Journal XXXVI

A notorious beginner of enterprises and non-finisher, partly through lack of time, partly through lack of single-minded concentration, I still wonder how and why I managed to peg away at this thing year after year, often under real difficulties…
– J.R.R. Tolkien

If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.
– Kenneth Goldsmith

YELLOW LADDER
by Elaine Equi

A yellow ladder
leans against
a redbrick wall
under a blue sky.

Beautiful.

But it doesn’t lead
to a window,

and it’s not tall enough
so someone could climb
over the wall.

Maybe a construction
worker left it there
temporarily.

But I don’t think
a builder put it there.

It must have been an artist.

Nevertheless,
don’t walk under it.

I tell my students, who believe passionately in explaining the work they’re sharing, You know, when you’re dead, you can’t go around explaining this thing—it has to be right there on the page.
– Louise Glück

BEAUTY OF THE BLUE SKY

Do we need to make a special effort to enjoy the beauty of the blue sky?
Do we have to practice to be able to enjoy it? No, we just enjoy it.
Each second, each minute of our lives can be like this.
Wherever we are, any time, we have the capacity to enjoy
the sunshine, the presence of each other, even the sensation of our breathing.
We don’t need to go to China to enjoy the blue sky.
We don’t have to travel into the future to enjoy our breathing.
We can be in touch with these things right now.

– Thich Nhat Hanh

What is being suggested is the initiation for enormous changes. In a man, or a woman, there is this potential energy that can just look, but can’t do more. We don’t know what will be the result of starting that process. Each time you start that process, it seems you forget, and forget again. But each time I start, I don’t know where I’ll forget or whether I’ll forget or not. I don’t know where it will lead. When I don’t know where it will lead, maybe then it will last longer. Maybe then I will be interested when I start. If it starts from some ego that wants to change something, it won’t last long. But if it starts from an energy that has awareness, that has the property which light has when it is transforming energy: do you understand what I mean by that? – if it has that property, maybe it will continue. I don’t know at the time I initiate this who is looking, whether I am using the right energy. There is a doing this and a self-observation. Maybe I’m cheating and trying to do something.

Or maybe I’m drawing on a possibility that exists, something universal, a chink of awareness. Maybe that awareness can ferment in me. I don’t know what is the process of that fermentation?

– Lord Pentland

It is only once in a while that you see someone whose electricity and presence matches yours at that moment.
– Charles Bukowski

The ancient world was settled so sparsely that nature was not yet eclipsed by man. Nature hit you in the eye so plainly and grabbed you so fiercely and so tangibly by the scruff of the neck that perhaps it really was still full of gods.
– Boris Pasternak

Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection …of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.
– David Whyte

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate…
– Anne Carson

It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.
– Anne Carson

To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.
– Michel Houellebecq

The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.
– Rollo May

Yet again, isn’t there something terrible in randomness—the idea that at the very bottom of its calculations, real depravity has no master plan of any kind, it’s just a dreamy whim that slides out of people when they are trapped or bored or too lazy to analyze their own mania.
– Aeschylus

Experiencing the radical present doesn’t mean detaching from what comes next.
– Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat Roshi

I am trying to write / a poem in which 1 am neither a monster nor a
martyr.
– Meghan O’Hern

You’re painfully alive in a drugged
and dying culture.

– Richard Yates

Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.
– Leo Tolstoy

After all those years of listening,
I thought you’d know
what a story was.

All you could do was weep.
You wanted everything told to you
and nothing thought through yourselves.

– Louise Glück

All the hardships of training teach you not only that nature can heal but also the importance of humility and surrender and recognizing that we’re part of something much larger. Surrender actually nourishes our sense of belonging.
– Hiroko Yoda

Not the blue the orthodoxy of the day
But a blue like intuition
The soft of the night into morning
Felt here. remembered
Under the hoofs of the cart

– Kamau Brathwaite

To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy.
– Robert Doisneau

Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.
– Dana Gioia

Happiness is to be outside, to walk, to look, to amalgamate with things. Sitting down, you fall victim to the worst of yourself. Man was not created to be nailed to a chair. But perhaps he doesn’t deserve any better.
– Emil Cioran

I was wedded to all the stars of the sky: There was not a single star left;
and I married every one of them with great spiritual pleasure…

Then I married the moon.

– Ibn Arabi

Fancy demanding feeling from poetry! That’s not the main thing at all. Radiant words, words of light, full of rhythm and music, that’s poetry.
– Théophile Gautier

The forces that are worked against you can only get through to you where your aura is weakened. Through your vices, your limiting beliefs, and what you’ve not made right within yourself.
– Nika Solé

There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever; everything useful is ugly.
– Théophile Gautier

There is a kind of dream we call kawaru yume. The Dream That Changes. There is the yochi yume, the dream in which you see what will happen. This is useful, to prepare for events that are otherwise unseen. The kawaru yume is more important. It’s seeing which world we are in, and whether we need to stay there. You not only see the future, you can lean in to make it change.
– Robert Moss

Mister Rogers once talked about how if you asked a room full of people to draw a tree, every single one would look different.

Even though we all know what a tree is.

And I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

When we’re little, we create so freely.
Purple trees.
Crooked trees.
Trees with giant swirls and strange colors and wild ideas.

Children don’t begin by asking,
“Is this cool?”
They begin by asking,
“What if?”

But somewhere along the way, many of us slowly learn to stop drawing our own tree.

We start noticing what gets approval.
What gets likes.
What helps us fit in.
And little by little, some people begin hiding the parts of themselves that made them unique in the first place.

I know I did.

I spent a lot of years trying to fit in somewhere.
Trying to figure out who I was supposed to be.

And honestly, it wasn’t until I became a father—and really, maybe not even until my 30s—that I started circling back to something I knew naturally as a child:

There is only one me.

Only one person with my ideas, my imagination, my voice, my perspective, my way of seeing the world.

And the same is true for you.

Sometimes growing up is actually the process of finding the courage to become yourself again.

To stop apologizing for your creativity.
To stop shrinking your ideas.
To stop believing you have to draw the same tree as everybody else.

The world doesn’t need another copy.

It needs the tree only you would draw.

– Lauren Loveless

‘Jesus’ life didn’t go well. He didn’t reach his earning potential. He didn’t have the respect of his colleagues. His friends weren’t loyal. His life wasn’t long. He didn’t meet his soul mate. And he wasn’t understood by his mother.

…Yet I think I deserve all those things because I’m so spiritual.

– Hugh Prather

Cynics are only in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves.
– George Meredith

We must never be afraid to be a sign of contradiction for the world.
– Mother Teresa

Developing compassion is the most fruitful way of “getting even” with people who make you angry.
– Chögyam Trungpa

That outering or uttering of sense which is language and speech is a tool which ‘made it possible for man to accumulate experience and knowledge in a form that made easy transmission and maximum use possible.ʼ
– Marshall McLuhan

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
– Charles Mingus

As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has-or ever will have-something inside that is unique to all time.
– Fred Rogers

Empaths did not come into this world to be victims, we came to be warriors. Be brave. Stay strong. We need all hands on deck.
– Anthon St. Maarten

A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a shortcut to meet it.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Of course everybody knows without telling that the king is naked: that the metaphysicians not only are unable to explain anything, but that hitherto they have not been able to present even a single hypothesis free from contradiction.
– Lev Shestov

There is no small act of kindness.
Every compassionate act makes large the world.
– Mary Anne Radmacher

In short, the medium is the message signifies not only the end of the message, but also the end of the medium. There are no longer media in the literal sense of the term … that is to say, a power mediating between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another — neither in content nor in form.
– Jean Baudrillard

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.
– Jodi Picoult

People of uncommon abilities generally fall into eccentricities when their sphere of life is not adequate to their abilities.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When a society has no mythological anchor, no soul-affirming rites-of-passage, a society doesn’t know which story it’s in. When you lose the metaphor, a hand moves briskly to a rusty blade. We are adrift in an epidemic of the literal.
– Dr. Martin Shaw

You don’t really exist in the way that you think you do, so you are constantly trying to secure your existence.
– Chögyam Trungpa

A personal library is a quiet anchor.
– Rachel Carson

It’s interesting watching people underestimate you until they realize you were being humble, not incapable.
– J.

All ‘scholars’ are apt to be quarrelsome…
– J.R.R. Tolkien

In early morning
I gaze at the sweep of the sky
cloud formations I’ve never seen before
then realize that this particular sky
with its clouds, colors, curves
is unique

Each person is their own sky
never before present on earth
which a breath created long ago
in a singular garden

– Mark Gordon

We do not know what the psyche is, this noun taken from a verb psychein, ‘to breathe’. But therein lies the clue that the psyche is a verb and not a noun, a process and not an entity. To think of the psyche, even the unconscious, as an entity leads to the fallacy of literalism wherein one is more easily seduced by the fantasy of measurement or manipulation, rather than the more respectful effort to track those energies as intentions and to possibly align oneself with them.
– James Hollis

The fun of this whole thing is to make patterns, to figure out games, to do something with it.
– Alan Watts

If we think that things are being repeated, it is generally because we don’t pay attention to all of the details. But if we pay attention we see that there is no such thing as repetition.
– John Cage

We wholly overlook the essential fact that the achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.
– CG Jung

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.
– Haruki Murakami

With an ambiguity I want to clarify: I hide from language inside language. When something–including nothingness–has a name, it seems less hostile. Nevertheless, I suspect that the essential is unspeakable.
– Alejandra Pizarnik, (tr. Cole Heinowitz)

We can faithfully adhere to a precept, and yet end up doing irreparable harm. We can never trace the ultimate consequence of our choices, but it’s safe to conclude that whatever we decide to do will be fraught with certain error and fall short of the best intent.
– Lin Jensen

If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.
– Haruki Murakami

The antidote to wrongs done in the past is restitution. But the only antidote to feelings of guilt, whether individual or collective, is repentance.
– Owen Barfield

Hard truth: If you are looking for perfect consistency in a relationship you are not going to find it. A human being is not a machine.
– Yung Pueblo

It’s always interesting that people search so tirelessly outside of themselves, for who they are.
– Nika Solé

Even if we are not at a meditation center, we can still practice at home, because around us the dharma is present. Each pebble, each leaf, each flower is preaching the dharma.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

A life based on thought and its activities becomes mechanical; however smoothly it may run, it is still mechanical action.
– Krishnamurti

VICTIMS OF CAPTOLOGY

I don’t look outside
or talk to the night
sky. I fall asleep
with my hands
holding my phone
like it’s your face.

