing and being healed. You didn’t of course believe it. The hurt part mostly. Day after day, you sank to your ankles in the eddies of your decentest intentions. You do not have to be good, a poem said. But you did! You did. You did, and you wanted to be good, and you wanted to be good. Still you glanced sidelong. Still you wrung, clung, harbored, balked, and spooned transgenic soups from the borrowed pot. Still your longing swerved. You were equally capable of healing and being healed. You were equally capable of hurting and being hurt. The tide trickled ravishing around your feet.
– Robin Myers
THE THIRD NOBLE TRUTH
The third noble truth says that the cessation of suffering is letting go of holding on to ourselves. By “cessation” we mean the cessation of hell as opposed to just weather, the cessation of this resistance, this resentment, this feeling of being completely trapped and caught, trying to maintain huge ME at any cost. The teachings about recognizing egolessness sound quite abstract, but the path quality of that, the magic instruction that we have all received, the golden key is that part of the meditation technique where you recognize what’s happening with you and you say to yourself, “Thinking.” Then you let go of all the talking and the fabrication and discussion, and you’re left just sitting with the weather—the quality and the energy of the weather itself. Maybe you still have that quaky feeling or that churning feeling or that exploding feeling or that calm feeling or that dull feeling, as if you’d just been buried in the earth. You’re left with that. That’s the key: come to know that.
– Pema Chodron
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
In what we call thinking the mind isn’t ‘directed’ but suspended. You don’t give it rules. You teach it to receive. You don’t clear the ground to build unobstructed: you make a little clearing where the penumbra of an almost-given will be able to enter and modify its contour.
– Jean-Francois Lyotard
Each body is a universe, as good a universe as you could conceive.
– Swami Amar Jyoti
Sometimes, between two people,
something happens.
Rarely, very rarely,
a whole world is born.
A tiny microcosm,
where you can always
find shelter
even when the rest of the world
is falling apart.
– Hannah Arendt
A warning against dozing
Passing an upturned carriage,
The driver’s suddenly awakened.
Surrendering to sleep invites disaster.
– Ikkyu Sojun
The core function of the memory system could in fact be to imagine the future (…) The system is not designed to perfectly replay past events. (…) It is designed to flexibly construct future scenarios in our minds. As a result, memory also ends up being a reconstructive process, and occasionally, details are deleted and others inserted.
– Tali Sharot
In painting, as in any art, we can escape the prison of our minds and connect with what transcends ordinary perceptions. And just as a body of water stays still while a wave-form moves through it, consciousness remains stable despite the constant motion and flow of our thoughts.
– Fredericka Foster
We age while we hope.
– Padraig O’Tuama
Deep inside us is a wilderness. We call it the unconscious because we can’t control it fully, so we can’t will to create what we want from it. The collective unconscious is a great wild region where we can get in touch with the sources of life.
– CG Jung
But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself…Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
– C.S. Lewis
If America needs a wise and compassionate guide, with weather in his voice and understanding in his heart—as well as a deep connection to both working man and person of privilege—it could do worse than listen, in any medium, to Mr. Springsteen.
– Pico Iyer
watching
the first snow cover
the road behind me
– Issa
The skill of intelligence is to put knowledge in its right place.
– Krishnamurti
I keep a list of my heroes as the invisible mortar against madness.
– Jim Daniels
The whole object of real art, of real romance — and, above all, of real religion — is to prevent people from losing the humility and gratitude which are thankful for daylight and daily bread; to prevent them from regarding daily life as dull or domestic life as narrow; to teach them to feel in the sunlight the song of Apollo and in the bread the epic of the plough.
– G. K. Chesterton
You have everything you need already within you. It’s just a matter of aligning with it.
– Sue Krebs
The one thing we refuse to admit is that we are dependent upon “powers” that are beyond our control.
– CG Jung
Somebody come and carry me into a seven-day kiss
I can’ use no historic no national no family bliss
I need an absolutely one to one a seven-day kiss
– June Jordan
In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.
– John Fowles
Carnal knowledge. It’s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face.
– Tom Stoppard
You read too much, and too much of that analytically. But then you are also a born critic. I am not. You are also a born reader.
– J.R.R. Tolkien to C.S. Lewis
I watch TV. All the channels, all the crap, back and forth. I find it a great substitute for living.
– Gordon Lish
There are human beings who seem to regard the place as craftily /as we do-who seem to feel that it is a good place to come / home to.
– Marianne Moore
What I wanted my whole life was relief—from pressure, isolation, people’s suffering (including my own, which was mainly mental), and entire political administrations. That is really all I want now.
– Anne Lamott
There are men for whom winter is not an enemy but a mirror. It reflects their own essence: cold and invincible.
– Ernst Jünger
But please go on dancing.
– Franz Kafka, 1912.
Extract and render useful some element from every field of thought.
– Seneca
the cold wind
cuts through me
down to my soul
– Basho
But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself…Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
– C.S. Lewis
The desire for chance is in us like a toothache; as is its opposite, chance wants the difficult intimacy of misfortune. No one can imagine the consummation of chance in a burst of lightning and the fall that follows without suffering.
– Georges Bataille
Even silence found a tongue,
To haunt me all the summer long.
– John Clare
Why not celebrate!
If nothing else,
it can’t hurt to celebrate survival.
– Clarence Major
Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.
– Haruki Murakami
Ain’t no way she can’t hear the choir of cracked hearts chorusing hoarse hollers up to her morning light—
– Raphael Jenkins
Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.
– Denis Diderot
Humans aren’t evolved to worry about everything happening outside of their immediate environment.
– @naval
This mind is the matrix of all matter.
– Max Planck
And I tell myself, a moon will rise from my darkness.
– Mahmoud Darwish
When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it’s so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time.
– Deborah Eisenberg
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something. In the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
– Bertrand Russell
Finding a way to live the simple life is one of life’s supreme complications.
– T.S. Eliot
A king either serves or else becomes a tyrant. The same is true of the people.
– Berto Consalvi
Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality.
– Colin Wilson
Now we are both lamenting.
But like Orpheus I know of
life on the side of death.
And blue before me
I see your eye, forever closed.
– Ingeborg Bachmann (tr. Mark Anderson)
World history is not only, as it is usually depicted, a history of human courage, but also a history of human cowardice.
– Stefan Zweig
Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. …Try to understand each other.
– John Steinbeck
No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honor, it has no word to keep.
– Carl Jung
CHALLENGE
Don’t set up barriers
it’s useless
my unsheathed heart
hurtles toward you.
– Claribel Alegría, (tr. D. J. Flakoll)
A waiting silence broods over the Nameless Land. I do not know what this portends. But the time draws swiftly to some great conclusion. Storm is coming. Hasten while you may! If you are ready, let us go. The Sun will soon rise above the shadow.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
– @naval
Buddhism suggests that we cultivate a discipline of guarding these doorways of consumption: what movies we see, what books we read, and what images we are ingesting. So it goes beyond purchasing products. Mindful consumption is a deep, radical practice.
– Allan Hunt Badiner
Become known to the angels and anonymous to men.
– Ibn Mas’ud
The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.
– Friedrich Schiller
In seed-time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
– William Blake
The thing about instability is we rarely see it / coming.
– Rachelle Sierra
But the greatest battle of all is with yourself—your weaknesses, your emotions, your lack of resolution in seeing things through to the end. You must declare unceasing war on yourself.
– Robert Greene
Yoga cultivates Peace of Body.
Meditation cultivates Peace of Mind.
– @naval
Intellect’s true concern is a negation of reification. It must perish when it is solidified into a cultural asset and handed out for consumption purposes. The flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make people smarter and more stupid at once.
– Adorno and Horkheimer
We are tied down to a language that makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.
– Tom Stoppard
I have seen the future and it doesn’t work. There is a Cyberclysm ahead. With everyone plugged into entertainment, who’s gonna run the world.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Marketers stimulate desire and dissatisfaction very effectively, offering a plethora of products to relieve almost every form of human suffering. What is unique about the Buddhist approach is that it goes to the very root of the urge for more, the desire, the hook that keeps us constantly searching for what will relieve our dissatisfaction.
– Stephanie Kaza
Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late.
– Tom Stoppard
We don’t practice to take refuge away from the world. We practice to take refuge with the world, and for the world.
– Joshin Byrnes
In me, too, many things that I thought would last forever have been destroyed, and new ones have arisen, producing new sorrows and new joys which I couldn’t have foreseen then, just as now the old ones have become difficult to understand.
– Marcel Proust
Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it.
– Elena Ferrante
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
– Erik Erikson
Hope is a rare commodity, but if there is hope for the earth, generally it has to do with acknowledging indigenous sovereignty in the face of insatiable resource extraction.
– Robert Sullivan
Genius…means one who understands things without any other body telling him what they mean. God makes a few such now and then to teach the rest of us.
– George MacDonald
We shall never save civilization as long as civilization is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.
– C.S. Lewis
As I’ve gotten older, history has moved along and my sense of rage has shifted a bit, but the basic posture remains the same.
– Jon Raymond
There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.
– Albert Camus
The ego enables us to consciously change our environment to meet our needs or to adapt ourselves to our environment. Through the ego, we remove an obstacle from our path, and if that can’t be done, we modify our behavior to get around the barrier. In my opinion, however, people have become all too egotistic in modifying nature to meet their needs and altering their own natures to meet alleged obstacles.
– Alexander Lowen
As for writing, I am doing none of it or almost none; I content myself with drawing up outlines, creating scenes, dreaming of disjointed, imaginary situations in which I picture myself and live intensely. It’s a strange world, my mind !
– Gustave Flaubert
For the faithful, the patient, the hermetically pure, all the important things in this world — not life and death, perhaps, which are merely words, but the important things — work out rather beautifully.
– J. D. Salinger
It’s a relief to have a routine to
fall into – which keeps me from
thinking too much about myself.
– Sylvia Plath
For so it seemed to them: Lórien was slipping backward, like a bright ship masted with enchanted trees, sailing on to forgotten shores, while they sat helpless upon the margin of the grey and leafless world.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Is there no way out
of the mind?
– Sylvia Plath
We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.
– Carl Sagan
People think capitalism reveals human nature. It doesn’t. It trains it. Chronic insecurity wires the brain for scarcity… defend, hoard, compete. Change the conditions and the behaviour changes. Structure shapes perception.
– George Monbiot
To limit humanity to gender binaries would limit the expression of God in the world. It would mean creating a god that reflects our limited perceptions.
– Kalie May Hargrove
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
– C.S. Lewis
It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living pleasantly.
– Epicurus
A gentle hand may lead even an elephant by a hair.
– Persian Proverb
Quarrels would not last long if the fault was only on one side.
– François de La Rochefoucauld
I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and impossible.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
We are called to be stewards of God’s creation, responding to the groaning of the earth and the suffering of the poor with compassion and action.
– Henri Nouwen
A fool contributes nothing worth hearing and takes offense at everything.
– Aristotle
You can make anything by writing.
– C. S. Lewis
It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.
– Albert Camus
The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace making the best of circumstances.
– Aristotle
There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it. Oh well, we’ll know better next time.
– Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.
– Denis Johnson, Train Dreams
Jung once observed that our neuroses were in fact our private religions, that is, where the bulk of our spirit is actually invested.
– James Hollis
The audience need not necessarily know where they are going every minute, but they must, like the well-known politician who always rode backward on a train, know where they have been when the journey ends and the curtain falls.
– W.A. Gregory
One way or another, the Paleozoic era was now over. Its megafauna had been consumed in the fires of the great dying.
– Nikolay Kukushki
Character is made by many acts; it may be lost by a single one.
– Aristotle
Sadness and happiness are all experienced by someone else before us; we’re simply following their lead.
– Mieko Kawakami
The best teacher is experience and not through someone’s distorted point of view.
– Jack Kerouac
A socialist cultural project would require rebuilding the capacities that were lost after 1991: ideological infrastructure, political imagination, mass organizations, cultural institutions aligned with working-class interests, and transnational solidarity capable of resisting U.S. imperial soft power.
It would require using the very networks that American corporations built, platforms, supply chains, communication systems to produce alternative narratives that oppose the grammar of capitalist subjectivity. It would require the creation of cultural forms that are not simply local traditions repackaged for contemporary consumption but new expressions of collective life rooted in struggle, not nostalgia.
– Vincenzo Consolo
I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.
– C.S. Lewis
Power is every stealing from the many to the few.
– Wendell Phillips
If one could only make people understand that it is the same with language as with mathematical formulae. These constitute a world of their own. They play only with themselves, express nothing but their own marvelous nature, and just for this reason they are so expressive — just for this reason the strange play of relations between things is mirrored in them.
– Novalis
As an antidote to battle unkindness we were given kindness.
– Marcus Aurelius
A man can’t be taken to hell, or sent to hell: you can only get there on your own steam.
– C.S. Lewis
Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress.
– Octavia Butler
In my opinion, we don’t devote nearly enough scientific research to finding a cure for jerks.
– Bill Watterson
An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.
– Pliny the Younger
The spell was broken; the cold shadow passed from me, and I arose light of heart.
– George MacDonald
Do nothing secretly; for Time sees and hears all things, and discloses all.
– Sophocles
Very rarely does an empath choose the sword for their offender, they choose silence. It’s sharper.
– Carl Jung
When natural things look most divine, the demoniac is just round the corner.