– Kyla Jamieson

The Madman knows that once God is dead, man must live like a god: man must go beyond the limits of his own being, leave his own nature behind and assume the burden, the risk, and the pleasure of divinity.
– Octavio Paz

The work of art lives and develops, like any other natural organism, through the conflict of opposing principles. Opposites reach over into each other within it, taking the idea out into infinity.
– Andrei Tarkovsky

The metaphors we use to describe the world (such as a machine, a jungle, a seamless whole, a mother, a living being) affect ways we live.
– Lisa M Christie, PhD

You don’t need to seek awakening. Just notice where you’re resisting life, and soften there. Freedom is already here.
– Amoda Maa

Besides, I’m not in the mood for all this today. I have no desire to demonstrate, surprise, amuse, or persuade. My goal is absolute rest. To know nothing, to teach nothing, to want nothing, to sense nothing, to sleep, and then to sleep more.
– Charles Baudelaire

Clear-seeing comes not from mind-based beliefs or knowledge, but from the absence of the overlay of beliefs on what we see.
– Amoda Maa

I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way, we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
– Hermann Hesse

It’s also a basic misunderstanding about the nature of translation–cherry-picking a single word isn’t very useful or productive.
– Alicia E. Stallings

As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around.
– Haruki Murakami

Identification with our mind causes thought to become compulsive.
– Eckart Tolle

When the spiritual war on the planet heats up, those with the purest hearts and most active divine connection are chosen to lead humanity through it.
– Nika Solé

I think it’s okay if writers don’t have the answers to what happened in a story, as long as an emotional truth was discovered.
– Melissa Lozada-Oliva

Floating Sweet Dumpling
by Ho Xuan Huong

Translated by Marilyn Chin

My body is powdery white and round
I sink and bob like a mountain in a pond
The hand that kneads me is hard and rough
You can’t destroy my true red heart

The older I get, the more I understand people who move to the countryside, grow their own vegetables, get a dog, and only talk to about three people. That life gets more appealing every year.
– Introvert Problems

The universe has an odd habit of making the strongest souls wait the longest for the things meant for them.
– Nithya Shri

We are defined and controlled by all that we have not transcended.
– Adi Da

The legitimate function of the mind is to tell you what is not.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

We cannot let the oil companies, the gas companies, and petro states tell us what is permissible.
– Al Gore

Those who don’t want to change, let them sleep.
– Rumi

Wires

The widest prairies have electric fences,
For though old cattle know they must not stray
Young steers are always scenting purer water
Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires

Leads them to blunder up against the wires
Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter.
Young steers become old cattle from that day,
Electric limits to their widest senses.

– Philip Larkin

Human Mind

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
Find good in it sometimes

– Mavis Staples

I tell the rogues to read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the internet or watch too much television lose it… Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.
– Werner Herzog

I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.
– Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

There’s a dream I have in which I love the world.
– Cameron Awkward-Rich

One hour devoted to mourning and lamenting the stolen equality of the weak is nobler than a century filled with greed and usurpation.
– Kahlil Gibran

In a world in which we have a diagnostic term for every “abnormal” state of mind, we overlook the pathology of the “normal”: the unreflective participation in a destructive pursuit of status, wealth, and power.

We are so profoundly sick as a society that we do not see how spiritually ill that society asks us to be: it wants our souls lost in the doomscroll; it wants us addicted to flickering images, distracted by meaningless bickerings, all while the powerful do what they wish with our world.

In such a distorted world, those who are spiritually stationary appear “healthy.” Those who are spiritually searching, however, appear “ill”—and indeed they often are, as they are the rightly restless ones; they are the seekers; they are carrying the burden of something ancient, something new, something that has no place in a world that has abandoned the pursuit of Truth for the pursuit of winning the meaningless Game at all costs—even at the cost of lives, futures, souls.

Such a Truth needs solitude, patience, and deep communion in which to grow. If it does not become itself, it turns into bitterness, rage, destruction.

And that is just more currency for the Players of the Game.

But Truth has another chance to appear. If it does, it will come from the outcasts, from the thinkers, from the feelers; it will come from the artists who risk everything; it will come from the children who refuse to play the false game and choose the real one; it will come in some inconspicuous place, on some distant day, in the eyes of someone who has gone deep enough into the fear and the solitude and the mystery to be changed, to see the self and the other, to see the heart of the real.

And when that life speaks, when it comes with its clarity and mystery, we will be judged by whether we can hear it, by whether we have lost the capacity to do so, by whether we destroy it because we cannot bear the challenge of its simple and transformative truth.

We will be judged by whether we make a space for it at the table or crown it again in thorns.

Because that is what the lost do with Truth, with Beauty, with Love. They come face to face with the devastating clarity of its command—”love one another”—and they nail it in the air among the birds.

They build systems and wage wars to cover up that simple mystery. They slay that Truth and then wear its symbols in a mockery of what it came for.

They slay whatever wakens them too soon.

Our only hope is to not be so lost. Our only hope is in cultivating the ability to listen. Not just to speak, not just to opine, not just to consume mindlessly, but to listen.

Can we listen, really listen—to ourselves, to each other, to the voices that rise up in solitude, to the ancient things within us, trying to tell us what they have always known? Can we hear the great questions instead of the sham ones? Can we live? Do we even want to?

The command is simple but the way is hard. But it is a joyful difficulty. Because it is both rest and work. Both stillness and motion. Because all this listening and all this becoming and all this search for Truth is one thing: love.

What is the rain saying? What is your neighbor going through? What is that voice whispering in you, that hunger you’ve learned to ignore, that calling you’re told you’d be absolutely mad to follow through the dark of the door?

– Joseph Fasano

If we don’t have true perception of visual dharma, a lot of things can go wrong.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Empty, I echo to the least footfall.
– Sylvia Plath

Do not act out words. Never act out words. Never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. Never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death. Do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love.
– Leonard Cohen

Poetry Will Save the World

I prefer not to make definitive or
bold claims. But consider that this
is neither definitive nor bold, just
a noted truth. Not that the world
needs saving. Not that poetry has
a grand plan. Just that it is nearly
impossible to act in violence when
in full attendance of your life,
which a poem asks of you to be.
Just that an awakened heart, for
which poetry is a key, has no desire
beyond the greatest of desires—
to love the earth, to protect its
possibility, and then to pass it on,
to let it all go.

– Moudi Sbeity

The Document
by Noor Hindi

The document mistranslates. You live / to collect your loved one’s losses / Their archive. Their quiet. What did you leave behind, oh ache ? / Oh whimper? / You are everyone I kn(o/e)w. When I stood in Al Akhdar I heard the streets calling your name. I heard the men / stomping their feet & I wept & I wept & I wept across the Dead Sea, across (mis)memories of my mother pacing / that miserable street. Somewhere you are smoking argeela Playboy / sunglasses clasped to your shirt. Somewhere I am sleeping next to you & you are asking me about death & I am too young too young too young to know loss / & I promise you we’ll live forever. There at the edge / of Jaafar Al-Husseini Street my father returns / home all briefcase & sweaty hands. Once, a rooftop wedding. Once, a certificate of death. My father collected / every report card of mine growing up — A Pleasure to Have in Class A Pleasure / to grow up in the states, a pleasure to be untouched by the news to hold a Certificate / of Participation for Your Obedience to the State. You Live Long Enough in the United States & You Mistake an Israeli Warplane for A Shooting Star my friend says / her eyes / offering me a photo of the Sea. In Amman, I Don’t Have an Address to Your Grandmother’s Home, my 3amo says, but I Can WhatsApp You the Coordinates. From Dearborn Ramleh is 5,977 miles or 9619.049 kilometers away / depending on who we audience. In Amman I was Case No. 2530400000131915 because I lost my Passport & when the man with a cigarette asks me where I lost it I mishear him / I mistranslate & I am afraid / to cough from the smoke in that too small room & lose another country not mine. The Air Here . . . I tell her . . . If It’s Anything Like Cairo It’s Like Sand + Salt + Warmth + Also Somehow Sweet. It Fills Your Lungs Different. It’s Easier to Breathe, she tells me. In Palestine — I can’t tell you about Palestine / I’ve never been but I have my Father’s Documents to prove us / The documents that rename me / refuse me / spectacle our birth & our death The Document as map as fiction as shame as eviction Please Rate Your Experience Please / stand in this Assembly / Line of Loss / Please: We’ve all wanted to be loved / by an impossible thing / it’s why the monarch butterflies keep following us around & This Is How It Is Habibti / Things Happen Until You Die / & All You Can Do Is Not Break

The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found an enemy is manufactured.
– Chris Hedges

It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man.
– Henri de Lubac

The exceptionals get rewarded differently.
– JJ Omojuwa

The true use of music is to become musical in one’s thoughts, words, and actions.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan, Sufi mystic

An overdose of praise is like 10 lumps of sugar in coffee; only a very few people can swallow it.
– Emily Post

God did not create evil. Just as darkness is the absence of light, evil is the absence of God.
– Albert Einstein

Where love, grounded in truth, is absent, sin disorders speech and conduct, and offense is not accidental but inevitable.
– Sophion A. Theophilus

To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.
– Mahatma Gandhi

If you’re really successful at bullshitting, it means you’re not hanging around enough people smarter than you.
– Neil deGrasse Tyson

I am far from being bad and just as far from being good. I can be as soft as satin, or as hard as a coral stone. … I am simply man.
– Giacomo Casanova

Like a novelist who never outlines a book, I’d never plotted my future.
– Tom Grimes, Mentor

It’s the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.
– Jennifer Egan

No one carries the best parts of themselves. The best parts are those held inside of others.
– Daniel Kraus, Whalefall

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
– Thomas Sowell

Authors are like tulips trampled beneath tyranny. In their desperation to preserve draconian regimes, oppressors attempt to shackle truth itself — yet the pen forever remains sovereign in its own dominion.
– Zargar Ishfaq

If we are to continue to exist, we will require more than intelligence. We will require wisdom.
– David Attenborough

Society corrupts the best of us. It is a little unfair to criticize a person for not sharing the enlightenment of a later epoch, but it is also profoundly saddening that such prejudices were so extremely pervasive. The question raises nagging uncertainties about which of the conventional truths of our own age will be considered unforgivable bigotry by the next.
– Carl Sagan

Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.
– Rene Descartes

An old error is
often more popular
than a new truth.

– German proverb

When you resist evil you are in fact celebrating life, and it’s okay to have a good time.
– Bruce Cockburn

The Self is the silent listener to the music of the spheres.
– Adi Shankara, Vivekachudamani

And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.
– Samantha Harvey

An artist can’t strive to make art any more than a monk can strive for enlightenment.
– Shozan Jack Haubner

If you go into the dark in this super graduated titrated way, what I found over and over is the darkness will show you the way.
– Andrew Holecek, On Dark Retreat

Witness is its own riddle that suspects it must create a world to say the world is real.
– Dan Beachy-Quick

If not for those black scratches
On the page
Where would I be?

Words connecting
The world
To the wound,

Connecting them both to me.

– Gregory Orr

Each of us, when in extremity, may, in that moment, find it impossible to escape the net of anguish, but a single person with a simple gesture can open such a door for us.
– Douglas J. Penick

A life-illusion is never wholly untrue. It is a vaporous eidolon of yourself that walks about with you wherever you go. It is a shadow. And because it is a shadow it has truth.
– John Cowper Powys

The whole task of art is to unexpress the expressible, to kidnap from the world’s language, which is the poor and powerful language of the passion, another speech, an exact speech.
– Roland Barthes

I will survive the wrong / I’ve done. All the love / that didn’t serve me.
– Leila Chatti

I find the blueprint
of the universe
in a leaf’s veins
in the breath
that weaves the morning

– Mark Gordon

Whenever the digital age encourages us to prize our rights over those of others, it overturns society as we know it and propels us ever farther from our best and deepest interests.
– Pico Iyer

With our thoughts we make ourselves unhappy because we are attached to the idea of trying to satisfy ourselves.
– Kosho Uchiyama Roshi

There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist
and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man.
You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover.
You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have
to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within
you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of
childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to
everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself.
You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek.
You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself.
You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you!
– Hermann Hesse

We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.
– Carl Rogers

…part of the problem was I had surrounded myself with the fiction writers instead of the poets. I had chosen the wrong world to immerse myself in; the poets were nightclub docents of mourning and melancholia and the fiction writers were real estate agents.
– Patrick Cottrell

To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life
Among strangers.
– Gerard Manley

Great art has often been made by bad people. So what? Expecting the artist to be a good person was a sentimental canard of Victorian moralism, rejected by the “art for art’s sake” movement led by Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.
– Camille Paglia

On my way home, I ask the sky to come down and keep me company, but the sky prefers its own boundlessness.
– Yuki Tanaka

The Other is not any one thing found in any particular place. It is a quality of (or rather visible in) all things, like a specific color. It shines through them at us. We see it and it sees back, as in a dialog…
– Philip K. Dick

To be nothing implies tremendous inward meditation. That is real meditation.
– Krishnamurti

Something in both of us
never got born:
too late to hack it out,
or to unlearn
needed, familiar pain.
Come, little thorn.

– Jay Macpherson

We are simply returning to the primordial ground of our own consciousness. This invites us to understand enlightenment not as becoming something sublime, but as returning to who we truly are—our original nature.
– Anam Thubten

That’s the way

it would be, everyone slender as drinking straws

nobody leaky

or hurting or abjectly religious, everything

allbillowyellowyorangeyflowywonderfulness

– C. D. Wright

If you don’t have a song to sing, you’re okay
You know how to get along, humming
– Fiona Apple

People make use of writers only in order to work off their own excess energy on them, in the form of agreement or disagreement.
– Robert Musil

ENGLISH

What language is this
that equates I love you
with I love turnips?
Can we not have another word
for passion, steady passion,
the agony that launched a thousand ships?
And let it be fresh,
yet one we’re used to:
I home you. You breathe me. We stallion.
If you cannot be a singer, be a story.
If you cannot be a story, be a song.
Say it, now,
to yourself, your love, your other:
I Rome you.
You Pompeii me.
I wouldn’t Judas you.

– Joceh Fasano

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.
– Herman Melville

Losing a Language

We were born with a
large door on our backs. When will
we know if it opens?

– Victoria Chang

They are so damn ‘intellectual’ and rotten that I can’t stand them anymore….I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those ‘artistic’ bitches of Paris.
– Frida Kahlo

It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard.
– Carl Rogers

The moment you choose truth over fear…

Everything begins to shift.

Not because the world changes —
but because you do.

Alignment starts quietly.
Doors open subtly.
Your light doesn’t force its way forward…

It simply stops hiding.

– Bill Philipps

Remember, you are the untouched presence observing the entire battles and drama of the person. You don’t need to move the mind aside to get to Truth, for Truth is not apart from you. Simply recognize and stay as the witnessing self.
– Mooji

I prefer to think of my patients and myself as fellow travelers, a term that abolishes distinctions between ‘them’ (the afflicted) and ‘us’ (the healers).
– Yalom

Writers are sorcerers of this realm. They take reality (and its neurologic recreations: dreams, memories) and turn it into a reality that is not reality but contingent on reality, a reality with the ability to alter reality in an endless feedback loop of forms and characters.
– delonix regia

This very day start your new life. Approach every experience in a new frame of mind with a new state of consciousness. Assume the noblest and the best for yourself in every respect and continue therein.
– Neville Goddard

Give your real being a chance, to shape your Life. The sinner and the saint are merely exchanging notes. The saint has a past and the sinner has a future. Therefore do not judge.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Long I sought you, late I found you,
Straying on the farther shore:
You indeed? a swaying phantom
Fades, that flickered on before.
Lost, no rescue: only dreams our
Wandered, wandered loves restore.

– Jay Macpherson

Home where I come from, well that all flow from, than memory
Deeper, the dreamland sluice that restores our friends:
Distant, sealed with a stone, but murmuring always:
If I forget thee, O secret fountain, forget not me.
– Jay Macpherson

When we get busy, we cut out the very things that will benefit us the greatest for the future, like training and personal development. If we miss these “upgrades,” when a change comes we will be less ready to embrace it.
– Cy Wakeman

What next device will fill the air with burning dollars
…
May we consent?
Consent to what? Nobody knows.
Yet the computers are convinced
Fed full of numbers by the True Believers.

– Thomas Merton (1961)

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves .
– Henry David Thoreau

God cannot be limited (even by his own Foundations) – of which St Paul is the first & prime example – and may use any channel for His grace.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

If Luther’s day expand to Darwin’s year,
Shall that exclude the hope—foreclose the fear?
– Herman Melville

Simplicity is not an end in art, but we usually arrive at simplicity as we approach the true sense of things.
– Constantin Brâncuși

We don’t know how long our lives will be or what misfortunes we may encounter later that may make it difficult to make real moral progress. So there is no time to lose!
– Jay L. Garfield

In olives ripened on the tree the very proximity of decay lends a special beauty to the fruit.
– Marcus Aurelius

The most honest artistic statement would read “I make stuff and figure it out later.
– Airea D. Matthews

There’s nobody living who couldn’t stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall. It’s a simple experience; you become lighter & lighter in weight. I want to draw a certain response like this––that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind
– Agnes Martin

It is easy to believe that we partake of certain virtues when we share in the defects they imply.
– Nicolás Gómez Davila

The Buddha is not in the ruins but in the continuous devotion of the people who visit.
– Philip Ryan

Even when the character is ourselves, in a memoir or essay, authors must find ways to allow readers deeply into their minds, their hearts, their skin.
– Tiffany Yates Martin

The poison was never forced;
it was offered gently,
until you forgot it was poison at all.
– Mark Twain

A master is always a friend, but his friendship has a totally different fragrance. It is less friendship and more friendliness. Its intrinsic part is compassion. He loves you because he cannot do anything else.
– Osho

I believe in the value of books and in reading, and the impact of small things, like a brief note with a few kind words. For me, the response acknowledges that they’ve been heard, that their request matters, and that they matter too.
– Andrea A. Firth

To come up with a good line is like briefly discovering that you are sane.
– Geoffrey Hill

Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.
– C.S. Lewis

“Read between the lives,” and “write between the lines.” “Be committed to something outside yourself…”
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The most feminine women are actually the most masculine within.
– Carl Jung

Technology is not only the thing that moves the human race forward, but it’s the only thing that ever has. Without technology, we’re just monkeys playing in the dirt.
– @naval