– C.S. Lewis
Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest.
– William Shakespeare
Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?
– Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.
– Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Create a culture in which it is okay to make mistakes and unacceptable not to learn from them.
– Ray Dalio
It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.
– Margaret Mead
We live by humor and grace, Good manners, books, an embrace, Good water, good light, A pencil to write, And a little orange stub to erase.
– Garrison Keillor
Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything.
– Robert A. Heinlein
It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.
– Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
But the four points of the compass are equal on the lawn of the excluded middle where full maturity of meaning takes time the way you eat a fish, morsel by morsel, off the bone.
– Rosmarie Waldrop, Lawn of Excluded Middle
All men by nature desire to know.
– Aristotle
Look on every exit as an entrance to somewhere else.
– Tom Stoppard
An open mind is really a mark of foolishness, like an open mouth. Mouths and minds were made to shut; they were made to open only in order to shut.
– GK Chesterton
Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.
– Gandalf, The Hobbit movie
(synthesized from the words & theme of Tolkien)
We listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard.
– Adam Grant
Survival isn’t strength if it leaves you the same. If you find yourself going through the same hardships over and over again, pause and think; ‘What am I refusing to learn?
– C. G. Ivey
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
I suspect that our conception of Heaven as merely a state of mind is not unconnected with the fact that the specifically Christian virtue of Hope has in our time grown so languid.
– C.S. Lewis
The negative is comparable to the composer’s score, and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.
– Ansel Adams
Act the way you’d like to be and soon you will be the way you want to act.
– Bob Dylan
A country is not just what it does, but what it will tolerate.
– Kurt Tucholsky
…some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.
– Louise Erdrich
If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
– Sir Tom Stoppard
We receive, perhaps, ten times as many mercies which escape our notice as those which we observe— mercies which fly by night on soft wings, and bless us while we sleep.
– Charles Spurgeon
The only clue as to what man can do is what man has done.
– R.G. Collingwood
Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
What multiculturalism boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture. And you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.
– Thomas Sowell
But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most, our one fellow and brother who most needed a friend.
– Mark Twain
Forgive all men for being which they are.
– Neville Goddard
A circle is the longest distance to same point.
– Tom Stoppard
Most people don’t understand they just learn.
– Francis Cress Welsing
Stars do not choose their distance.
Their distance is their wound.
– Lucen Mara
The socialist worker knows there is no other road to socialism save through the road through democracy, through political liberty. He therefore strives to achieve democraticism completely and consistently in order to attain the ultimate goal—socialism.
– Lenin
No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.
– Edward L. Bernays
Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
…any dogma, primarily based on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user.
– Isaac Asimov
Nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf.
– Terence McKenna
The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
– Christopher Hitchens
Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.
– Simone de Beauvoir
That was all a man needed: hope. It was a lack of hope that discouraged a man.
– Charles Bukowski
I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.
– C.S. Lewis
All get what they want; they do not always like it.
– Aslan (C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew)
If we don’t have deep, rapid and fair decarbonisation of modern society, we’ll have a revolutionary style change that will be both chaotic and violent.
– Damien Gayle
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.
– Fyodor M Dostoevsky
You — you strange –
you almost unearthly thing!
– Charlotte Brontë
Our greatest weariness comes from work not done.
– Eric Hoffer
Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire
Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne’s tiar.
– John Keats, Lamia
Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.
There is a goal, but no way; what we call a way is hesitation.
– Franz Kafka
The Wild Hunt
by Jasmina Kuenzli
And for so long I wasn’t anything. A pile of rocks to the side of the trail, might be a tiny grave or some kid’s collection. Circles in the mushrooms at the edge of the woods. Heartbeats through clothes. I was no one except grief. I haunted hilltops and ushered my tears in with the rain. I was so beautiful, but I was nothing–if you looked inside me, it was dead air. You’d fall in, too. You’d disappear.
I looked up at you like from the bottom of a well. And I was reckless for it. I turned thunderstorms inside out, hand over fist. I raced the sun across the sky. I pulled at the oceans until they made tidal waves, and I let them break over me, over and over again. I was there beneath them–I was one with the reef. The wind howled and I sang with it, the wolves and the birds and the trees. I ate everything raw. I was alive. I hadn’t felt that way before. I haven’t felt that way since.
Maybe I don’t have any idea about want
by Jasmina Kuenzli
And maybe somewhere the want flies out of our mouths before it becomes words. Maybe the primordial ooze, maybe a single-celled organism and another and another, builds, reaches out a scaly, clawed hand for– . Maybe that instantaneous moment when atoms bond and chemical reactions combust. Maybe just surprise. Maybe I think I can’t look away because I just don’t want to, splicing the strands of fate to put my name in them. Maybe it isn’t matter. Maybe you were just a spare bit of electricity, sprawled sunlit gold against spring grass; maybe my brain fog snapped its neck on the first thing it saw. Maybe jeans and bracelets and a paper frame. An electrical tower teetering in the wind. Ghosts in the machine. Maybe purple thunderclouds at war, slashed orange sunset. Maybe soul-possessed. Maybe drunken planes spiral out of the sky. Maybe vultures. Maybe I disappear again. Maybe you beat me to it.
Everything one believes in begins to exist.
– Ilse Aichinger
It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in
between.
– C.S. Lewis
A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
– Alexander Pope
Ink is a deadly drug. One wants to write. I cannot shake off the addiction.
– C. S. Lewis
For all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.
– Tom Stoppard
France
by Billy Collins
You and your frozen banana,
you and your crème brûlée.
Can’t we just skip dessert
and go back to the Hotel d’Orsay?
You and your apple tart
and your plates of profiteroles.
Can’t we just ask for the check?
Can’t you hear Time’s mortal call?
Why linger here at the table
stuffing ourselves with sweets
when all the true pleasures await us
in room trois cent quarante-huit?
What kind of peace do we seek? I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living… not merely peace in our time but peace for all time. Our problems are manmade—therefore, they can be solved by man… For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.
– John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Keeping a cult is easier than building a coalition.
– Tom Nichols
The heretic is a man who loves his truth more than truth itself. He prefers the half-truth that he has found to the whole truth which humanity has found.
– G.K. Chesterton
One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.
– Oswald Spengler
If you are a friend of
everybody, you are an
enemy to yourself.
– Mike Tyson
Dig your way out of the disappointment. Don’t let it bury you.
– Dr. Thema
I hope your rambles have been sweet, and your reveries spacious.
– Emily Dickinson
The more you think about the things that upset you, the more you’ll become obsessed with your pain. Stop being a curator of your pain. Start learning to be an architect of your peace. Redirect your energy, change your inner dialogue, and become the master of your inner world.
– Nyle Beck, Inner Practicioner
Our world needs more men and boys who are healed, whole, and carry peace.
– Dr. Thema
I’m only telling you the sort of chap I am. I only want my rights. I’m not asking for anybody’s bleeding charity.
Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought.
– C.S. Lewis
Before books, there were stories. In them was distilled the knowledge each generation wished to pass on to the next. Storytelling was (and is) a form of power. It was time binding: it linked then to now. Told eloquently, at the right time to the right listeners, a story shaped the future
– Nancy Marie Brown
All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.
– Mark Twain
Shakespeare is always going to be a good read if you know how to read him.
– Tom Stoppard
Most people are not atheists. They just replaced God with their ego.
– St. Sophrony Sakharov
Of all intellectuals, the Substack intellectual is truly the saddest.
– Mark de Silva
Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by information, by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality – a banality that is the same in every country. To arrive in a new city, or in a new language, is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how to look. Delivered from images, it rediscovers the imagination.
– Jean Baudrillard
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
– Oscar Wilde
If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves.
– Carl Sagan
The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
I’m beginning to just sit & savor life, & remember vividly […] Is life Good?—As Good as a hot meal when you’re hungry.
– Jack Kerouac
The British Isles as we know them now were formed during the Acadian phase of the Caledonian orogeny when the parts which belonged to Laurentia and those which belonged to Avalonia were amalgamated.
– Avalonia, Wikipedia
It seems to me that much of our education in the urban, industrial era has worked to separate children from the natural world, so much so that they almost feel hostile toward it. That alienation is built into our modern educational process. It involves, I think, rooting out of children what I’ve called the ecological unconscious—or if not rooting it out, then muting it, silencing it—so they can no longer hear what I’ve called the voice of the Earth.
Yet in children you can find everything you need for a healthy relationship with the natural environment. In a very real sense, you might say that eco-psychology is devoted to the goal of keeping children as sane as they’re born.
I’ve met therapists—eco-psychologists—who believe they can often bring people great peace and stability by helping them recognize that, whatever else is going wrong in their lives (their marriage, their children, their job), this mothering planet is keeping them alive every moment. They come to see that they are being sustained in profound ways, and for many people that realization becomes a consoling, comforting, and deeply supportive insight.
The fact is, each one of us is the product of millions of years of evolution on this planet—evolution that produced life, and eventually human life. We are bonded to the Earth by something that has sustained our species for millions of years.
That is a deep insight into our true condition. And beyond the Earth itself, we are bonded to the whole cosmos by a process of cosmological evolution that goes back to the very beginning of the universe. This sense of belonging—of being part of a great cosmological system—is, for many people, a source of tremendous peace, consolation, and tranquility. And I would go further: it also happens to be true.
– Theodore Roszak
Movement is a medicine for creating change in a person’s physical, emotional, and mental states.
– Carol Welch
There is really no end to the secrets hidden behind the meanings of a single word…
– Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction
The symbol is not an artificially constructed sign: it flowers in the soul spontaneously to announce something that cannot be expressed otherwise.
– Henry Corbin
As it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.
– Anne Lamott
High intelligence does not make people immune to biases.
– Daniel Kahneman
If we don’t define “enough” we default to more, which makes it impossible to understand then to say no.
– Paul Millerd
You cannot own the power and the magic of this world. It is always available, but it does not belong to anyone.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The brain should, and in some cases does, calculate and reason with the unconscious ease of the other bodily organs. After all, the brain is not a muscle, and is thus not designed for effort and strain.
– Alan Watts
Every day I walk out into the world to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
– Mary Oliver
Almost all sadness comes from thinking about the past, and all worry from thinking about the future — present-mindedness is your only safe haven.
– Bryant McGill
Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.
– Diane Duane
Facial recognition software can pick out a person in a crowd a thousand feet away, but a vending machine can’t recognize a dollar bill with a bent corner
– Shawn Wood
The fool with all his other faults, has also this, he is always getting ready to live.
– Seneca
Ride the energy of your own unique spirit.
– Gabrielle Roth
I don’t have any children, so I’ve decided to claim all the future freedom-fighters and hell-raisers as my kin.
– Molly Ivins
What are a friendʼs books for if not to be borrowed?
– Tom Stoppard
There is no need for people to know who is helping. The important thing is someone is.
– Keanu Reeves
Someone please push me out of the way
Of this bad poem like it was a bus.
– Ana Božičević
Very little is required to destroy a person: one has only to convince him that the business he is engaged in is not necessary to anyone.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
– Richard Russo, Mohawk
Life was never meant to be a struggle; just a gentle progression from one point to another, much like walking through a valley on a sunny day.
– Stuart Wilde
We can’t get a “breakthrough” by going through the drive-thru. We can only breakthrough what we’ve been through.
– Joyce Meyer
We don’t live in a meritocracy, we live in an inheritocracy.
– Michael Beatrice
A dogmatical spirit naturally leads us to arrogance of mind, and gives a man some airs in conversation which are too haughty and assuming.
– Isaac Watts
Disability is a climate solution.
– Selin Nurgün
& what if hope crashes through the door what if?
– Mong-Lan
This walk requires community.
– Dr. Kia Conerway
I am awfully sentimental. Of books, belongings, people, places. It matters very little how positive or negative the experience was. If it shared some meaningful time in my life, I’ll have trouble letting go.
– Beau Taplin
The grievance is with an issue or an idea or a character, but it is never within the writing. The writing is the salvation–no, the writing is sacramental. I write badly when the anger perfumes the words and clogs the senses. You love through the work, no matter how much rage has brought you to the act of writing. Writing is–or always should be–holy, even if the subject is utterly depraved.
– Tennessee Williams
Non-human consciousness does not have physical bodies or objects, so nothing physical is ever left behind or recovered.
– Nancy Thames, Oversoul
. . . put the last words foremost, and not say that poetry abuseth man’s wit, but that man’s wit abuseth poetry.
– Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poetry
With poems, I try and give them what I got, raise them to 18, then send them into the world and tell them to get a job.
– Traci Brimhall
The words of a righteous man are like pure silver, the thoughts of a wicked man are worth nothing.
– Proverbs 10:20
Politics is a form of social amnesia. The people who survive it are our only insurance against forgetting.
– Johnathan Blitzer
Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.
– Adrienne Maree Brown
I accept the great adventure of being me.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Life’s bounty is in its flow.
– Tom Stoppard
Christian nationalism is what happens when Jesus is reduced to a mascot for the very things he opposed.
Don’t be fooled.
– Ortinel G.
It is a curse having the epic temperament in an overcrowded age devoted to snappy bits.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
In many ways, history is marked as ‘before’ and ‘after’ Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.
– Jesse Jackson
When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
The United States does not have problems, the United States is the problem. The same goes for other states that have built themselves up off of slavery, genocide, conquest, and colonialism – which is far too many of them.