Nervous system regulation will change your whole world because reality looks completely different when you look at it from a place of inner peace. I see this shift every single day with my clients. It’s reality bending and world changing work.
– Nika Solé

At some point you discover the light in the darkness. You discover the lightness of being at your core, the jewel of freedom in the midst of all experiences. You discover that there really are no opposites in life … only those you create in your mind.
– Amoda Maa

You don’t have to hurry to get somewhere that has already been prepared for you. You just need to make sure that you’re the absolute best version of yourself when you arrive.
– Nika Solé

I want to talk about everything with at least one person as I do with myself.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Just because you are soft doesn’t mean you are not a force. Honey and wildfire are both the color gold.
– Victoria Erickson

Transference arises spontaneously in all human relationships … and the less its presence is suspected, the more powerfully it operates.
– Freud

If a father bathes his children, both will laugh, and if a son bathes his father, both will cry.
– Turkish proverb

There is no hurry, and in a way, there is no future. It is all here — so take it easy, take your time, and get acquainted with it.
– Alan Watts

We lost the plot when we started viewing the Earth as a giant store or landfill instead of a life-supporting miracle we are part of.
– @OrevaZSN

By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.
– H. D. Thoreau

I’ve always told people that all they have to do is read. But that’s the hardest thing to do.
– Hélène Cixous

I pray for your career. / That you aren’t crushed by the stupid and the vacant. / For whatever is left / of imagined, impossible careers: / dyspeptic soda jerk dying in Frazier, Indiana; / a librarian in Pompeii
– Paul Guest

If you cannot call wrong as wrong, you’re at the last stage of slavery.
– Che Guevara

early dawn light
the tea glowing
on its own

– @BashoSociety

We are all
voyeurs of
the universe.

– David Starzynski

lying in a hammock on St. Mark’s Place sorting my poems
in the rancid nourishment of this mountainous island
– Frank O’Hara

Bedouin of the London Evening

Ten years in your cafés and your bedrooms
Great city, filled with wind and dust!

Bedouin of the London evening,
On the way to a restaurant my youth was lost.

And like a medium who falls into a trance
So deep, she can be scratched to death
By her Familiar – at its leisure!
I have lain rotting in a dressing-gown
While being savaged (horribly) by wasted youth.

I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown
My private modern life has gone to waste.

– Rosemary Tonks

Poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to remember what they are risking. What I see as poetry is a sample of the human scene, its incurably acute melancholia redeemed only by affection.
– David Schubert

If you get your back up when someone questions your ideology, it’s because your ideology has become your identity. Don’t do that.
– Kenneth Folk

Language becomes for us, not a tool invented by individual minds, but an echo reverberating from the source of all individual minds, of all individual selves.
– Owen Barfield

Without hard work, you‘ll develop neither judgement nor leverage.
– @naval

The infinite is bliss. There is no bliss in anything finite. Only the Infinite is bliss. One must desire to understand the Infinite.
– Chandogya Upanishad

Spirituality gets stuck on thinking that you need to dissolve your self. Like you can’t have human emotions or a backbone. But I don’t think that’s true at all. The integration of and existing as all of it is, to me, the entire point.
– Nika Solé

But what if we take forgiveness off the table?

His question dangles in the silence between us.

Unanswered, yet spacious.

– Rachel Newcombe

The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?
– Emil Cioran

fading light
as the day
releases its hold

– Ogawa

One benefit of doing shadow work is most people’s insults towards you won’t work anymore because you’ve been reflecting on that part of yourself for years.
– Laura Matsue

subjectivity or self-aware consciousness is not an attribute I would attach to a river […] one way to imagine the life of the river is to consider the multiplicity of lives concentrated in this moving, directional form …
– Lisa Robertson

Every person sooner or later invents a story that they take to be their life.
– Max Frisch

Your own tactic is to train yourself in the art of becoming enigmatic to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubled himself to guess your riddle–what joy, then, would you have in it?
– Søren Kierkegaard

Weakness on both sides is, as we know, the motto of all quarrels.
– Voltaire

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.
– Rene Magritte

I no have education. I have inspiration. If I was educated I would be a damn fool.
– Bob Marley

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
– Matthew Arnold

If your work comes from a place deep within, its authenticity will be communicated.
– Robert Greene, Mastery

Everything in the Universe was as the Creator willed it – nothing superfluous, nothing lacking – a harmony.
– Joseph Hertz

Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one.
– Matthew Arnold

People have to go through dark times;
the mark of a person is can they do it.
– Martin Short

The things that seem insignificant to most people such as a note, song or walk become invaluable treasures kept safe in your heart to cherish forever.
– Bob Marley

The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.
– Henry David Thoreau

They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life.

– Louise Glück

Methinks that the moment my legs began to move, my thoughts began to flow.
– Henry David Thoreau

Time ripens all things; no one is born wise.
– Miguel de Cervantes

What is war? War is when you really want to live.
– Svetlana Alexeivich

What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case?
– Friedrich Nietzsche

I know what they’d like, they’d like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly.
– Patricia Highsmith

Wisdom is sold in a desolate marketplace where none can come to buy.
– William Blake

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
– Sigmund Freud

You can take a man’s show, but you can’t take his voice.
– David Letterman

Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.
– Richard Dawkins

Of course, grown-ups won’t believe you. They imagine they need a lot of space. They think they’re as important as baobab trees.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Love is a sacred mystery.
To those who love, it remains forever wordless;
But to those who do not love, it may be but a heartless jest.

– Khalil Gibran

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.
– George Eliot

The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
– Matthew Arnold

It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Imagine a world where belonging is the foundation of life… the air is filled with laughter, the streets with trust, and the homes with love.
– Ken Breniman

The world is incomprehensible. We won’t ever understand it; we won’t ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as it is: a sheer mystery.
– Carlos Castaneda

Most writers are at once their own readers — as they write — and that is why so many traces of the reader appear in their works — so many critical considerations — so much which is the province of the reader and not the writer.
– Novalis, Teplitz Fragments

To keep our hearts open is probably the most urgent responsibility you have as you get older.
– Leonard Cohen

Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.
– Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

The Celtic imagination always sensed that beneath time there was eternal depth. This offers us a completely different way of relating to time. It relieves time of the finality of ending. While something may come to an ending on the surface of time, its presence, meaning, and effect continue to be held and integrated into the eternal. This is how spirit unfolds and deepens. In this sense, eternal time is intimate; it is where the unfolding narrative of individual life is gathered and woven. Eternal life is eternal memory; therefore, it becomes possible to imagine a realm beyond endings where all that has unfolded is not canceled or lost, but where the spirit-depths of it are already arriving home.
– John O’Donohue

Fiction writers really expect to be heard.
Whereas poets don’t. Poets go into writing poetry knowing it’s speculation.
– Fanny Howe

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression “metaphysical exile” had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.
– Emil Cioran

a sight of Manahatta in the towering needle
multi-faceted insight of the fly in the stringless labyrinth
– Frank O’Hara

The universe is exactly the size
that your soul can encompass.
Some people live in extremely
small worlds, and some live in a
world of infinite possibility.
– Kevin Hearne

Maintain the merry theme of life.
– Martin Short documentary

This is one of the deep motives for literature, or for art of any sort: that one is defeating the formlessness of the world. One is cheering oneself up [and] instructing oneself by giving a form to something that is, perhaps, alarmingly formless.
– Iris Murdoch

where is the summit where all aims are clear?
– Frank O’Hara

I talk to God but the sky is empty.
– Sylvia Plath

Silence is the ally of reason. It allows thoughts to grow. It is the seed of kind words.
– Paweł Cwynar

To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind.
– William Hazlitt

As any good therapist will tell you, you cannot heal what you do not acknowledge, and what you do not consciously acknowledge will remain in control of you from within, festering and destroying you and those around you.
– Richard Rohr

Cosmology does, I think, affect the way that we perceive humanity’s role in nature. One thing we’ve learnt from astronomy is that the future lying ahead is more prolonged than the past. Even our sun is less than halfway through its life.
– Martin Rees

There are times when the spirit is completely darkened because it needs to be reborn.
– CG Jung

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works.
– Gabrielle Zevin

The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back?
– Patricia Highsmith

The need to belong is not just a product of weakness and a need to join forces with something or someone stronger than myself. Often the intense desire to belong has its roots in my own strength — I want to belong so that my strength doesn’t prove to be pointless, but can be used to shore up another person or thing.
– Clarice Lispector

Socialists spent decades warning capitalism would eat itself. The cruel joke is that it ate them first.
– The Economist

The flower in the vase smiles, but no longer laughs.
– Malcolm de Chazal

Genuine beginnings begin within us, even when they are brought to our attention by external opportunities.
– William Bridges

You cannot champion a culture while distancing yourself from the language that gives it life.
– Nekeisha Burchell

If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
– Leo Tolstoy

I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with ‘you’ in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.
– Christopher Hitchens

I’m astounded by people who want to ‘know’ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.
– Woody Allen

You were convinced before you understood why. That is not weakness — that is the image doing its actual work.
– @rrose.selaivy

the reason why black people designed jazz to sound like it does, is because we knew if white people couldn’t understand it, they couldn’t steal it from us.
– Miles Davis

Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.
– Ray Bradbury

What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?
– Robert Nozick

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay … More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.
– Matthew Arnold

Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.
– Albert Einstein

Today we call them ‘angels’ and ‘demons’… tomorrow, we will call them something else.
– Aleister Crowley

There are thoughts so heavy they punish you simply for having them…
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
– Matthew Arnold

Wisdom requires not only the investigation of many things, but contemplation of the mystery.
– Jeremy Narby

I have a naive trust in the universe – that at some level it all makes sense, and we can get glimpses of that sense if we try.
– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
– Max Planck

Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative.
– Matthew Arnold

The problem with hoarding is you end up living off your reserves. Eventually, you’ll become stale. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish. . . . Somehow the more you give away, the more comes back to you.
– Paul Arden

When you re-read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in yourself than there was before.
– Clifton Fadiman

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
– Matthew Arnold

Here is the simple truth about people: Love the ones you want to keep.
– Iain Thomas

Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.
– Edward Abbey

I never removed anyone from my life
They all died in the accident of trust
– Fyodor Dostoevesky

Don’t bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality.
– Bob Marley

Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.
– Matthew Arnold

The heavens are full of floating mysteries.
– Thomas Buchanan Read

Not deep the poet sees, but wide.
– Matthew Arnold

The fundamental idea of good is thus; that it consists in preserving life, in favoring it, in wanting to bring it to its highest value; and evil consists in destroying life, doing it injury, hindering its development.
– Albert Schweitzer

I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations which constitute a picture.
– Henri Matisse

Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.
– Barbara Brown Taylor

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
– Matthew Arnold

American free-market capitalism generates—it allows things to be brought to life. Socialism merely distributes what is. And in the end it always relies on lies, the first of which is always that it works.
– Peggy Noonan

It is the dim haze of mystery that adds enchantment to pursuit.
– Antoine Rivarol

To be human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.
– Matt Haig

There is an ocean of endless opportunities, and there are so many things that one can do. I’m so fortunate that I’ve grown up with this sort of a philosophy and mentality.
– Hafez Nazeri

The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
– Ken Kesey

Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.
– Henry Rollins

If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
– Matthew Arnold

My life is only important if i can help plenty of people.
– Bob Marley

Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another.
– Ottessa Moshfegh

Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.
– Matthew Arnold

At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity.
– Rachel Naomi Remen

Today, this hopeless case is healed.
– Sy Montgomery

Never in human history has an entire generation had it as good, on average, as the Western Boomers, namely Americans and Western Europeans who came of age catching cheap houses, free-or-cheap college, rising wages, booming markets, and a welfare state still intact behind them.

This isn’t a grievance post. The Boomers didn’t engineer their luck, and guilt/shame doesn’t seem to work well as a foundation for politics. But that luck wasn’t accidental either. It was the result of a progressive era—the New Deal, the GI Bill, strong labor unions, public universities, the whole postwar social contract—that their parents and grandparents fought for and built. They inherited a wave and rode it well. Many of them are still riding it. The job now, theirs, ours, all of us downstream of that era, is to build the next one. And it can’t be a remake (like seemingly every movie coming out today).

The first progressive era was, let’s be real, a deal cut largely for white Americans and Western Europeans, financed in no small part by what was extracted from everyone else. The next one has to be wider. Across generations, yes. But also across the borders and histories we’ve spent a century pretending don’t connect to our prosperity. A progressive era worthy of the name shares the wave—with the Millennials and Zoomers locked out of housing, with the Global South we built our wealth on top of, with the generations not yet born who’ll inherit whatever world we leave them.

The Boomers got the ride of a lifetime. The question isn’t whether they deserved it. The question is whether the rest of us have the political imagination to build something bigger, and the moral conviction to actually share it.

– Vince Horn

Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization. Complete analogy.
– Simone Weil

Most of us have been conditioned… Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.
– The Dalai Lama

It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting them on this earth.
– Joseph Conrad

At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people.
– Anton Chekhov

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
– E.M. Forster

Indeed, intolerance is essential only to monotheism; an only God is by nature a
jealous God who will not allow another to live.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

The most common sort of lie is that by which
a man deceives himself: the deception of
others is a relatively rare offense.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

You think that you can only establish true practice after you attain enlightenment, but it is not so.

True practice is established in delusion, in frustration.

If you make some mistake, that is where to establish your practice.

There is no other place for you to establish your practice.

We talk about enlightenment, but in its true sense perfect enlightenment is beyond our understanding, beyond our experience.

Even in our imperfect practice enlightenment is there.

We just don’t know it.

So the point is to find the true meaning of practice before we attain enlightenment.

Wherever you are, enlightenment is there.

If you stand up right where you are, that is enlightenment.

– Shunryu Suzuki

Rest is a weapon given to us by God. The enemy hates it because he wants us stressed and occupied.
– Elizabeth Elliot

He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.
– Horace

Some people are so much sunshine to the square inch.
– Walt Whitman

Absolute care is love. Without this love, there can be no change in society.
– Krishnamurti

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.
– Mark Rothko

The old dreams were good dreams; they didn’t work out, but I’m glad I had ’em’.
– Robert James Waller

With open arms we welcome the stranger and discover the friend.
– Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out

Life is not about how fast you run or how high you climb, but how well you bounce.
– Vivian Komori

“How old are you?”
“Old enough to have regrets. Young enough to write it down.”
– Eugene Thacker

Don’t ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on.
– Marshall McLuhan

If I close my eyes, I see things better than with my eyes open.
– Henri Matisse

We can have capitalism without monopolies. Everything is owned by a monopoly, yet we were taught in school that they were illegal.
– Mergers & Aquisitions, Private Equity

The law works fear and wrath; grace works hope and mercy.
– Martin Luther

In short, there are mysteries of science and of soul that will never be understood no matter how hard we measure, no matter how strongly we believe, no matter how deep our think tanks and how high our aspirations. But as anyone will tell you—for we all know this within our hearts—the impossible happens and grand cosmic mysteries are solved on a regular basis, although most of the time the solutions lead to even greater mysteries.
– Neal Shusterman

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, The Cost of Discipleship

Colours have their own distinctive beauty that you have to preserve, just as in music you try to preserve sounds. It is a question of organization, of finding the arrangement that will keep the beauty and freshness of the colour.
– Henri Matisse

Truth needs not flowers of speech.
– Alexander Pope

Life is a reciprocal exchange. To move forward, you have to give back.
– Oprah Winfrey

If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control.
– Elizabeth Gilbert

When I paint green, it doesn’t mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn’t mean sky.
– Henri Matisse

If you look at the moon, you’ll see the beauty of God. If you look to the sun, you’ll see the power of God. If you look the mirror, you’ll see the God’s greatest creation. So believe in it.
– Charlie Chaplin

Other human beings are not our enemies. Our enemy is not the other person. Our enemy is the violence, ignorance, and injustice in us and in the other person. When we are armed with compassion and understanding, we fight not against other people, but against the tendency to invade, to dominate, and to exploit…
– Thich Nhat Hanh

Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth ever afterward resumes its liberty.
– Walt Whitman

The mind is like a wild forest; it must be cleared with the tool of mindfulness.
– Gautama Buddha

Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.
– bell hooks

There is no misery in art. All art is about saying yes, and all art is about its own making.
– John Currin

Every hour of every day is an unspeakably perfect miracle.
– Walt Whitman

Experience, the only logic sure to convince a diseased imagination and restore it to rugged health.
– Mark Twain

The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
– E.L. Doctorow

The habit of giving only enhances the desire to give.
– Walt Whitman

Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village… a simultaneous happening.
– Marshall McLuhan

A story is rarely the full sky — it is usually just one person’s horizon.
– Tomi Arayomi

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
– Marshall McLuhan

Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.
– Marshall McLuhan

Nothing is more highly to be prized than the value of each day.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Future generations depend on whether humanity learns stewardship instead of greed and responsibility instead of destruction.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi

We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.
– Hermann Hesse

Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.
– CS Lewis

The hardest thing is facing yourself. It’s easier to shout “Revolution” and “Power to the People” than it is to take a look at yourself; find out what’s real inside you and what isn’t, when you’re pulling the wool over your own eyes and your own hypocrisy…that’s the hardest one.
– John Lennon

If you want to hear the sound of birds, don’t buy a cage. Plant a tree.
– Bruce Newman

You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.
– Salvador Dalí

The world suffers when pride, division, and hatred become louder than compassion, humility, and love.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi

A generation connected to screens but disconnected from peace must learn again how to heal the mind, soul, and heart.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi

If what we already know were simply applied to all the agricultural land of the world and the problem of proper distribution were given consideration, the world could feed itself well.
– Louis Bromfield

I have always been fascinated by
the law of reversed effort.

Sometimes I call it “the backwards law.”

When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float.

Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure—contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves.

– Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Humanity needs emotional healing as deeply as it needs education, because wounded minds can silently destroy destinies.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi

Ideas are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.
– Carl Schurz

If you’re overwhelmed, it means you still care. Let that be your compass—not your curse.
– Lawrence Nault

My life is sustained by the world of beauty which you will see where ever you rest your eyes, and this beauty is nature itself.
– Kahlil Gibran, Before the Throne of Beauty

It’s a funny feeling to work with people who you consider your colleagues and to realize that they actually are young enough to be your children.
– Alan Alda

None of us know enough to be dogmatic. All that we wisest can say is, “At the present time, such and such appears to be true”; if we be wise, we add, “But fuller knowledge may make a change of opinion necessary.”
– J.W. (John Wesley) Hanson

Without enough wilderness America will change. Democracy, with its myriad personalities and increasing sophistication, must be fibred and vitalized by regular contact with outdoor growths – animals, trees, sun warmth and free skies – or it will dwindle and pale.
– Walt Whitman

I loved watching her at the dinner table, speaking passionately about her work. And I would think to myself: this is home.
– Haruki Murakami

So much had fallen into the sea. Hats fell in to the sea. Hearts fell into the sea. So much had fallen into the sea.
– Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light

The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting it around and changing the rules and so forth. No, any world is a living world if it’s alive, and the thing is to bring it to life. And the way to bring it to life is to find in your own case where your life is, and be alive yourself, it seems to me.
– Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
– Joseph Campbell

Imagine a world where empathy replaces fear, equity dismantles hierarchies, and safety becomes a right, not a privilege.
– Ken Breniman