– William C. Anderson
You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft, that you will die without knowing your true potential.
– David Goggins
Do not aim low, you will miss the mark. Aim high and you will be on a threshold of bliss.
– B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life
A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind.
– Frederick Douglass
Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.
– Washington Irving
In our tradition, equanimity means profound stability, like trees planted by the water that shall not be moved. That’s the fierce equanimity that comes from an open heart, open mind, and a clear direction of our energy toward changing the direct trajectory of history.
– Larry Ward
I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden
You know the rules. No jazz before a rumble.
– S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders
When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.
Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?
– Tom Stoppard
To become a Buddhist priest, you have to follow ten heavy precepts. They are: do not kill, steal, engage in improper sexual conduct, lie, drink, or cloud the mind, praise self, slander others, be greedy, give way to anger, or disparage the noble path.
– Jake Adelstein, The Last Yakuza
Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.
– Voltaire
Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.
– Tom Stoppard
Repeating the facts, over and over, is the way to be a lighthouse in the fog of misinformation and lies. Otherwise people doubt, tune out, assume the truth is unknowable, or that known facts are up for debate.
– Garry Kasparov
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
– Victor Hugo
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.
– John Steinbeck
What is magic but a change in the world? What is conjugation but a transformation, one thing into another? She runs; she ran; she will run again.
– Amal El-Mohtar, The River Has Roots
We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.
– Louise Erdrich
[Wallace Stevens] discovers that stripping oneself of all one’s torments simply will not work. There would still remain, as he says, “the never-resting mind”.
– Harold Bloom
Who are the ones that we kept in charge?
Killers, thieves and lawyers.
– Tom Waits, God’s Away on Business
Beware: learning more is a smart person’s favorite form of procrastination.
– Mark Manson
He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars:
The general good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer…
– William Blake
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.
– Howard Zinn
I ache and swell in a hundred places,
but mostly in the middle of my heart.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Everywhere I go to find this boy, to save this boy, I run into something worse than what we are saving him from … but we still think monsters are the ones with claws, and scales and skin.
– Marlon James
Respect your own mind—to prize it— will leave you satisfied with your own self, well integrated into your community.
– Marcus Aurelius
So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds.
– Samuel Beckett
A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.
– G.C. Lichtenberg
Everything has a spirit—honor that.
– Chief Arvol, Looking Horse
It is impossible to construct a theory of knowledge which would not itself be knowledge. It is impossible to make knowledge the object of one’s research without having the researcher accomplish an act of knowing.
– Nikolai Berdyaev, Solitude and Society
There is no virtue in poverty; the latter is a mental disease, and it should be abolished from the face of the earth. You are here to grow, expand, and unfold—spiritually, mentally, and materially. You have the inalienable right to fully develop and express yourself along all lines. You should surround yourself with beauty and luxury.
– Joseph Murphy
Shut your eyes and see.
– James Joyce
There are occasions when prose must eclipse poetry.
– Ian McEwan
In grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?
– C.S. Lewis
You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence “democracy”, and the other “tyranny”.
– Karl Popper
We are saved not as souls but as wholes.
– N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope
Skyful
I shrunk
like the stomach
of a rooster
at sea. Here, you
need to take
this pill. It will
heal you. It’s so
full of sky.
– Ben Niespodziany
We are not pristine little islands, unassailed by influence, heading relentlessly to existential individuation, but tug boats delightedly banging into each other in the bay-of-life. God doesn’t want us as lonely as many of us wind up being.
– George MacLeod, Iona Community
The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.
– Carl Sagan
It’s called the ‘American dream’ because you have to be asleep to believe it
– George Carlin
To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.
– Marcus Aurelius
PTSD isn’t just mental. It’s a full physiological commitment to survival that depletes your body’s resources hour after hour, creating complete exhaustion.
– Brad Schipke
I begin when the dream does
– Leila Chatti, Examination of Night
Humans are the only organisms on earth that can self-direct neuroplasticity.
Meaning, you can teach yourself into and out of ANYTHING.
– Kimia Nora
One cannot understand magic. One can only understand what accords with reason. Magic accords with unreason, which one cannot understand. The world accords not only with reason but also with unreason.
– C.G. Jung
I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion …
– Dorothy Allison
the white dove
flies over the battlefield
shitting on the war
– Bo Lille
Maybe the reason all the powerful instruments pointed at the sky have not yet been able to detect high-tech alien civilizations is that these unsustainable societies don’t last long enough to leave a cosmic trace. An unsettling thought.
– Tyson Yunkaporta
The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.
– Meghan O’Rourke
We live in a moment of grace. Through the hedges of our divisions we are beginning to glimpse again the beauty of life’s oneness. We are beginning to hear…the essential harmony that lies at the heart of the universe. And we are beginning to understand…that we will be well to the extent that we move back into relationship with one another, whether as individuals and families or as nations and species. The time is right. The time is desperately right.
– John Philip Newell
There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed…These things are so ancient within us…that they’re ground into each separate cell of our bodies…It’s as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.
– Frank Herbert
In a fully functional organism, an emotion has a very short life span. It is like a momentary ripple or wave on the surface of your Being. When you are not in your body, however, an emotion can survive inside you for days or weeks, or join with other emotions of a similar frequency that have merged and become the pain-body, a parasite that can live inside you for years, feed on your energy, lead to physical illness, and make your life miserable.
– Eckhart Tolle
And all I loved,I loved alone.
– Edgar Allan Poe
Look at you comforting others with the words
you wish to hear.
– William Wordsworth
Many ‘primitive’ peoples … believe that almost every normal adult has the ability to go into a trance state and be possessed by a god; the adult who cannot do this is a psychological cripple.
– Robert O. Becker and Gary Selden
Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us – every man, woman, and child – and with enough hard work and concentration, every human being is capable of the feat. You must learn to stop being yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground. Like so.
– Paul Auster
What you do not know is the only thing you know,
And what you own is what you do not own,
And where you are is where you are not,
Leading to a condition of complete simplicity
Costing not less than everything.
– T.S. Eliot
It is above all the valorizing of the present that requires emphasizing. The simple fact of existing, of living in time, can comprise a religious dimension. This dimension is not always obvious, since sacrality is in a sense camouflaged in the immediate, in the “natural” and the everyday. The joy of life discovered by the Greeks is not a profane type of enjoyment: it reveals the bliss of existing, of sharing — even fugitively — in the spontaneity of life and the majesty of the world. Like so many others before and after them, the Greeks learned that the surest way to escape from time is to exploit the wealth, at first sight impossible to suspect, of the lived instant.
– Mircea Eliade
Sisters and brothers: We direct to your minds that peace is not merely the absence of war, but the constant effort to maintain harmonious existence between all peoples, from individual to individual, and between humans and the other beings of this planet. We point out to you that a spiritual consciousness is the path of survival of humankind.
– The Haudenosaunee Declaration, 1979
Safety isn’t always safe.
You can find one on every gun.
I’m aiming to do better.
– Andrea Gibson
There are no contests in the Art of Peace. A true warrior is invincible because he or she contests with nothing. Defeat means to defeat the mind of contention that we harbor within.
– Morihei Ueshiba
It is better to arm and strengthen your hero, than to disarm and enfeeble your foe.
– Anne Brontë
THE SWAN
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
– Mary Oliver
Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.
– Goethe
Although the pure truth has never been stated, nevertheless it has never been lost. Its existence does not depend upon human statement but upon human sensitivity. In this it is unlike all other knowledge.
– Paul Brunton
Just as a trained surgeon constantly keeps his tools at the ready, so must you hold your mind and ability to understand all things at the ready, and always abide by your principles. Humanity and the universe are linked: you can’t do anything well without appreciating the profound but unseen links between them.
Ὥσπερ οἱ ἰατροὶ ἀεὶ τὰ ὄργανα καὶ σιδήρια πρόχειρα ἔχουσι πρὸς τὰ αἰφνίδια τῶν θεραπευμάτων, οὕτω τὰ δόγματα σὺ ἕτοιμα ἔχε πρὸς τὸ τὰ θεῖα καὶ ἀνθρώπινα εἰδέναι, καὶ πᾶν καὶ τὸ μικρότατον οὕτω ποιεῖν ὡς τῆς ἀμφοτέρων πρὸς ἄλληλα συνδέσεως μεμνημένον. οὔτε γὰρ ἀνθρώπινόν τι ἄνευ τῆς ἐπὶ τὰ θεῖα συναναφορᾶς εὖ πράξεις οὔτ̓ ἔμπαλιν.
– Marcus Aurelius
The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is, but that you can see the world as it isn’t. We can remember the past and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it’s like to be some other person in some other place. And we all do this differently.
– Kathryn Schulz
The mind is a hotel with a thousand rooms. When I tilt my head a certain way, I think about certain things. When I tilt my head another way, I think about other things. If I sleep on the right side of my face, for example, I’d dream of a pale rose, the future, or a continental diner in Passaic, New Jersey. When I sleep on the left side of my face, I’d dream that a hand is squeezing my heart, that I’m in prison, or that I’m watching hockey at an airport bar, about to miss a flight.
– Linh Dinh
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked – as I am surprisingly often – why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?
– Richard Dawkins
Those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it. They are never rationally reconciled to civilization. Instead, they bow to it, secretly accepting the identity of reason and domination, of civilization and the ideal, however much they may shrug their shoulders. Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity. These people willingly embrace or force themselves to accept the rule of the stronger as the eternal norm.
– Max Horkheimer
Today I write you from my traveler’s cell
at the hour of an imaginary rendezvous.
A downpour shatters the rainbow in the air
and planetary sadness on the mountains.
Sun and bells in the old tower.
– Antonio Machado
Read, do not dream. Plunge into long studies; there is nothing continually good but the habit of stubborn work. It releases an opium which lulls the soul. I have gone through periods of bleak despair, and have turned endlessly in a void, desperate with boredom. This can be overcome by force of persistence and
pride: try.
– Flaubert
Every high civilization
decays by forgetting
obvious things.
– G.K. Chesterton
One of the ways you know you are in the underworld is that you do not ride your passions, your passions ride you.
– Martin Shaw
He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.
– Proverbs 16:32
Keynes knew very little economics… He was much more concerned with influencing policy at a particular moment than developing a true theory.
– Friedrich Hayek
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
– Thomas Sowell
Among our egocentric sad-sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation.
– Tom Robbins
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don’t give her one we
don’t like terrible diseases
– Frank O’Hara
Tom did more than any other playwright or novelist in his own lifetime to redefine Britishness as something freedom-loving and open-hearted.
– David Hare on Tom Stoppard
My entire vocabulary lately has collapsed to two words:
Simple.
Nourishing.
– River Kenna
The realest bonds are the ones that enter into your life and immediately you both begin to transform into more.
– Nika Solé
I like sweeping words into piles and whispering good night.
– Bill Hicok
I’ve seen a whole system collapse and fade away.
– Jenny Erpenbeck
Once you learn about spiritual hygiene you start moving around the world completely different.
– Nika Solé
If we open the hand of thought, we are one with the whole universe. This truth leads to the crucial point for us of what role we should be playing right now, right here.
– Kosho Uchiyama Roshi
I am a ‘say the real say’ kind of person. I have a pretty good radar for experimentation with language versus obfuscation.
– Maggie Nelson
When you open your heart to give, the grace of the Divine invariably seeps into it.
– Sadhguru
It’s not enough just to know the definition of bodhisattva. What’s much more important is to study the actions of a bodhisattva and then to behave like one yourself.
– Kosho Uchiyama Roshi
A genius is the one most like himself.
– Thelonius Monk
I do not like the pressure to laugh
It is like being strangled
With an invisible twine
I will only laugh when it is true
I will only laugh when my body feels
Like it would otherwise disintegrate
– Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi
Religious beliefs are wonderful but writing a paper under their influence is like doing acid and trying to write about monads: one is too addled to think straight. One must interrogate the saddle one uses to ride thru the world: this is part of what it means to think, eh? Saddle-addle
– Alina Stefanescu
DOG
Until the rain takes over my life I’ll never change,
although I know by heart the Lord’s Prayer
and the prayer Christ prayed to his father
in John, chapter 17, sanctifying himself.
Trying to convert me would be like teaching a dog to drive a car
just because it likes to go out for a drive—and save the poor mutt
from the greater or lesser vehicles of Buddhism.
On the other hand I am a dog that has been well treated
by his master. He kisses me and I lick his face. When he can
he lets me off the leash in the woods or at the beach.
I often sleep in his bed.
– Stanley Moss
Whoever conditioned you to be unquestionably obedient– in childhood or adulthood– put you at risk.
– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle
Indigenous people make up 6 percent of the world’s population, but their territory accounts for close to a quarter of the earth’s land surface, containing more than a third of remaining natural lands worldwide.
– Robert Sullivan
dusty road
my shadow stretches
ahead of questions
– Ogawa
Two joy-fires were Lona and I. Earth breathed heavenward her sweet-savored smoke; we breathed homeward our longing desires. For thanksgiving, our very consciousness was that.
– George MacDonald, Lilith
stars in winter skies,
brighter when you walk with me
night feels newly born
– Ogawa
There is no change without contemplation. The whole image of Buddha under the Bodhi tree says here is an action taking place that may not appear to be a meaningful action.
– bell hooks
Silence is the only teaching.
The rest is noise.
– Bankei Yōtaku
I think it’s obvious that the psychedelics are demonized and illegalized by our society because somewhere in our society are controlling minds that realize that these substances have the potential, have the power to unpick the controlling hierarchy.
– Graham Hancock
O passing Angel,
speed me with a song,
a melody of heaven
to reach my heart
and rouse me to the race
and make me strong.
– Christina Rossetti
Languages throw light on each other: one language can, after all, see itself only in the light of another language.
– M.M. Bakhtin
One of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.
– Annie Proulx
Peace does not mean an absence of conflicts; differences will always be there. Peace means solving these differences through peaceful means; through dialogue, education, knowledge; and through humane ways.
– Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama
The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself. It branches out like a rooted parasite through the tissues of life, and everything gets into a rather peculiar mess.
– Gregory Bateson, Pathologies of Epistemology
Night does not cover our troubles, it brings them to the mind.
– Seneca
He saw things with a jaundiced eye that still got the humanity of things.
– David Crosby about Warren Zevon
Once the richest begin living outside the civic sphere, they stop caring whether the rest of society works at all. A nation where the wealthy secede into a private realm is a nation confronting oligarchy.
– Thom Hartmann
Everything in a story should be credible.
– Rex Stout
I don’t attach importance to great speeches or philosophy.
– Jacques Santer
When Hermes is at work in an analysis, one feels that one’s story has been stolen and turned into something else.
– James Hillman
another half-forgotten city, / wearing another man’s rags— / a scene he might have written: / streets snaking around him, / steaming and sulphurous, / rain dirty as it left the sky— / one last maze before the foothills of hell
– Nicholas Christopher
Some day the workers will take possession of your city hall, and when we do, no child will be sacrificed on the altar of profit!
– Mother Jones
What innumerable acts of injustice may be committed, and how fatally may the principles of liberty be sapped, by a succession of judges utterly independent of the people?
– John Dickinson
The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.
– Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
She needed to be away from things. She needed to be alone… or as close to alone as she could get. And [he] had the uncanny ability to make her feel like she was away from everyone, but not alone in this world.
– Jason Mott, The Wonder of All Things
The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the “correct miscalculation,” for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers.
– Yōko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor
Wonderful companies become risky investments when people overpay for them.
– Peter Lynch
Description finds its traction in fissures and flaws.
– Leslie Jamison
As far as I can tell, it’s just about letting the universe know what you want and then working toward it while letting go of how it comes to pass.
– Jim Carrey
Each of us has a so-called masculine task, and each of us has a so-call feminine task. . . Our summons is both to be and to do; it is to nurture and to define; it is to be at home and to journey.
– James Hollis
Whenever there is declining virtue, and an absence of love, God sends helpers. They restore virtue, create a sanctuary for those who do good, and doom for those who do evil.
– Bhagavad Gita 4:7-8
The failure of our education system is that it thinks curiosity is optional in learning.
– Dan Goldfield
Clergy should read books, or else accept the only logical alternative, which is to promise never to preach again.
– Dr David Edwards
This rings very true to me, how about you? A better system will not automatically ensure a better life. In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.
– Vaclav Havel
know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch another human soul, be just another human soul.
– Carl Jung
The best way to teach
your kids about taxes
is by eating 30% of
their ice cream.
– Warren Buffett
Social religion is perfected when private religion is purified.
– A.W. Tozer
So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand.
– Thucydides
Here we are, clueless about what the future holds but knowing who holds the future.
– Annie Lamont
Literary fiction & poetry are real marginalized right now. The audience only wants to go this deep, but if an art form is marginalized it’s because it’s not speaking to people.
– David Foster Wallace
We stoke in people an inner critic and call it the voice of god.
– Hilary Mcbride
And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west. The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other’s 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully.
– Haruki Murakami
If Christianity has an enemy, it isn’t atheism, socialism, democrats, LGBTQ+, scientists, or academia. The enemy would be within. Those who speak with their lips and deny with their action. Hypocrisy, is the enemy of Christianity.
– C.E. Jarnagin
If the church is to practice the teachings of Christ it must be an unreliable ally to every social, political, and government order of the world.
– Karl Barth
Do not kill the part of you that is cringe, kill the part of you that cringes.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
It seems Americans prefer not to notice the destruction of democracy that is happening right in front of your nose. And it all starts with scapegoating certain groups of people.
– Nadia Tolokonnikova
Christ wasn’t white therefore white supremacy is inherently anti-Christ.
– Daniel Pugsley
Data doesn’t just reflect bias—it multiplies it. And if women don’t control the algorithms, they’ll control us.
– @thebrazenera
…Modern man can’t see God because he doesn’t look low enough.
– Carl Jung
Alabama bragging to California because it’s cheaper is like a 2003 Chevy talking to a brand new Porsche and bragging that it has a lower price tag.
– Nick Caputo
I opened my eyes then and got right up / and went back to being happy again. / I’m grateful to you, you see. I wanted to tell you.
– Raymond Carver
Everyone who eats has a relationship with food. The question is: is it a conscious relationship?
– Marc David
Dieting often starts as control—but at its root, it’s often avoidance.
– Marc David
snowstorm at midday
the world slowly disappears
into its own breath
– Aiko
In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is…to enable him (the reader) to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.
– Marcel Proust
David Mamet in The Free Press on Tom Stoppard:
“Steven Spielberg asked Tom to write the screenplay for Jaws, and Tom said he couldn’t as he was writing a play for the BBC. Spielberg said, ‘I’m offering you a fortune to collaborate with me on a Hollywood blockbuster, and you turn me down to write a play for BBC TV?”
“No,” Tom said, “BBC Radio.”
Knots
I read it in the Times today-long things will knot.
Scientists have proven what we already know,
yet never wondered why. For instance, you sew,
the needle goes through, you’re lost in thought—
then out of nowhere, a knot. Or you wind the wire
of your earphones, place them with care in your bag-
only to find later, on opening, a gordian snag.
It’s true of anything you can name: string, cables, hair,
spaghetti noodles, garden hoses, red tape. As I said
it should come as no surprise, but it does,
that there’s such a gnarled mess between us
tethered as we are by this tender thread
from that pearlescent cord of decades ago
to this tangle we’ve got each other in now.
– Nancy Hechinger
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s
understanding without guidance from
another.
– Immanuel Kant
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it,
if only we’re brave enough to be it.
– Amanda Gorman
Genuine speech is the expression of a genuine personality. Because it takes pains to make itself intelligible, it assumes that the hearer is a genuine personality too—in other words, wherever it is spoken it creates a community. Bastard speech is not the voice of the genuine self: it is more typically the voice of what I shall here call the ego. The ego has no interest in communication, but only in expression. What it says is always a monologue, though if engaged with others, it resigns itself to a temporary stop, so that the other person’s monologue may have its turn to flow. But while it seeks only expression, the ego is not the genuine individual, consequently it has nothing distinctive to express. It can express only the generic: food, sex, possessions, gossip, aggressiveness and resentments. Its natural affinity is for the ready-made phrase, the cliché, because it tends to address itself to the reflexes of its hearer, not to his intelligence or emotions. I am not suggesting that society can do without a great deal of automatic babble on ready-made subjects: I am merely saying that we limit the aspects of our personality that we can express with words if we devote ourselves entirely to such verbal quackery.
– Northrop Frye, The Well-Tempered Critic
PRIMARY WONDER
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.
– Denise Levertov
Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.
– G.K. Chesterton
Some people live 90 years, some people live 1 year 90 times.
– Mary Morissey
If we get together… we can make the change.
– Dr. Jane Goodall
Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.
– Aldous Huxley
Let a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will effect in the material conditions of his life.
– James Allen
The man who has
no weakness by definition has no love.
– Jared Singer, Achilles, Forgotten Necessities
By simply being on the spot, your life can become workable and even wonderful.
– Chögyam Trungpa
On the spiritual path, there’s nothing to get, and everything to get rid of.
– Ayya Khema
I am the sum total of everything that went before me… to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.
– Salman Rushdie
Poverty is expensive because it costs so much time and money to navigate systems that are built to exclude the poor
– John Green
I think what you have to do in translation is translate the dynamic, the essential structure that is separate from the words.
– Frank Bidart
I’d had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn’t apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all.
– Wendell Berry
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking (that) makes what we read ours.
– John Locke
Good people
Do not bend over backwards
To stay in the good books
Of bad people
– Lucas Jones
If the world seems to have fixed us in our helplessness, but death is not a fixed state, then what else is possible, after?
– Maria Pinto
desiring no money we were
serene like a nation.
– Barbara Guest
Wealth in this country has become so intertwined with our mythologies of genius, destiny, and merit that we’ve ended up elevating into near-sainthood (and electing to high office) some of the least thoughtful, least competent, and least self-aware people ever to walk a boardroom floor. It’s a dangerous confusion, and one with deep roots.
– Thom Hartmann
You cannot make thoughts go away, but you can create the conditions for them to go away on their own by letting go of all mental effort and cultivating the ability to let things be as they are.
– Matt Tenney
He’s trying to change us and it’s failing. That’s heartening to me.
– Rachel Maddow, Trump
In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
No one can make you feel like you live upstate without your consent.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder with a dash of the dictionary.
– Kahlil Gibran
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
– Wallace Stevens
Have I done something for the common good? Then I share in its benefits.
– Marcus Aurelius
I invented the color of vowels—-A, black; E, white; I, red; O, blue; U, green-l controlled the form and movement of each consonant, and flatter myself that, with instinctive rhythm, ! might invent some day or other, a poetic verb accessible to all five senses. I reserved the right of translation. At first, it was an experiment. I wrote silences. Nights. I took notes of the in-expressible. I transfixed vertigoes.
– Rimbaud
Much learning does not teach understanding.
– Heraclitus
To be obsessed with who is good and who is bad is a trait of conservatism. It doesn’t make you a bad person, but it does harm us all in some way.
– Kim Diaz Holm
I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.
– Allen Ginsberg
Within every desire is the mechanics of its fulfillment.
– Deepak Chopra
Every age has its signature afflictions.
– Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society
Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
– Ann Patchett
The ‘good’ do not condemn the ‘wicked’ to hell and enjoy their own triumph, but descend with Christ into hell in order to free them.
– Nicolas Berdyaev
…a political struggle that does not have women at the heart of it, above it, below it, and within it is no struggle at all.
– Arundhati Roy
Fate is a dimension that is not of your person. It’s transpersonal. You open up to something that is deeper than your own personal notion of yourself. Even though it’s you, it’s beyond what you know of yourself. It’s experience that’s coming to you.
– Joseph Campbell
Whether we use artificial or human intelligence, there is but one task. How do 8 billion existing humans transition to a version of human activity that is conducted sustainably, without war?
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
What we are taught today mainly has to do with economics and politics. We are not nurturing our spiritual side. So we are left with this void. It’s the job of the artist to create these new myths. Myths come from the artists.
– Joseph Campbell
In Mojave, our words for want and need are the same – because why would you want what you don’t need?
– Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem
People fail to understand that they are indebted to violence for the degree of peace that they enjoy.
– René Girard
You know what it’s like… You earn just enough to get by but at the end of the day there’s nothing left mentally, and so you cling to the job even harder.
– Rachel Cusk, Kudos
His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough.
– J. M. Coetzee
I would rather people speak up imperfectly than not speak up at all.
I would rather have people join movements for liberation late than not have them join at all.
I would rather hear your voice
than not hear it at all.
It is not too late to save this world.
And I would rather people believe that than not believe it at all.
– Nikita Gill
Mythology, in other words, is not an outmoded quaintness of the past, but a living complex of archetypal, dynamic images, native to, and eloquent of, some constant, fundamental stratum of the human psyche. And that stratum is the source of the vital energies of our being.
– Joseph Campbell
Who had already become as mute as I was? who, like me, was calling fear love? and want, love? and need, love? Who, like me, knew that I had never changed my form since they had drawn me on the stone of a cave?
– Clarice Lispector
Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.
– George Saunders
Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you’re looking to sell something.
– Ann Patchett
Still instead of trusting what their own minds tell them men have as a rule a weakness for trusting others who pretend to supernatural sources of knowledge.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
What we would like to do is change the world…by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world.
– Dorothy Day
Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favor of another object of a different nature; this second object requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favor of a third, and so on and so forth until we reach the one lasting presence, the point at which the distinction between meaning and the absence of meaning disappears: the same point from which we began.
– Claude Lévi-Strauss
When the whole world is globalized, you’re going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match.
– René Girard
Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left
– Aldous Huxley
There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything’s quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep—then they appear.
– Tove Jansson
[…] operate within a new form of science that asks not just what is possible, but what is appropriate—appropriate to the well-being of self and Earth. Such a question does not originate in the mental realm but the spiritual, and is felt bodily, once our senses and heart are attuned. So the central part of our being that simply must be allowed to function and be attended is the heart.
– Joseph Chilton Pearce
In what we call thinking the mind isn’t ‘directed’ but suspended. You don’t give it rules. You teach it to receive. You don’t clear the ground to build unobstructed: you make a little clearing where the penumbra of an almost-given will be able to enter and modify its contour.