In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Ask for work. If they don’t give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.
– Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

From Jung I took courage to tell my patients not to put their faith in abstract concepts. Put your faith in your own unconscious, your own dreams.
– Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work

Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
– Walt Whitman

Before there were gods, there were patterns. The gods are the patterns wearing faces.
– Unknown

Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one’s soul. This turning is done through one’s own affirmation of one’s worth – an affirmation fueled by the concern of others.
– Cornel West

Don’t try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.
– Henri Matisse

Our telling shapes what the past becomes.
– Jen Gippel

I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea –

I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch –
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience –

– Emily Dickinson

We cannot find our enlightened minds while continuing to be estranged from our neurotic ones.
– Mark Epstein

We are, from a purely biological perspective, simply breathing pieces of defecating meat, no more significant or enduring than a lizard or a potato.
– Sheldon Solomon

The point is not to pay back kindness but to pass it on.
– Julia Alvarez

A wise woman puts a grain of sugar into everything she says to a man, and takes a grain of salt with everything he says to her.
– Helen Rowland

“Work” does not exist in a non-literate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
– Marshall McLuhan

An artist is a title that you earn. And it’s a little embarrassing to hear people refer to themselves as artists. It’s like referring to themselves as a genius.
– Charles Eames

If you feel like nothing after you have lost something, it means that the thing you lost was your everything.
– Tim Keller

Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Man is not the partial component but the final product. He is not a part of the All but rather the all its living expression.
– R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz

How in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again?
– Robin Wall Kimerer

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
– William Hazlitt

Salt is born of the purest parents: the sun and the sea.
– Pythagoras

Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all.
– Nelson Mandela

Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex.
– Oscar Fingal O’Fflahertie Wills Wilde

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.
– M. F. K. Fisher

Let fortune do her worst, whatever she makes us lose, so long as she never makes us lose our honesty and our independence.
– Alexander Pope

It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe to venture to instruct, even our friends.
– Charles Caleb Colton

We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.
– Bill Vaughan

There’s nothing more political than the lens through which we use to view the world. Only if we learn to look at the world differently can we act differently.
– Clara Mattei

The Imaginal Stage
by D. A. Powell

turns out
there are more planets than stars
more places to land
than to be burned

I have always been in love with
last chances especially
now that they really do
seem like last chances

the trill of it all upending
what’s left of my head
after we explode

are you ready to ascend
in the morning I will take you
on the wing

You tried to change, didn’t you? Closed your mouth more, tried to be softer, prettier, less volatile, less awake…You can’t make homes out of human beings. Someone should have already told you that.
– Warsan Shire

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
– Sigmund Freud

The great Buddhist truth is that we have been whole from the very beginning: we only need realize it.
– Taylor Plimpton

One can only say that a person who has no myth or solid idea about the meaning of life, or simply believes what he reads in the newspapers, is neurotic and is to be pitied, for he is caught in believing in only ideological half-truths.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other’s opposite and complement.
– Hermann Hesse

A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all evidence that would unseat it.
– Gordon W. Allport

Intentionally regulating emotions is a slippery slope toward suppressing them.
– Margaret Cullen

I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be to forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you.
– C.S. Lewis

Only when the distress reaches a certain proportion are we likely to look within, to reexamine the principles and perceptions that govern our lives, or to enter a serious self-examination. Yet it is in those moments that the opening to a larger life begins.
– James Hollis

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
– Rollo May

The greatest courage is not needed for war,
but for ordinary people growing old.
– Red Hawk

You are accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not seek for anything. Do not perform anything, do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.
– Paul Tillich

The fact is that there are people, good people who,
not because they want to
but all the same,
fall in love with the wrong thing.
– Anne Carson

Page by page I slowly and lucidly reread everything I’ve written and find that it’s all worthless . . . What grieves me is that my best is no good, and that another whom I dream of, if he existed, would have done better. Everything we do, in art or in life, is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing.
– Fernando Pessoa

they say we’re at war
i think we’re falling in love
with the human race

– John Paul Lederach

I believe that the spirits are your parents and their parents and their parents and their parents and they are in your bloodstream, and they run through your body constantly. Because they want you to live on, because they want to live on. And they’re trying all the time to tell you shit and if you just spend a few minutes listening to yourself, you would hear them.
– Gil Scott-Heron

The inability to remember is itself perhaps a memory.
– John Berger

I feel as if I am an ad
for the sale of a haunted house:
18 rooms
$37,000
I’m yours
ghosts and all.

– Richard Brautigan

When you encounter those who are wicked, unrighteous, foolish, dim-witted, deformed, vicious, chronically ill, lonely, unfortunate, or disabled, you should think: “How can I save them?” And even if there is nothing you can do, at least you must not indulge in feelings of arrogance, superiority, derision, scorn, or abhorrence, but should immediately manifest sympathy and compassion. If you fail to do so, you should feel ashamed and deeply reproach yourself: “How far I have strayed from the Way! How can I betray the old sages?” I take these words as an admonition to myself.
– Ryokan

When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.
– Alexandre Dumas

The real culprit was, and remains, something that neither Democrats nor Republicans have shown any willingness to tackle seriously: unprecedentedly high and growing levels of income and wealth inequality. Since the 1970s, economic gains around the world have been heavily concentrated at the top of the income ladder. The wealthy are spending more now on everything simply because they have more money, and this has spawned the changes in spending patterns that have made it much more difficult for low- and middle income families to achieve basic life goals.
– How Inequality Caused America’s Affordability Crisis

I need my memories. They are my documents. I keep watch over them. They are my privacy and I am intensely jealous of them. Cézanne said, ‘I am jealous of my little sensations.’ To reminisce and woolgather is negative. You have to differentiate between memories. Are you going to them or are they coming to you? If you are going to them, you are wasting time. Nostalgia is not productive. If they come to you, they are the seeds for [your work].
– Louise Bourgeois

The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The porter runs to the heavy load and takes it from others,
knowing burdens are the foundation of ease
and bitter things the forerunners of pleasure.
See the porters struggle over the load!
It’s the way of those who see the truth of things.
Paradise is surrounded by what we dislike;
the fires of hell are surrounded by what we desire.
– Rumi

For me, the challenge is to play music that makes the audience imagine they are playing it too. Maybe they think or have been told that they are not artists and can’t perform. Then, when they hear music, they get the feeling that they can do what they had thought they couldn’t.
– Wayne Shorter

In the Green Morning, Now, Once More

In the green morning, before
Love was destiny,
The sun was king,
And God was famous.

The merry, the musical,
The jolly, the magical,
The feast, the feast of feasts, the festival
Suddenly ended

As the sky descended
But there was only the feeling,
In all the dark falling,
Of fragrance and of freshness,
of birth and beginning.

– Delmore Schwartz

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 crowned,
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 natures 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

Fascist and Nazi totalitarianism…do not occur because a Hitler or Mussolini decides to seize power. When a nation…is psychologically and spiritually empty, totalitarianism comes in to the fill the vacuum; and the people sell their freedom as a necessity for getting rid of the anxiety which is too great to bear any longer.
– Rollo May

We build a fire in a powder magazine, then double the fire department to put it out. We inflame wild beasts with the smell of blood, and then innocently wonder at the wave of brutal appetite that sweeps the land as a consequence.
– Mark Twain

Landscape is my religion.

…God in a green legend, I lean over the pool
In a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood
Before me in a cool cave roofed with branches
And floored with a skin of water.

– Norman MacCaig

Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.
– C.S. Lewis

[…I]t’s taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid, so thank you for that […].

You also asked after the meaning of my practice of letter writing,
calling it quaint and impractical […]. [H]ere is a secret: my letters have been far more meaningful to me than anything I did with the law. […] Writing letters was easier for me than speaking; it still is. […]

Imagine all that you have said to another, all the commentary you have exchanged with friends over drinks, over the phone with colleagues and distant relatives, all the prattle sent quickly, mindlessly over e-mail, messages typed into your cellular phone, and really, the sum of this interpersonal communication is the substance of your life, relationships being, as we know by now in our old ages, the meat of our lives; but all of that is gone. Vanished!

And yet, if one has committed oneself to the page, the tragedy I’ve just laid out will not apply. Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?

– Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice.
– Kurt Vonnegut

It is a pity that there are no big creatures to prey on humanity. If there were enough dragons and rocs, perhaps mankind would turn its might against them. Unfortunately man is preyed upon by microbes, which are too small to be appreciated.
– T.H. White

Now many crises in people’s lives occur because the hero role that they’ve assumed for one situation or set of situations no longer applies to some new situation that comes up, or–the same thing in effect–because they haven’t the imagination to distort the new situation to fit their old role. This happens to parents, for instance, when their children grow older, and to lovers when one of them begins to dislike the other. If the new situation is too overpowering to ignore, and they can’t find a mask to meet it with, they may become schizophrenic–a last-resort mask–or simply shattered. All questions of integrity involve this consideration, because a man’s integrity consists in being faithful to the script he’s written for himself.

I’ve said you’re too unstable to play any one part all the time–you’re also too unimaginative–so for you these crises had better be met by changing scripts as often as necessary. This should come naturally to you; the important thing for you is to realize what you’re doing so you won’t get caught without a script, or with the wrong script in a given situation. You did quite well, for example, for a beginner, to walk in here so confidently and almost arrogantly a while ago, and assign me the role of a quack. But you must be able to change masks at once if by some means or other I’m able to make the one you walked in with untenable. Perhaps–I’m just suggesting an offhand possibility–you could change to thinking of me as The Sagacious Old Mentor, a kind of Machiavellian Nestor, say, and yourself as The Ingenuous But Promising Young Protégé, a young Alexander, who someday will put all these teachings into practice and far outshine the master. Do you get the idea? Or–this is repugnant, but it could be used as a last resort–The Silently Indignant Young Man, who tolerates the ravings of a Senile Crank but who will leave this house unsullied by them. I call this repugnant because if you ever used it you’d cut yourself off from much that you haven’t learned yet.