– Jean-Francois Lyotard
While meditating things will come into your mind and you will want to clear them away, believe that they are fish and your mind, a pool that longs to be vacant. There is no use (you will go crazy) trying to keep fish from your waters, so what you must do instead is draw them in and with a calmness and a smoothness and a touch of their own momentum, get the little trouble-fish (fish of what someone said at work, fish of your family falling apart on the phone) to move swiftly by, like a hand goes through the middle of a pour from a faucet of water, the flow seeming relatively undisturbed.
– Joshua Beckman
One day you’ll have whatever it is you’re now so confusedly seeking. That kind of calm that comes from knowing oneself and others. But you can’t rush the arrival of that state of mind. There are things you only learn when no one teaches them. And that’s how it is with life. There’s even more beauty in discovering it for yourself, in spite of the suffering.
– Clarice Lispector
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
– Susan Sontag
It’s a life’s work to see yourself for what you are, and even then you might be wrong.
– Cormac McCarthy
Man is a genius when he is dreaming.
– Akira Kurosawa
am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe, that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless. You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe.. Nature is a totally efficient, self-regenerating system. If we discover the laws that govern this system and live synergistically within them, sustainability will follow and humankind will be a success. We are called to
be architects of the future, not its victims…
– R. Buckminster Fuller
The mind starts to become quiet when it really sees how untrue its narrative is.
– Adyashanti
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
– Philip Larkin
I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.
– Rebecca Solnit
The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind…
– Djuna Barnes
the body is and is and is
and has nowhere to go.
– Wislawa Szymborska
It shows insufficient knowledge and understanding of the Yoga Sutra if you come to the conclusion that the many mental faculties we have—those of observation, inference, memory, imagination, inactivity, and hyperactivity, for example—are detrimental and need to be eliminated. Yoga understands that these faculties are indeed necessary for living.
However, exposed to the influences that constantly assail it, the mind develops its own way of working if it’s left to its own devices. In the end it becomes incapable of using the many faculties it possesses because it cannot find any stability and clarity… . In yoga we are simply trying to create the conditions in which the mind becomes as useful as possible for our actions.
– TKV Desikachar, The Heart of Yoga
and I thought I am so many! What is my name? What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us?
– Mary Oliver
You think you’re ‘thinking,’
but you’re actually listening.
– Terence McKenna
Can all men, together, avenge
One of the leaves that have fallen in autumn?
But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
– Wallace Stevens
A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
– Proverbs 17:17
A sense of reverence is necessary for psychological health. If one has no sense of reverence, no feeling that there is anyone or anything that inspires awe, it generally indicates an ego inflation that cuts conscious personality from nourishing springs of unconscious.
– Robert A. Johnson
Not one single person in history has gotten an alcoholic sober. (Maybe you’ll be the first. But—and I say this with love—I doubt it.) If it is someone else’s problem, you probably don’t have the solution.
– Anne Lamott
If you don’t have a relationship with yourself, all other relationships become shallow. And if your relationship with yourself is so profound and steady then you naturally develop the skill to handle any kind of relationship around you.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
– Virginia Woolf
The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head.
– Jean Cocteau
Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can.
– Gwendolyn Brooks
Even a goose knows how to find / shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
– Barbara Crooker
We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling, and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment.
– Paulo Coelho
Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.
– Gandalf (Tolkien, The Two Towers)
Faith is more a matter of a courageous heart than that of intellect. Faith involves trust and confidence, and for some, that’s taking refuge in the three jewels.
– Leslie Booker
The real in us is silent: the acquired is talkative.
– Kahlil Gibran
The crowd tends to be completely on the ‘right’ or on the ‘left.’ An intellectual has the obligation to avoid such dichotomies.
– René Girard
winter constellations
I map my longing
by their light
– Aiko
I really, really hate writing that pulls its punches, stalls out in exposition that we don’t need.
– Maggie Nelson
The ultimate truth is that things do not work between man and woman.
– Jacques Lacan
In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.
– Hemingway
Meter is as natural as breathing or the heartbeat. I think my childhood asthma had a lot to do with my consciousness of the breath unit—in a sense I’ve never really taken breathing for granted.
– Carolyn Kizer
Some people are just ontologically single, much like how others are ontologically in a couple.
– Judith Butler
When people start acting stupid I usually stop reading. Those people aren’t ready to be characters yet. You can’t have just any figment be a character. They should have to pass a test.
– Renee Gladman
These ethics are foundational in that they create worlds that view private property, prisons, punishment and greed as terrible mistakes.
– Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water
Education can either activate or suppress mental energy. If it is mainly obedience training, it suppresses energy. If it creates social dislocations, it disturbs mental and emotional energy.
– Ray Peat
Finally, all of you,
have unity of mind,
sympathy, brotherly
love, a tender heart,
and a humble mind.
– 1 Peter 3:8
(Something weeps in me all the time.
All the time.)
– Linda Gregg
We all have our own life to pursue,
Our own kind of dream to be weaving,
And we all have the power
To make wishes come true,
As long as we keep believing.
– Louisa May Alcott
The undisturbed mind is like the calm body of water reflecting the brilliance of the moon. Empty the mind and you will realize the undisturbed mind.
– Yagyu Jubei
We are all co-extensive, and our work is to move toward union… It is our spiritual imperative to connect, or else the destiny of the world cannot be completed.
– Mark Doty
That’s one of the reasons we go to poetry in the first place: to indulge in language, ideas, and music, all to the point of excess.
– Anthony Domestico
Everyone is born at the time that is best suited for his salvation.
– St. Ambrose of Optina
When I sit down to write, I usually set the research aside. What I’m more interested in always is, How can I enter and re-create that life from the inside out?
– John Keene
The birds are singing in the yellow patios,
Pecking at more lascivious rinds than ours,
From sheer Gemütlichkeit.
– Wallace Stevens
There would be no sense in saying you trusted Jesus if you would not take his advice.
– C.S. Lewis
The way things were, the way we made things, it turns out, none of it was inevitable — none of it is the way things have to be.
We can be different.
– David Byrne
whether raindrop by raindrop
or the entire storm all at once
the cloud only unfolds when she wants
– @rainyreverie
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
If you can feel that staying human is worthwhile … you’ve beaten them.
– George Orwell
midnight frost
even dreams
grow quiet
– Yuki
frozen afternoon
two people share a lantern
and sudden warmth
– Ogawa
It Passes Away
What is the purpose of reacting to something when it is changing so quickly? What is the purpose of reacting with craving or clinging? It passes away. Or hatred: it passes away.
– S.N. Goenka, Superscience
But, nevertheless, if there is even the slightest recognition, liberation is easy. Should you ask why this is so—it is because once the awesome, terrifying and fearful appearances arise, the awareness does not have the luxury of distraction. The awareness is one-pointedly concentrated.
– Padmasambhava
The thing you don’t see while you’re still there on Earth is how easy it is to change your mind. When you’re in it and you’re mixed up with feelings, assumptions, influences, and misconceptions, things seem completely impossible to change.
– Amy Sarig King
Personality encloses us like a shell. We like to believe that inside that shell is our ‘true self’, the ‘real me’. In fact, says Guidjieff, we are full of thousands of little ‘I’s. They could be compared to the crystalline fragments that a windscreen shatters into when struck with a hammer. But every time we make some tremendous effort, two of the crystals fuse together. If we could make enough efforts, we would finally obtain one solid block of crystal. If that could happen, man would be virtually a god.
Our aim, then, is to make the kind of effort that will create enough ‘friction’ to fuse two crystals together. These efforts Gurdjieff calls ‘intentional suffering’. This does not mean flogging ourselves or seeking out misery, but simply making efforts of will instead of drifting along in a robotic or mechanical state.
– Colin Wilson
Linear time is exhausting. Life has never been more rushed. This present way of being is not a truth about life or a truth about time; it is propositional. We can disagree.
– Nan Shepherd
My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.
– Frank O’Hara
The death of God did not put us back into Plato and Aristotle’s world… We no longer think that we are what’s wrong with the world. We are no longer at all puzzled about why the world, being good, is yet not good. Because for us, the world is no longer first and foremost form. It is matter… The real is no longer the good. For us, reality is something hard, something which resists reason and value, something which is recalcitrant to form.
– Christine M. Korsgaard
The immunologically organized world possesses a particular topology. It is marked by borders, transitions, thresholds, fences, ditches, and walls that prevent universal change and exchange.
– Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society
The test of love is in how one not relates to scholars and saints but to rascals.
– Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
We are all saving each other every single day in tiny seemingly insignificant ways.
– Lewis Howes
When the mind is exalted, the body is lightened and feels as if it could float in the wind.
– Madeleine Thien
winter tea steaming—
I watch you sip and wonder,
who warmed who the most?
– Aiko
…no man finds fault in him who will justly speak the truth.
– Beowulf (J.R.R. Tolkien)
We do not choose
each other randomly.
We meet only those who
already exist in our subconscious.
– Freud
Burnout shows up differently for everyone, and I believe many of us live with a chronic, low-level version we don’t even notice until our well-being starts to fall apart.
– Antonya Beamish
One climbs all stairs—even clandestine ones—faster than the snail staircase of merit.
– Jean Paul
Yet my heart loves December’s smile
As much as July’s golden beam;
Then let us sit and watch the while
The blue ice curdling on the stream.
– Emily Brontë
There’s no prize for racing through life. Slow down. Feel the breeze. Taste your food. Laugh with someone you love. Slow doesn’t always ‘win the race,’ but it feels a lot more joy.
– Lori Deschene
Boldness makes even the smallest animal dangerous.
– Robert Greene
From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist.
– Wallace Stevens
I am nothing but words, just a shape of dreams or night.
– Euripides
Autumn — that season which
has drawn from every poet worthy
of being read some attempt at
description, or some lines of feeling.
– Jane Austen
I shift my pillow
closer to the
full moon.
– Saiba
snowflakes
never falling
straight
– Seegan Mabesoone
Fools and wise-folk are alike harmless. It is the half-wise, and the half-foolish, who are the most dangerous.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Sometimes feelings are like that – not positive, not negative, just a lot.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I want to infect you with the tremendous excitement of living, because I believe that you have the strength to bear it.
– Tennessee Williams
When we give up our images of self-importance and our ideas of what should be, we can help things become what they need to be.
– Benjamin Hoff
The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.
– Voltaire
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
– Aldous Huxley
The wind tried to topple her, Thinking she was top-heavy with dreams. It didn’t know How deep her roots went Into the soil of self-belief.
– Sai Pradeep
How sad, the dependability of greed to make men fools.
– Pierce Brown
You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven.
– Jimi Hendrix
Love God. Love one another. Love your neighbor. Love your enemy. That about covers it. In Christ’s meticulous census, the community exempt from the love of Christians has a population of exactly zero.
– Beth Moore
To play well the scenes in which we are ‘on’ concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
– C.S. Lewis
Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do than what one can do.
– Lin Yutang
If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself; you hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet. Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.
– Steven Pressfield
Buddhism is not particularly concerned with beliefs, because beliefs don’t liberate us.
– Guy Armstrong
To be so full of. Everything. At her age. It is very difficult.
– C. D. Wright, Girl Friend
To live what is right and to let what is false die, that is the art of life.
– CG Jung
It is psychical reality which is the decisive kind.
– Freud
If you can be open with your weaknesses it will make you freer and will help you deal with them better.
– Ray Dalio
If your tooth hurts, your tongue keeps going there. You are always conscious of a wound.
– Ingmar Bergman
Just as space can accommodate the whole universe – the mountains, continents, and so forth – the nature of the mind is so vast that it can accommodate the whole of phenomena.
– Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in your own.
– Adam Lindsay Gordon
The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived.
– Ann Patchett
I suspect we are all recipients of cosmic love notes. Messages, omens, voices, cries, revelations, and appeals are homogenized into each day’s events. If only we knew how to listen, to read the signs.
– Sam Keen
Thus the Protestant disease of cheap grace can produce some of the most selfish and contentious leaders and lay people on earth, more difficult to bear in a state of grace than they would be in a state of nature.
– Richard Lovelace
Once you cede power to the Leviathan, he is free to treat you as he will.
– Thomas Hobbes
I’m interested in the zen of puppetry. In teaching Buddhism, they show you a Bunraku puppet that’s nothing but a mask and cloth—there’s no body to it. And the puppeteer puts his hands into it, and there’s an illusion of life. He takes his hands out and there’s just cloth. It makes the same statement as the Hollow Buddha, the “void” inside the “process.”
– Lee Breuer
To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.
– Zhuangzi
Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth.
– Winona LaDuke
Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free,
– Thoreau
Donating books to someone who needs immediate medical care misses the mark… Sometimes the most charitable act is not giving – especially when giving would enable destructive behavior or support corrupt systems.
– Bhagavad Gita
Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.
– Edwin Hubbel Chapin
If all men knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.
– Blaise Pascal
The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.
– Marcus Aurelius
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
– Noam Chomsky
Disturbance comes only from within, from our own perception.
– Marcus Aurelius
People who lack a deeper root inevitably substitute politics for spirituality, and the result is always agitation and despair. No one escapes the rat-wheel of temporal duality by doubling down on temporal duality. Only a higher axis breaks the cycle.
– @avalon156
…as a playwright, I’ve always believed that each member of the audience must sort the play out himself.
– Vaclav Havel
I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.