It’s extremely important that you learn to assume these masks wholeheartedly. Don’t think there’s anything behind them: ego means I, and I means ego, and the ego by definition is a mask. Where there’s no ego–this is you on the bench–there’s no I. If you sometimes have the feeling that your mask is insincere–impossible word!–it’s only because one of your masks is incompatible with another. You mustn’t put on two at a time. There’s a source of conflict, and conflict between masks, like absence of masks, is a source of immobility. The more sharply you can dramatize your situation, and define your own role and everybody else’s role, the safer you’ll be. It doesn’t matter in Mythotherapy for paralytics whether your role is major or minor, as long as it’s clearly conceived, but in the nature of things it’ll normally be major. Now say something.

– John Barth

Consciousness is all there is, flowing, streaming through these instruments in a manner which, in accordance with the perfect unfolding of totality, is perceived as discreet individual entities autonomously performing actions, but in truth this is not the case. There is no individual, no entity, no separate self here to do anything or to be anything, awakened or enlightened included.
– David Carse, Perfect Brilliant Stillness

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it’s you I’m addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You’ve read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don’t go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where’s your shame?
– John Barth

Once Miles Davis asked me, “How do you play from nothing?” And I said, “You know, you just do it.” And that actually is the answer. I wish there were a way to make “I don’t know” a positive thing, which it isn’t in our society. We feel that we need to “know” certain things, and we substitute that quest for the actual experience of things in all its complexity. When I play pure improvisation, any kind of intellectual handles are inappropriate because they get in the way of letting the river move where it’s supposed to move.
– Keith Jarrett

Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she’d see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her…and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.
– John Barth

Human beings have launched satellites into outer space, and yet they still grovel on earth looking at their own feet like wild dogs. What is to become of our planet?
– Akira Kurosawa

Too late she saw: what she’d favored him with in jest he had received with adoration.
– John Barth

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.
– Anne Lamott

If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.
– Dwight D Eisenhower

It’s about all of us wanting to stand where he stands and to include as he does. It is less about what it is we are to do at the margins, and more about what will happen to us if we stand there.
– Gregory Boyle

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

When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.
– Baltasar Gracian

Humans have a tendency to fall prey to the illusion that their economy is at the very center of the universe, forgetting that the biosphere is what ultimately sustains all systems, both man-made and natural. In this sense, ‘environmental issues’ are not about saving the planet—it will always survive and evolve with new combinations of atom—but about the prosperous development of our own species.
– Carl Folke

According to an old Native American legend, one day there was a big fire in the forest. All the animals fled in terror in all directions, because it was a very violent fire. Suddenly, the jaguar saw a hummingbird pass over his head, but in the opposite direction. The hummingbird flew towards the fire!

Whatever happened, he wouldn’t stop. Moments later, the jaguar saw him pass again, this time in the same direction as the jaguar was walking. He could observe this coming and going, until he decided to ask the bird about it, because it seemed very bizarre behavior.

“What are you doing, hummingbird?” he asked.

“I am going to the lake,” he answered, “I drink water with my beak and throw it on the fire to extinguish it.” The jaguar laughed. ‘Are you crazy? Do you really think that you can put out that big fire on your own with your very small beak?’

‘No,’ said the hummingbird, ‘I know I can’t. But the forest is my home. It feeds me, it shelters me and my family. I am very grateful for that. And I help the forest grow by pollinating its flowers. I am part of her and the forest is part of me. I know I can’t put out the fire, but I must do my part.’

At that moment, the forest spirits, who listened to the hummingbird, were moved by the bird and its devotion to the forest. And miraculously they sent a torrential downpour, which put an end to the great fire.

The Native American grandmothers would occasionally tell this story to their grandchildren, then conclude with, “Do you want to attract miracles into your life? Do your part.”

You have no responsibility to save the world or find the solutions to all problems—but to attend to your particular personal corner of the universe. As each person does that, the world saves itself.”

– provenance unknown

…like this definition of love, or caritas: “to earnestly desire the achievement of wholeness by the beloved.” Notice that it doesn’t say, “To give the gift of wholeness to the beloved” or “To impose wholeness on the beloved.” This can be hard to remember when it comes to one’s own children, who are, as Kahlil Gibran said, “the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.” Kahlil Gibran didn’t actually have any children, incidentally; he just wrote lovely things about them. “How do you do it all?” a woman who doesn’t know me asked when she heard that in addition to being a law enforcement chaplain and a writer, I am mother to six children (including steps). “I do quite a lot of it badly,” I said.

– Marriage and Other Acts of Charity: A Memoir by Kate Braestrup

Two of their young hunters rescued a dragonfly stuck in the mud. It gave them the usual wishes you get in these stories. One wished to be the smartest man in the world. The dragonfly said, ‘So you shall be.’ But the second hunter wanted to be smarter than the smartest man in the world.” On this Leaphorn paused, partly for effect, partly to see if Bernie had already heard a version of this, and partly to see if she had cheered up enough to be listening. She was listening. “So the dragonfly converted the second hunter into a woman,” Bernie said, laughing and nodding at Leaphorn.
– Tony Hillerman

The great fool is a being who is above wisdom rather than below it.
– G.K. Chesterton

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.
– Thomas Merton

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Clam
by Mary Oliver

Each one is a small life, but sometimes long, if its
place in the universe is not found out. Like us, they
have a heart and a stomach; they know hunger, and
probably a little satisfaction too. Do not mock them
for their gentleness, they have a muscle that loves
being alive. They pull away from the light. They pull
down. They hold themselves together. They refuse to
open.

But sometimes they lose their place and are tumbled
shoreward in a storm. Then they pant, they fill
with sand, they have no choice but must open the
smallest crack. Then the fire of the world touches
them. Perhaps, on such days, they too begin the
terrible effort of thinking, of wondering who, and
what, and why. If they can bury themselves again in
the sand they will. If not, they are sure to perish,
though not quickly. They also have resources beyond
the flesh; they also try very hard not to die.

There is a common language, a mode of consciousness, almost a secret sign which can be read and recognized by all who are similarly engaged. Such realizations help fend off the feeling of isolation…
– John Matthews

You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you.
– William S. Burroughs to Jack Kerouac

MAGA Should Quit Trying to Make Jesus Sound Like a Jerk

The president is using history’s highest example of self-emptying love as a shield for his bottomless grift and senseless cruelty.

by Heather Melton Fox

The point of the path in my Buddhist tradition is to uproot the afflictions of greed, hatred, and ignorance in order to see clearly how to use one’s life to best be of benefit to others. As such, we hold Jesus with great reverence as an inspiration for living a life of ethics, conscience, and selfless care for others. The beloved Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in Living Buddha, Living Christ, “On the altar of my hermitage are images of Buddha and Jesus, and every time I light incense, I touch both of them as my spiritual ancestors.” In my own life, I have Christian friends and loved ones who practice their faith in a way that is beautiful and that I deeply admire.

I believe that faith (or lack thereof) is a deeply personal matter and one that should be treated with respect. That is why I have hesitated for so long to write about this topic. But when religion is weaponized for political ends, it becomes a public act. Moreover, this president has shown no similar such hesitation in using history’s highest example of self-emptying love as a shield for his bottomless grift and senseless cruelty.

We are taught that Buddhism itself is not the truth, rather it points to the truth like a finger pointing at the moon. In other words, it is a mistake to confuse any symbol, piece of scripture, or spiritual identity with the higher truths they are meant to reveal. Insofar as all religions and systems of secular ethics point to compassion, justice, and human dignity, they can be useful guides for how to have a shared moral conversation about what it means to live well together and in mutual care.

However, history has shown that when power claims divine endorsement to carry out a political agenda, it can point society in a dark direction. This president’s MAGA movement is explicitly animated by Christian Nationalism, an ideology which always seeks to use state power as a tool to enforce a narrow view of God-given order.

But a political project built on dominance, exclusion, and grievance will have a hard time credibly claiming a Jesus who centers mercy, humility, and care for society’s most vulnerable. So they have set about selling a sort of MAGA Jesus who demands partisan loyalty to an ultra-conservative, predominantly white movement which requires complete loyalty to and submission before the earthly authority of Donald J Trump.

In order to explain this president’s staggering disinterest in kindness, humility, or ethical conduct of any kind, they say he is, “an imperfect instrument of God’s perfect plan.” Loyalty to the president is not evidence of hypocrisy, it is proof of faith. In their telling, this president is acting in service of a divine strategy and is only accountable to God as defined by their movement. This president is not accountable to citizens, or the Constitution, or the rule of law. The claim collapses under even a cursory look at the diversity of Christian thought in this country and the moral legacy of Christian leadership in America.

Abraham Lincoln spoke of the role of his Christian faith as he navigated the awesome responsibility of leading a nation at war and deeply divided when he said, “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.” By contrast, Donald J Trump says he turns foremost to “himself” for counsel because he “has a very good brain.” Recently, that counsel apparently advised that he publicly issue the apocalyptic threat that “an entire civilization will die tonight” through his private platform from which he receives personal financial gain.

From John Lewis’s first step across the Edmund Pettus bridge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to representing his beloved Georgia in the United States House of Representatives, Mr. Lewis’s civic life was always guided by his Christian commitment to justice, mercy, and the worth and dignity of every human being. He was widely regarded as the “Conscience of the Congress,” across the political spectrum and throughout the country. Toward the end of his life and at the dawn of the Trump era, John Lewis

warned the country, “A democracy cannot thrive where power remains unchecked and justice is reserved for a select few.”