– Nelson Mandela
One stance I’ve never understood is the belief that there shouldn’t be money in poetry; that money in poetry cheapens poetry itself.
I’d love to live in a world where more than just a handful of poets make a living as poets.
Help me see the other side/what I’m missing?
– Katie Dozier Green
How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself.
– Marcus Aurelius
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
– Victor Hugo
The highest compact we can make with our fellow is – “Let there be truth between us two forevermore.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.
– Thomas Merton
Some individuals remain oblivious to reality until the clock stops ticking.
– Lucille Ball
There’s a price to be paid for dreaming.
– Denis Johnson
Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.
– Bill Moyers
Before Freud, the study of the soul was thought of as a spiritual discipline. In other words, it was inherently associated with religion. Freud’s chief contribution was to define the human soul and the study of human behavior in wholly secular terms. He utterly divorced anthropology (the study of human beings) from the spiritual realm and thus made way for atheistic, humanistic, and rationalistic theories about human behavior.
– MacArthur
Dream a little before you think.
– Toni Morrison
The effect of wisdom is a joy that is unbroken and continuous.
– Seneca
It is curious to think that each of us has a country like this one, even if altogether different, which must always remain his landscape, unchanging; it is curious that the physical order of things is so slow to filter down into us, and then so impossible to drain back out.
– Eugenio Montale, (trans. Charles Wright)
The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.
– Nicola Tesla
There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.
– Octavia Butler
To love is to give what you do not have to someone who does not want it.
– Lacan
Nearly all of our faults are more forgivable than the means we use to hide them.
– La Rochefoucauld
When people talk about war
I vow with all beings
to raise my voice in the chorus
and speak of original peace.
– Robert Aitken
There is, then, no greater sacrilege than insensitiveness toward those who suffer.
– Simone Weil
With a labyrinth, you make a choice to go in – and once you’ve chosen, around and around you go. But you always find your way to the center.
– Jeff Bridges
The guitar is a gateway drug to poverty.
– Son Marty Mueller
You’re about as bold as tea made from used leaves.
– Elphaba Thropp, Gregory Maguire
Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.
– Voltaire
I believe the best books become not just an accompaniment, but a living companion.
– Julienne van Loon
He who knows not that the Prince of Darkness is the other face of the King of Light knows not me.
– Manly P. Hall
The men who would later claim to speak for the Revolution were nowhere near it. Young, scattered, oblivious. James Madison was fourteen years old, conjugating Latin verbs at a boarding school a hundred miles from home. Alexander Hamilton was a child in the Caribbean (even he didn’t know how old he was). John Jay was a teenage law clerk in New York. The resistance was happening somewhere else, to other people.
– Tad Stoermer
You can’t talk yourself out of problems you behave yourself into.
– Stephen R. Covey
You say you don’t understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day.
– Ray Bradbury, How to Keep and Feed a Muse
I am I plus my surroundings,
and if I do not preserve the latter
I do not preserve myself
– José Ortega y Gasset
We are celebrating a cult of machines — which are replacing us at work, in the kitchen, in the field — as if we were pursuing the idealized ambiance of the royal court (with its bustling yet idle courtiers) and wished to extend it across the whole world. […] At the same time, a feeling of emptiness, superficiality, and sham sets in.
– Stanisław Lem, Summa Technologiae
It’s awful not to be loved. It’s the worst thing in the world…It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel.
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Do not walk with those who fear the archive of their own actions.
– African Proverb
The snow goose need not to bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.
– Lao Tzu
Habits are either the best or the worst things in the world; they either carry us to heaven or hurl us to hell. Form only those that will prove an honor to you.
– Philip Dormer Stanhope, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield
She was heading to America, after all. The truest version of it. The one where everyone pays to be here.
– Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness
The resurrection…is the ultimate affirmation that…embodied human beings matter.
– N.T. Wright
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.
– Victor Hugo
There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.
– Emily St. John Mandel
Come over the hills and far with me
And be my love in the rain.
– Robert Frost
Once metaphysical ideas have lost their capacity to recall and evoke the original experience they have not only become useless but prove to be actual impediments on the road to wider development.
– CG Jung
Always remember that striving and struggle precede success, even in the dictionary.
– Sarah Ban Breathnach
“Well, back in my day…”
Nope.
Today is your day too.
Join us.
– Rob Lott
If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.
– Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
All she’d ever needed was one break. One kind person in her corner. For things, just once, to go her way. But no. She kept getting kicked. Over and over. By whoever felt like it. If you kicked someone like that, you were just one more person on the list of the many people who’d kicked her. Nobody would ever blame you. Whereas if you stood up for someone like that, you risked becoming — well, you risked becoming one of them.
– George Saunders, Liberation Day
Now, it’s a basic mythological principle, I would say, that what is referred to in mythology as “the other world” is really (in psychological terms) “the inner world.” And what is spoken of as “future” is “now.”
– Joseph Campbell
The pen is the antenna to God.
– Quentin Tarantino
…without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action.
– William Hazlitt
An event becomes an experience, moves from outer to inner, is made into soul, when it goes through a psychological process, when it is worked upon by the soul in any of several ways.
– James Hillman, Healing Fiction
Realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.
– Oscar Wilde
TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT!
I used to think “confidence” meant being slick, presentational, never showing your nerves.
Now I see it completely differently.
There is genuine courage in letting your vulnerability be seen.
Your uncertainty, your doubts, your stumbling.
The moments you feel awkward and out of place.
You don’t need to hide any of it.
It’s powerful to be authentic in a world obsessed with surfaces.
To feel deeply instead of performing.
To be fully human, instead of polished, disconnected, and perfectly calm.
This is the grounded kind of confidence.
The kind that says,
“Here I am, in all my strangeness.
Here is my unique, beautiful,
perfectly imperfect tapestry of self.
Take it or leave it!”
– Jeff Foster
Not a single moment, old beautiful Walt Whitman, have I stopped seeing your beard full of butterflies.
– Federico García Lorca
EARTH
Let the day grow on you upward
through your feet,
the vegetal knuckles,
to your knees of stone,
until by evening you are a black tree;
feel, with evening,
the swifts thicken your hair,
the new moon rising out of your forehead,
and the moonlit veins of silver
running from your armpits
like rivulets under white leaves.
Sleep, as ants
cross over your eyelids.
You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.
This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;
you can never be dispossessed.
– Derek Walcott
A decision joins us to the eternal. It brings what is eternal into time. A decision raises us with a shock from the slumber of monotony. A decision breaks the magic spell of custom. A decision breaks the long row of weary thoughts. A decision pronounces its blessing upon even the weakest beginning, as long as it is a real beginning. Decision is the awakening to the eternal.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Our mental cosmos teems with a thicker texture of invisibles than ever before. Living with invisible forces used to mean spirits, ghosts, gods, angels, and ancestors. Our view of nature now supplies different familiar ghosts, including all the wispy tangles, tinctures, and driblets of a working body being revealed to us as never before through technology and nanotechnology. We take for granted the vast invisible worlds surrounding and inside of us. It’s a sort of high-tech shamanism (the belief that spirits inhabit all things, living or nonliving). Some entities may hide in the holly bush at the front door; others float light-years away.
– Diane Ackerman
…this notion of effort. This word at first means something you strive for. But you understand at a certain point that the kind of effort you need to comprehend is different; that what is meant by effort is letting go. It is an effort because I have to struggle against what is ingrained in me about the idea of effort: I want to get something, to do something. Finally, after years of trying, I begin to understand that the nature of effort is to allow something to appear. This new meaning of effort has to do with relaxation. And it is really an effort to understand relaxation when all my training is to strive, to battle against, to chastise some aspect of myself.
– Paul Reynard
To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.
– Rebecca Solnit
If you have patience enough to search, maybe you’ll catch a glimpse of what you’re looking for. And when you find it, you’ll probably be disappointed. It isn’t the devil. It isn’t the State. It isn’t a magical child. It’s the void.
– Roberto Bolaño
This sky like an infinite tenderness, I have caught glimpses of that, / often, so often, and never yet have I described it, I can’t, somehow, I / never will. This sky like an infinite tenderness, I have caught glimpses of that, / often, so often, and never yet have I described it, I can’t, somehow, I / never will.
– Franz Wright, Walking to Martha’s Vineyard
The noble soul is devoted most of all to wisdom and to friendship — one a mortal good, the other immortal.
– Epicurus
At this moment she was much inclined to sit on into the night, spinning her light fabric of thoughts until she tired of their futility…
– Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
Dipa Ma taught that the mind is all stories, one after another, like nesting dolls. You open one, and another is inside. Open that one, and there is another story emerging. When you get to the last nesting doll, the smallest one, and open it, inside of it is—what? It’s empty, nothing there, and all around you are the empty shells of the stories of your life. Because Dipa Ma was able literally to see through the stories of the mind, she did not acknowledge personal dramas of any kind. She wanted her students to live from a deeper truth than their interpretations of, and identification with, the external events of their lives. Dipa Ma knew all about life’s dramas. She had personally suffered chronic illness; grief at the deaths of her parents, husband, and two children; and crushing despair. Only when she had gone beyond identification with the stories and dramas in her life did she begin to live as a free person.
– Amy Schmidt, Dipa Ma
Where I am undefended is where I know love.
– Quiet Lotus
It is as though you have an eye
That sees all forms
But does not see itself.
This is how your mind is.
Its light penetrates everywhere
And engulfs everything,
So why does it not know itself?
– Foyan
The world will not be saved by what we know — but by how deeply we grieve, how fiercely we love, and how unrelentingly we act.
– Adapted from Parker Palmer
My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.
– Agnes Martin
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, and germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
[ FOOL: O nuncle, court holy-water in a dry house is better than this rain-water out o’ door. Good nuncle, in, and ask thy daughters’ blessing: here’s a night pities neither wise man nor fool. ]
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join’d
Your high engender’d battles ‘gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! ‘tis foul!
– William Shakespeare, King Lear
There is no greater cruelty than that which is exercised under the appearance of legality.
– Montesquieu
Seeing myself well lost once more, I sighed,
‘Where, where in Heaven am I? But don’t tell me!
O opening clouds, by opening on me wide.
Let’s let my heavenly lostness overwhelm me.
– Robert Frost, Lost in Heaven
a monastery is a hospital where the master cures the illusion that you are sick.
– Christophe Lebold
The thief left it behind:
the moon
at my window.
– Ryokan
You are like a human transmission tower, transmitting a frequency with your thoughts. If you want to change anything in your life, change the frequency by changing your thoughts.
– Rhonda Byrne
The two sides of a secret are repression and expression, just as the two sides of the poem are the told and the untold.
– Mary Ruefle
Any piece of matter, when heated, starts to glow.
It’s that kind of relationship that’s built on friction.
– Anne Tardos
Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars.
– Theodor Adorno
[As children,] some of us felt like walking tics, too sensitive or rebellious, needy or robotic—damaged like an air conditioner that was dropped in the warehouse, & when the worker points out that it’s broken the boss says: ‘Just put it in a new box. Ship it out.’
– Anne Lamott
For at heart man depends on the picture of himself formed in the minds of others, even if the others are half-wits.
– Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke
winter’s high full moon
old promises turn brittle
ready to be freed
– Akari
Hidden
If you place a fern
under a stone
the next day it will be
nearly invisible
as if the stone has
swallowed it.
If you tuck the name of a loved one
under your tongue too long
without speaking it
it becomes blood
sigh
the little sucked-in breath of air
hiding everywhere
beneath your words.
No one sees
the fuel that feeds you.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
The melting pot was introduced by unbridled industrial capitalism. The thought of being cast into it conjures up martyrdom, not democracy.
– Teddie A. in Minima Moralia
The reason I stopped seeing my psychotherapist was that she wanted to talk about how I should get a teaching job, and I knew I wasn’t going to get one.
– Alice Notley
Love is not liking somebody. Anyone can do that. Love is loving things that sometimes you don’t like.
– Ajahn Brahm
a halo of ice
rings the moon like a promise
never to forget
– Yuki
A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.
– Proverbs 17:22
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
– Albert Einstein
Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.
– Henry J. Kaiser
Slow Music
The building is closed. The sun crowds in through the window
panes
and warms up the surfaces of desks
that are strong enough to take the load of human fate.
We are outside today, on the long wide slope.
Many have dark clothes. You can stand in the sun with your
eyes shut
and feel yourself blown slowly forward.
I come too seldom down to the water. But I am here now,
among large stones with peaceful backs.
Stones which slowly migrated backwards up out of the waves.
– Tomas Transtromer, (tr. Fulton)
our breath interlace
two ghosts stitching themselves
into living cloth
– Yuki
…although anxiety involves the futurity of the future, it is a future humiliated by its insufficiency, exposed in the horror that what its form brings forth is not enough.
– Eugenie Brinkema
The fantasy of persecution is contagious: wherever it occurs spectators are driven irresistibly to imitate it. This succeeds most easily when one gives the fantasy a helping hand by doing what the other fears.
– Theodor Adorno
These Strangers, in a foreign World,
Protection asked of me —
Befriend them, lest Yourself in Heaven
Be found a Refugee —
– Emily Dickinson
If you want to understand people, observe what they envy, not what they praise. Envy is honest. Envy reveals what they secretly wish they had the discipline to build, and what they quietly fear you might achieve long before they do.
– Ryan Leak
your shadow and mine
sleeping together
candlelit cabin
– Akari
The endgame of competence is simple: you become so skilled, so resourceful, and so strategically embedded that whether it’s a company, a relationship, or a project, the rational move for everyone involved is to keep you, reward you, and bet on you, because losing you would cost them more than they’re willing to pay.
– @UnmodernmanBot
Sometimes the poem is for the poet. Sometimes it’s for someone unborn, who will seek shelter under the same willow.
– Alice Kinsella
Only together can we be the irresistible force for the system change we need.
– Oisín Coghlan
Come Inside Now
Come inside now.
Stand beside the warming stove.
Watch out through the windows as
a cold rain tears down
the last leaves.
The larder full of dried herbs,
hot peppers, chutneys,
jellies, jams, dill pickles,
pickled relishes,
pickled beets.
The freezer full of frozen greens–
chard and spinach, collards, kale–
green beans, basil, red sauces,
applesauce, and
smoked meats.
The woodshed dry and full of wood,
winter squashes stashed away.
Down cellar: potatoes, carrots,
crock of sauerkraut.
Come inside now.
Stand beside the warming stove.
Listen. Wait.
– David Budbill, Happy Life
The Poet’s Obligation
To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell:
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.
So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea’s lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn’s castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying, “How can I reach the sea?”
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and of quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of sea-birds on the coast.
So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.
– Pablo Neruda, (tr. Alistair Reed)
The card for the Santa Teresa cybercafe was a deep red, so red that it was hard to read what was printed on it. On the back, in a lighter red, was a map that showed exactly where the cafe was located. He asked the receptionist to translate the name of the place. The clerk laughed and said it was called Fire, Walk With Me.
– Roberto Bolaño
Forgive yourself
as you slip into the cool after years of unrelenting heat.
There is magic in missteps and
miscalculations. There is beauty in accepting life for all that it can be.
– L.E. Bowman
Each of us, briefly, a tense
cast into the other’s time
– Aracelis Girmay
Socialism is the people. If you’re afraid of socialism you’re afraid of yourself.
– Jason Hickel
The crime which bankrupts men and nations is turning aside from one’s main purpose to serve a job here or there.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is the fractal of our flag. It stands for the right to destroy itself.
– Ken Kesey
I refuse to accept
the soul at death
shoots outward consumed
in wind & light.
More likely it arcs
back into the past,
eager to review
every face & word,
poisons as well as
blessings.
– David Rivard
There are several good protections
against temptations, but the surest
is cowardice.
– Mark Twain
Ever since Kant succeeded in convincing the learned that the world of phenomena is quite other than the world of true reality … philosophy has been stuck in a new rut, and cannot move a single millimetre out of the track laid out by the great Königsbergian. Backward or forward it can go, but necessarily in the Kantian rut. For how can you get out of the counterposing of the phenomenon against the thing-in-itself?
– Lev Shestov
The power of myth is to put the mental sheath in touch with this wisdom sheath, which is the one that speaks of the transcendent.
– Joseph Campbell
The cultural emphasis on endless consumption deflects attention from spiritual hunger.
– bell hooks
Anti-Capitalists are deeply connected to the Earth and to the collective.
– Natalie Spautz
Art once made a cult of beauty. Now we have a cult of ugliness instead. This has made art into an elaborate joke, one which by now has ceased to be funny.
– Sir Roger Scruton
…but I am inordinately proud these days of the quill, for it has shown itself, historically, to be the hypodermic that inoculates men and keeps the germ of freedom always in circulation…
– E.B. White
Eyes and ears are poor witnesses to people if they have uncultured souls.
– Heraclitus
We have a powerful potential in our youth, and we must have the courage to change old ideas and practices so that we may direct their power toward good ends.
– Mary Mcleod Bethune
Big Tech may be a worse addiction for society than Big Oil.
– Stinson Carter
If the landslide is big enough, even square pebbles will roll.
– Terry Pratchett
Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing.
– Zhuangz
All arts are anarchist when they are beautiful and good.
– Pissarro
[Real folk music] would help to do away with all of our silly little Clans and Herds and Legions and Cults.
– Woody Guthrie
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
– Sigmund Freud
America has always practiced a quiet form of democratic socialism — long before the word became a political weapon.
We had barn raisings, free breakfast programs, Shaker equality, labor movements,
Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign, and mutual aid societies.
– Holly Pettit
Nostalgia is continually aroused and teased; you miss clips the moment they’re gone, and cling to the aural afterglow of what has passed even as you focus on what is coming, what keeps coming.
– Zadie Smith
Pagan society was much more accepting than modern culture.
– Jiang Xueqin
I cannot remember a night so dark as to have hindered the coming day.
– John Brown
Days were passed in making shrouds, in farewells, in drinking holy thin soup.
– Charles Madge
In religion, as in war and everything else,
comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it.
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end…
If you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth…
only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.
– C.S. Lewis
Authentic culture creates generations of uniquely beautiful souls, a gentrified culture creates generations of extremely confused spirits.
– Zandria F. Robinson
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.
– Abraham Lincoln
If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.
– Gen. Jim Mattis
The chasm between the principles upon which this Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are fully practiced under the protection of the flag, yawn so wide and deep.
– Mary Church Terrell
A man could spend the rest of his life trying to remember what he shouldn’t have said.
– Abraham Polonsky
The universe’s ancient heartbeat predates dogma; if you don’t embrace your own worth, no celestial voice will descend to affirm it – your love is the universe’s love, embodied.
– Mawuli Anani
He who conquers himself is the architect of every future.
– Marcus Aurelius
Spring Day
by Amy Lowell
The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.
The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.
Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot, and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots.
The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air.
Breakfast Table
In the fresh-washed sunlight, the breakfast table is decked and white. It offers itself in flat surrender, tendering tastes, and smells, and colours, and metals, and grains, and the white cloth falls over its side, draped and wide. Wheels of white glitter in the silver coffee-pot, hot and spinning like catherine-wheels, they whirl, and twirl—and my eyes begin to smart, the little white, dazzling wheels prick them like darts. Placid and peaceful, the rolls of bread spread themselves in the sun to bask. A stack of butter-pats, pyramidal, shout orange through the white, scream, flutter, call: “Yellow! Yellow! Yellow!” Coffee steam rises in a stream, clouds the silver tea-service with mist, and twists up into the sunlight, revolved, involuted, suspiring higher and higher, fluting in a thin spiral up the high blue sky. A crow flies by and croaks at the coffee steam. The day is new and fair with good smells in the air.
Walk
Over the street the white clouds meet, and sheer away without touching.
On the sidewalks, boys are playing marbles. Glass marbles, with amber and blue hearts, roll together and part with a sweet clashing noise. The boys strike them with black and red striped agates. The glass marbles spit crimson when they are hit, and slip into the gutters under rushing brown water. I smell tulips and narcissus in the air, but there are no flowers anywhere, only white dust whipping up the street, and a girl with a gay Spring hat and blowing skirts. The dust and the wind flirt at her ankles and her neat, high-heeled patent leather shoes. Tap, tap, the little heels pat the pavement, and the wind rustles among the flowers on her hat.
A water-cart crawls slowly on the other side of the way. It is green and gay with new paint, and rumbles contentedly, sprinkling clear water over the white dust. Clear zigzagging water, which smells of tulips and narcissus.
The thickening branches make a pink grisaille against the blue sky.
Whoop! The clouds go dashing at each other and sheer away just in time. Whoop! And a man’s hat careers down the street in front of the white dust, leaps into the branches of a tree, veers away and trundles ahead of the wind, jarring the sunlight into spokes of rose-colour and green.
A motor-car cuts a swathe through the bright air, sharp-beaked, irresistible, shouting to the wind to make way. A glare of dust and sunshine tosses together behind it, and settles down. The sky is quiet and high, and the morning is fair with fresh-washed air.
Midday and Afternoon
Swirl of crowded streets. Shock and recoil of traffic. The stock-still brick façade of an old church, against which the waves of people lurch and withdraw. Flare of sunshine down side-streets. Eddies of light in the windows of chemists’ shops, with their blue, gold, purple jars, darting colours far into the crowd. Loud bangs and tremors, murmurings out of high windows, whirring of machine belts, blurring of horses and motors. A quick spin and shudder of brakes on an electric car, and the jar of a church-bell knocking against the metal blue of the sky. I am a piece of the town, a bit of blown dust, thrust along with the crowd. Proud to feel the pavement under me, reeling with feet. Feet tripping, skipping, lagging, dragging, plodding doggedly, or springing up and advancing on firm elastic insteps. A boy is selling papers, I smell them clean and new from the press. They are fresh like the air, and pungent as tulips and narcissus.
The blue sky pales to lemon, and great tongues of gold blind the shop-windows, putting out their contents in a flood of flame.
Night and Sleep
The day takes her ease in slippered yellow. Electric signs gleam out along the shop fronts, following each other. They grow, and grow, and blow into patterns of fire-flowers as the sky fades. Trades scream in spots of light at the unruffled night. Twinkle, jab, snap, that means a new play; and over the way: plop, drop, quiver, is the sidelong sliver of a watchmaker’s sign with its length on another street. A gigantic mug of beer effervesces to the atmosphere over a tall building, but the sky is high and has her own stars, why should she heed ours?
I leave the city with speed. Wheels whirl to take me back to my trees and my quietness. The breeze which blows with me is fresh-washed and clean, it has come but recently from the high sky. There are no flowers in bloom yet, but the earth of my garden smells of tulips and narcissus.
My room is tranquil and friendly. Out of the window I can see the distant city, a band of twinkling gems, little flower-heads with no stems. I cannot see the beer-glass, nor the letters of the restaurants and shops I passed, now the signs blur and all together make the city, glowing on a night of fine weather, like a garden stirring and blowing for the Spring.
The night is fresh-washed and fair and there is a whiff of flowers in the air.
Wrap me close, sheets of lavender. Pour your blue and purple dreams into my ears. The breeze whispers at the shutters and mutters queer tales of old days, and cobbled streets, and youths leaping their horses down marble stairways. Pale blue lavender, you are the colour of the sky when it is fresh-washed and fair . . . I smell the stars . . . they are like tulips and narcissus . . . I smell them in the air.
Language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community.
– Noam Chomsky
There’s actually quite a bit of science behind swearing too, they are not just syllabic fill ins, they are processed in the brain differently to other words, they can increase pain tolerance, and can help with emotional regulation.
– Hanna McConnon
It is easy to get attached to any insight we have, especially if it is a profound one, but to be truly free, we must also let go of even our most precious realizations.
– Santiago Santai Jiménez
As a therapist, I’ve asked people to put
a sign on the door of their refrigerator
or wherever else to confront some
compulsive greed they have, that says
“That which I’m seeking I cannot find in
here.” I’ve asked people to look at the
obsession and ask, “What is it really
about?” Greeds are never about what
they’re about, whether its food, money,
power, sex. They’re always ultimately
about spiritual issues driven by fear,
loneliness, emptiness, general anxieties,
absence of meaning.
– James Hollis
The industrial Revolution has separated man from nature and from his family. The only jobs he can get are liable to harm the earth and the atmosphere; in general he doesn’t know whether to be ashamed of being a man or not.
– Robert Bly
The Sabbath is more than an armistice, more than an interlude; it is a profound conscious harmony of man and the world, a sympathy for all things and a participation in the spirit that unites what is below and what is above. All that is divine in the world is brought into union with God. This is Sabbath, and the true happiness of the universe.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
to attain the Grail you must become who you are, realize your unique potentiality, become a type unto yourself. for no one else exactly like you has ever lived before, and no one exactly like you will ever live in the future.
– Keiron le Grice
You cannot teach a man anything, you can just help him to find it within himself.
– Galileo
To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them… to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary.
– George Orwell knew exactly what would happen to our world.
Movement is the song of the body.
– Vanda Scaravelli
lodged
among the words, beneath
the skin of images: nerves,
muscles, rivers
of urgent blood, a mind
secret, disciplined, generous and
unfathomable.
– Denise Levertov
It may just be a refusal to take the counsel of despair. I think to admit despair and to revel in it — as many 20th- and 21st-century writers do — is an easy way out. Whenever I get really really depressed and discouraged about our politics in America and what we are doing, ecologically speaking, globally speaking, [with] our mad rush to destroy the world, it’s very easy to say, “To hell with us. This species is not successful.” Something tells me I have no right to say that. There are good people. Who am I to judge? The problem with despair is it gets judgmental.
– Ursula Le Guin
Just look at your stream of consciousness when you are thinking about a politician you dislike, or when you have just had a minor disagreement with your spouse. It’s like you’re preparing for a court appearance. Your reasoning abilities are pressed into service generating arguments to defend your side and attack the other. We are certainly able to reason dispassionately when we have no gut feeling about a case, and no stake in its outcome, but with moral disagreements that’s rarely the case. As David Hume said long ago, reason is the servant of the passions.
– Jonathan Haidt
“A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until–“My God,” says a second man, “I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn.” At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience… “Look, look!” recites the crowd. “A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.”
– Tom Stoppard
The universe is the combination of a thousand elements, and yet the expression of a single spirit – a chaos to the sense, a cosmos to the reason.
– Helena P. Blavatsky
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
There is a thought in your mind right now. The longer you hold on to it, the more you dwell upon it, the more life you give to that thought. Give it enough life, and it will become real. So make sure the thought is indeed a great one.
– Ralph Martson
You rain on me – I sky you
You’re the fineness, childhood, life – my love –
little boy – old man mother and center – blue –
tenderness – I hand you my universe and you live me
It is you whom I love today.
= I love you with all my loves
I’ll give you the forest with a little house in it
with all the good things there are in my
construction, you’ll live joyfully – I want you to
live joyfully.
– Frida Kahlo
In Fascism the nightmare of my childhood has come true.
– Adorno
We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.
– Terence McKenna
Go within. Use the inner body as a starting point for going deeper and taking your attention away from where it’s usually lodged, in the thinking mind.
– Eckhart Tolle
The whole modern world is at war with the nature of man, and it calls this war ‘progress.’ It breaks the tools of the soul and then wonders why the soul no longer works.
– G. K. Chesterton
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
– G.K. Chesterton
Where Buddhist practices seem to be of most help is in developing more awareness of emotions as they are beginning to arise—the spark before the flame.
– Paul Ekman
I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it.
– Joan Didion
Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
by Robert Duncan
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,
that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein
that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.
Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.
She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.
It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun’s going down
whose secret we see in a children’s game
of ring a round of roses told.
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,
that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.
Modern society flatters men into weakness by promising ease; but a man who accepts ease as his master soon finds he has no strength left to resist anything at all. Comfort is the chief corrupter of the age.
– Hilaire Belloc
Turn within. See the truth. Become the truth.
Do not look to others for advice, what to do, how to live.
Be a lamp unto yourself as the Buddha said.
All the answers are within you.
– Robert Adams
our shared silence
crosses the ridge
far mountain
– Aiko
It is precisely our recognition of life’s inevitable hardships, along with our uprooting of the attachment that exacerbates them, that allows us to appreciate the mere fact of being.
– Reverend Patti Nakai
There’s a whale in my thigh
There’s a whale in my thigh. at
nite he swims the 7 seas. on
cold days i can feel him sleeping.
i went to the dr to see abt myself.
‘do you feel this?’ the dr asked,
a harpoon in my flesh. i nodded
yes in a clinic room of frozen
poetry.
‘then there’s no whale in yr thigh.’
there’s a whale in my mind. i
feed him arrogant prophets.
– Ishmael Reed
Each of us has an image of what we think we are or what we should be, and that image, that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing ourselves as we actually are.
– J. Krishnamurti
There is so much we do not hear—
/ the rumble of shifting sand dunes,
the purr and drum / of the wolf
spider, the echoes of bats, the
explosions / on the sun, the warning
cry of the treehopper?
– Richard Jackson
Some people are so far ahead of their time that they don’t even realize that they’re blazing a path that many will walk in the trails of their existence.
– Nika Solé
We witness and try to alleviate others’ suffering, but sometimes it just outdoes itself and we are left gasping, groaning.
– Anne Lamott
When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.
– C. K. Williams
There are those who actively transform themselves, and those who don’t. And so reflects the split in consciousness.
– Nika Solé
The thirst for truth means that one wants to explore into the being of this whole existence. It is a great passion – the greatest passion.
– Osho
The optimist’s pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural.
– G.K. Chesterton
I believe in the night.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
bare plum branches
their shadows longer now
than the day itself
– Ogawa
But what I couldn’t write swelled
and swelled like an old-fashioned airship and drifted away at
last through the night sky.
– Tomas Transtromer
my reflection
learns stillness
frozen creek
– Akari
Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,
And for the day faint visions there is store;
Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle spright,
Into the clouds, and never more return!
– John Keats
I was born lost and I do not enjoy being found.
– John Steinbeck
The words in books, like the blanket of stars on clear moonless nights, mix with memories of everywhere I’ve been and everyone I’ve known. Books lean against books, even with authors long dead, the words waiting as quiet gifts for us to find.
– steve s. saroff
a cold river
carrying the dreams
of last summer
– Hikari
Soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
– John Keats
Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins
If one could run without getting tired, I don’t think one would often want to do anything else.
– C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle
Anything that’s not growing is dead. So we better be changing.
– Lauryn Hill
A lot of people who transcend in their thinking, understand a lot of different things, not just one.
– Zrow Tollerantz
The genius of quantum mechanics is its obvious incompleteness. We cannot know everything about reality.
– Slavoj Žižek
Love, love, love. And hurry as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the
rubble, or the dust.
Then, go to sleep. Give up your body meat, your beating
heart.
Then, trust.
– Mary Oliver
Much as the achievements of science deserve our admiration, the psychic consequences of this greatest of human triumphs are equally terrible. People still do not know that the greatest step forward is balanced by an equally great step back.
– Carl G. Jung
The possession of anything begins in the mind.
– Bruce Lee
Our blight is ideologies — they are the long-expected Antichrist!
– Carl Jung
When we lie to ourselves, we stand on our wings. There can be no healing unless we first tell ourselves the truth about our wounds.
– Dr. Thema
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
– Richard Dawkins
The Plot Against The Giant
by Wallace Stevens
First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.
Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.
Third Girl
Oh, la … le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.
May you be forever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn’t such a moment sufficient for the whole of one’s life?
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
We are not here to do what has already been done.
– Robert Henri
If your words are not rare, your words do not hold value.
– Dewayne Noel
If your dream does not live after you, you’ve probably had a nightmare.
– Olga Fyne
When a country is Americanised, art, leisure, traditional culture are swept away. Long hours, low wages, economic enslavement to the foreigner, take their place. The political government, which is unimportant, is left to natives; the real government is in the hands of American banks.
– Bertrand Russell
Fear of life closes off more opportunities for us than fear of death ever does.
– Agnes Moorehead
…We choose our next world through what we learn in this one…
– richard bach
no, we are not souls in a bodily form. and no, we are not bodies in a soul form. we are human beings. we are whole-beings. whatever we are, we are in relationship. don’t let “them” tell you otherwise: they will buy and sell your body, and you will pay with your soul.
– hune margulies
…Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant path, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. Whether it flows as sand or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch. Even when the bulbs of the hourglass shatter, when darkness withholds the shadow from the sundial, when the mainspring winds down so far that the clock hands hold still as death, time itself keeps on. The most we can hope a watch to do is mark that progress. And since time sets its own tempo, like a heartbeat or an ebb tide, timepieces don’t really keep time. They just keep up with it, if they’re able.
– Dava Sobel
We walked out of there, and for the first time I felt the mood of a night without feeling that an author was ramming it down my throat for story purposes. I looked at the clean-swept, star-reaching cubism of the Radio City area and its living snakes of neon, and I suddenly thought of an Evelyn Smith story the general idea of which was “After they found out the atom bomb was magic, the rest of the magicians who enchanted refrigerators and washing machines and the telephone system came out into the open.” I felt a breath of wind and wondered what it was that had breathed. I heard the snoring of the city and for an awesome second felt it would roll over, open its eyes, and … speak.
– Theodore Sturgeon
I felt that I could swim out for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever expanding wastes of anonymity. I could swim out into the sea as far as I liked, if what I wanted was to drown. Yet this impulse, this desire to be free, was still compelling to me: I still, somehow, believed in it, despite having proved that everything about it was illusory.
– Rachel Cusk
The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood… a pool that nobody’s fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.”
– Katherine Mansfield
QUESTIONS OF INFLUENCE
It was quite early in the morning
when I fell under the influence of the cup of coffee.
The coffee was under the influence of
some sugar it had met a little earlier
and the caffeine and the sugar got together
in a concerted way to influence my heartbeat
to bump and thrust a little faster.
That’s when I noticed how the sunlight
just outside the kitchen window
seemed to be influencing the cherry tree,
with its white aromatic blossoms,
which were influencing the erotic humming of the bees,
which must have been distantly influencing
the New England honey industry.
I have been living this life for so long,
yet I am only just beginning to comprehend
how the little streams feed into the big;
how even the paper napkin
is composed of tiny woven threads
which have travelled here from far away
to soak up tears, and gravy stains, and
scrawled-down words in blue blurred ink.
So maybe it isn’t wrong to believe
that a book or a poem might have influence;
that one day the right one
might come along
to calm everybody down,
explaining how the pieces fit perfectly together:
how everything
moves through the crowd of everything else
touching and whispering and changing.
– Tony Hoagland
The mind is never passive; it is a perpetual activity, delicate, receptive, responsive to stimulus. You cannot postpone your life until you have sharpened it. Whatever interest attaches to your subject-matter must be evoked here and now; whatever powers you are strengthening in the pupil, must be exercised here and now; whatever possibilities of mental life your teaching should impart, must be exhibited here and now. That is the golden rule of education, and a very difficult rule to follow. […]
The solution which I am urging, is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children – Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages; never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory.
Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of the living of it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together.
– Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Eduction
I love my shape. I didn’t always. A few years ago, my massage therapist advised: “Stand naked in the mirror and say, ‘I love you.’” A colleague and I laughed about this afterward, but I persisted with this through a series of health-building efforts toward increased somatic intelligence. It worked. The massage therapist recently told me, “I could work on you all day; you know how to receive, and not everyone knows how to receive.” I was pleased with this diagnosis.
Released from the baggage of apartheid, my cells and muscles are open and light. These are also aspirations of both traditional Chinese medicine and Buddhism. Bruce Lee believed that in order to be a good fighter in martial arts, you must have loose hips. For this he practiced the dance of cha-cha. Loose hips and a swagger can propel a generosity and lightness that is infectious—it can become viral. A femme can swagger much the same way a butch can swagger, but every swagger has a different tenor, a different musicality, and this is rooted in chemistry, cellular memory, and cellular exchange via touch, fluids, sound, taste, sight, intuition, instinct, guts, breath, etc.
All expand bodily intelligence, physical and emotional attention, and consciousness. To balance yin and yang, I work with somatic intelligence performatively; that is, I perform with intentional, conscious of ways of moving in the world. Like an actor, I can choose which pose, which posture to embody, to appropriate to any given moment. At a young age, I saw Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, and I wanted to wear a blanket in the desert, ride alone on a horse, eat beans from a tin plate. Luckily, I didn’t get trapped there. My imagination was demanding and rigorous and, instead, I propelled myself into this soulful trajectory, embodying hunger and desire with a fistful of bliss.”
– Laiwan
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger.
One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.
– Eckhart Tolle
A man matters, his experiences matter, but in the city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves; and this is of course the beginning of life’s notorious turning into abstraction.
– Robert Musil
You will find out what love is, and what sorrow is, only when your mind has rejected all explanations and is no longer imagining, no longer seeking the cause, no longer indulging in words or going back in memory to its own pleasures and pains. Your mind must be completely quiet, without a word, without a symbol, without an idea. And then you will discover – or there will come into being – that state in which what we have called love, and what we have called sorrow and what we have called death are the same. There is no longer any division between love and sorrow and death; and there being no division, there is beauty. But to comprehend, to be in this state of ecstasy, there must be that passion which comes with the total abandonment of oneself.
– J. Krishnamurti
Drop by drop is the water pot filled. Likewise, the wise man, gathering it little by little, fills himself with good.
– Gautama Buddha
Love never dies of a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source, it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illnesses and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never of natural death. Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love. When something hurts you, saddens you, I rush to avoid it, to alter it, to feel as you do, but you turn away with a gesture of impatience and say: “I don’t understand.
– Anaïs Nin
My memory rummaged through that heap of insignificant recollections that we haphazardly cast aside once our attention has judged them unfit for use — yet which, through some old thrifty habit of our subconscious, end up stacked away in the vast, empty chambers of remembrance, as in the attic of an old country house where three-legged chairs, dented buckets, cracked dishes, chipped jugs, and mismatched books take refuge, to endure quietly in their serene uselessness.
And sometimes it happens that we stumble among the innumerable castoffs of our memory, irritated or moved to discover there an object, an image that we would never have thought to keep.
– Marcel Brion
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
– Joan Didio
The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his “ideas” almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.
Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.
– Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups, who have let the demogogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.
– Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It’s frightening how many people and things there are in a man’s past that have stopped moving. The living people we’ve lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.
As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.
– Louis-Ferdinand Celine
One thing about human nature which has always been a mystery to me is why people, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, will cling to an idea once beaten into their brains, in earlier periods of life which limits their thinking, their ability – even hold them in attitudes which cause them to suffer and die, when a little thought and effort would course them into avenues which would lead to health – might even save their lives. In my personal acquaintance I can name dozens of actual instances of chiropractors who went to their graves decades earlier than they should have because of such an attitude. “Only the teachable survive”, said George Santayana. Which is the same as saying the unteachable perish.
– Raymond Nimmo
Neoliberalism, like all utopian ideologies, requires the banishment of empathy. The inability to feel empathy is the portal to an evil often carried out in the name of progress. A world without empathy rejects as an absurdity the call to love your neighbor as yourself. It elevates the cult of the self. It divides the world into winners and losers. It celebrates power and wealth. Those who are discarded by the corporate state, especially poor people of color, are viewed as life unworthy of life. They are denied the dignity of work and financial autonomy. They are denied an education and proper medical care, meaning many die from preventable illnesses. They are criminalized. They are trapped from birth to death in squalid police states. And they are blamed for their own misery.
– Chris Hedges
The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.
– Tom Stoppard, Arcadia