In 2025, this president put proud Christian Nationalist Pete Hegseth in charge of leading the United States military. Mr. Hegseth has committed to “restoring merit” in part by removing references to the military contributions of Black Americans as well as other minorities, women, and members of the LGBTQ community. At an event earlier this year, he said, “divisive and Godless diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are now a thing of the past.”

The vast majority of us do not accept that this president’s MAGA movement has the right to be the sole arbiters of what it means to have “authentic faith” or to be a “true American.” Any interpretation of a flag or a cross, the Bible or the Constitution, an identity as a Christian or a patriot should aim us toward our highest potential, not our worst instincts.

When political power claims the authority to define both faith and belonging, it decides who counts and who doesn’t. A religion that has been a beacon of mercy for countless souls should not be used as an authoritarian slogan that normalizes cruelty and entrenches privilege. A politics that requires that kind of exclusion is not one that can be trusted with power.

After the Work Is Done
by Deahna Fumarol

I can tell you that some things vanish
without ceremony—a town can lose its name
and keep the post office, or keep the name

and lose the rest. There still marks a point
on the map where it began, but the work’s long done;
the road grown over with bleeding hearts and alder.

You can walk there. The gravel crunches
under the phantom buzz of chainsaws, and fog
licks at the gridded hillside like an old debt.

Each stump is a headstone,
a biography in every ring. You think you see
a form in the mist—a thrashing elk, or a bobcat

or the shape of work that once
held the valley upright. Every road here
leads to another road that stops

at a locked gate, a washout,
a view of nothing but cloud.
Acceptance lives somewhere past that.

They say the forest heals, some say faster
than the heart—Scotch broom,
thistle, the thin gray line of runoff

that feeds the river in winter.
If there’s holiness in this, it’s in the rot,
the glacial comeback of what was taken.

Once I dreamed the salmon spoke
in a tongue I almost understood—
a language of loss, but also return.

They swam upstream through
clear-cuts and culverts, their bodies bright
as stripped wire, and I woke thinking

maybe the land dreams us too,
and stirs awake each time we leave
another scar across its ribs.

Docks rust and rot beside the river,
the paper mill sighing its white smoke
like a ghost rehearsing its final exit.

On the coast: blown glass, fish smells
and salt wind—the gulls screaming
for everything we drop.

Sometimes I go there just to see
where the road gives out at the jetty,
where the land admits defeat. Or victory.

No revelation, only the dull
thought that everything moves
toward water, then into it.

I’m somewhere inland still,
standing in the rain, or threat of it,
watching a fern push through the asphalt.

The sky as always undecided
gray, opening, closing—
slack mouth of forgiveness, of apology.

White sand, tall grass. This strip of ocean is a thin bit of deep
blue as if the earth bends suddenly out there, beneath the dark
storm moving, pushing shadows on the surface of the sea which
presses in close and rushes away. A cold wind feels impatient,
too, as it returns in force with each break, again. And the sky
that splits is a surprise, sending a straight shaft of silver to claim
its town of luck. Doors blow open with a crash, close gently a
ways away. They would close.

The sun is faith and will be for so many months of empty houses,
linen closets, shelves of cold glasses, while the unending sand in
the undying wind heckles the clapboards, blasts the paint.

Sometimes everything is all right except my ears are cold. I think,
if only my ears were warm again. If only again, want. Away. A
whistle in the wind. If something changed it all forever … It is
all changing always forever. Certainly the fish must swim deeper
and birds leave for a while. In the back of a school desk a scrap of
paper learns its folds until they are weak, and the penciled joke is
lost in the creases, graphite dust.

There is no imitating the weather, no remembering but a dullness
I think is near my heart. And when I am asked to carry out the
one fine thing from the burning house, I’ll know what reflects me
is arbitrary; I am invisible. Won’t my habits be undercut while
the paces across a familiar room are smoke and ash, distance no
more? I don’t know myself without these clothes – the buttoned
coat of answers and shoes of home.

– Killarney Clary

There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other.
– Pamela Lyndon Travers

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

You’re not healing to be able to handle trauma, pain, anxiety, depression. You’re used to those. You’re healing to be able to handle joy and to accept happiness back into your life.
– Anthony Goldsmith

For everyone a moment comes in which he or she must utter this ‘I can,’ which does not refer to any certainty or specific capacity but is, nevertheless, absolutely demanding. Beyond all faculties, this ‘I can’ does not mean anything–yet it marks what is, for each of us, perhaps the hardest and bitterest experience possible: the experience of potentiality.
– Giorgio Agamben

The real choice isn’t “pragmatism” or “idealism.” It’s either allowing these trends to worsen – destroying what’s left of our democracy and turning our economy into even more of a playground for big corporations, Wall Street, and billionaires – or reversing them. And the only pragmatic way of reversing them is through a “political revolution” that mobilizes millions of Americans.
– Robert Reich

My understanding from being a gardener is: Earth is magic. Whoever claims otherwise is blind. Earth is not a resource, not a mere means to achieve human ends. Our relationship to nature today is not determined by astonished observation, but solely by instrumental action. The Anthropocene is precisely the result of total subjugation of Earth/nature to the laws of human action. It is reduced to a component of human action. Man acts beyond the interpersonal sphere into nature by subjecting it entirely to his will. He thereby unleashes processes that would not come about without his intervention, and lead to a total loss of control.

It is not enough that we now have to be more careful with Earth as a resource. Rather, we need a completely different relationship with Earth. We should give it back its magic, its dignity. We should learn to marvel at it again. Natural disasters are the consequences of absolute human action. Action is the verb for history. Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is confronted with the catastrophic consequences of human action. In front of him, the heap of debris of history grows towards the sky. But he cannot remove it, because the storm from the future called progress carries him away. His wide eyes and open mouth reflect his powerlessness. Only an angel of inaction would be able to defend himself against the storm.

– Byung-Chul Han

It happens or it does not happen. And certainly it does not happen if we try to force it upon ourselves, just as it shall not happen so long as we think, in our self-complacency, that we have no need of it. Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, of from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.
– Paul Tillich

If we have no compassion,
we will suffer alone, we will suffer
alone the destruction of ourselves.
– Wendell Berry

Remember that our understanding of life progresses at the speed of a bullock cart. The impatient man runs, greedy for conquest. Our mind has wings and can soar over difficulties, but we have a fine pair of feet to keep in touch with Mother Earth. We have to plough through it and often stumble over roots and stones. Then comes the time for sowing. Our feet dance in joy and this spontaneous joy is the daughter of our soul. Remember that all the real things in life are in accord with a very slow rhythm like the changing of seasons and the coursing of stars. This work in depth is done in darkness, without sound.
– Sri Anirvan

And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.
– Galatians 6.9

Oh mind, be patient. Results take some time to show up. Even if the gardener feeds a plant hundreds of buckets of water, the fruits will come only when the right season arrives.
– Kabir

Just do exercise. Repeat, repeat. A drop, a drop.
– Gurdjieff

In Tibet every monk, nun or lama begins each meal by first taking a portion of food, often rice, wadding it into a ball and throwing it outside or placing it aside to feed the hungry spirits. In this way, we are reminded of the value of sharing as well as of the depth of pain that can be suffered by those whose lives are dominated by either hunger or greed.
– Surya Das

You get lonely, is what it is. A person’s not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It’s not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It’s a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.
– Jim Shepard

Each one of us has it in themselves to be a free spirit, just as every rose bud has in it a rose.
– Rudolf Steiner

The difference between simple and easy. A marathon is simple. You just keep running until you’re done. It’s not easy.
– Ben Abbott

Khem was an ancient name for the land of Egypt; and both the words alchemy and chemistry are a perpetual reminder of the priority of Egypt’s scientific knowledge.
– Manly Palmer Hall

I believed in them more than they believed in themselves.
– Kafka

That is how betrayal begins, by giving someone a soul they never earned.
– Dostoevsky

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
– Oscar Wilde

Discretion is the salt, and fancy the sugar of life; the one preserves, the other sweetens it.
– Christian Nestell Bovee

The forest waves, the morning breaks,
The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,
Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be
And life pulsates in rock or tree.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Know that the desire to be perfect is probably the veiled expression of another desire—to be loved, perhaps, or not to die.
– Ron Padgett

If you read a lot of stories, you become able to understand the feelings of many different people. That’s the power of imagination.
– Sōsuke Natsukawa

So we should talk to our animus or anima. So you listen to the inner mentor, you develop the inner ear; or you write automatically, and a word is formed by your hand, or your mouth speaks that which you have not thought.
– Carl Jung

Science has penetrated the constitution of nature, and unrolled the mysterious pages of its history, and started again many, as yet, unanswered questions in respect to the mutual relations of matter and spirit, of nature and of God.
– Noah Porter

The further backward you look, the further forward you will see.
– Winston Churchill

He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself – to sink.
– George Orwell

There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.
– Dave Brubeck

The Buddha did not need quite so long to see that even rebirths are vain.
– Carl Jung

Life is a blend of striving, learning, and embracing the chaos.
– Steve Ghikadis

Hurting someone is as easy as throwing a stone in the ocean. But you will never know how deep that stone will go.
– Buddha

Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.
– John Ruskin

The moment that you rest, thinking that you have attained the level you desire, a part of your mind enters a phase of decay. You lose your hard-earned creativity and others begin to sense it. This is a power and intelligence that must be continually renewed or it will die.
– Robert Greene, Mastery

Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.
– Henri Barbusse

A desolate day; the whitey-grey sky looked as if it could never be blue again; the naked trees wept slowly into the gutters.
– George Orwell

Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of today a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity.
– James Clerk Maxwell

There are many more shining qualities in the mind of man, but there is none so useful as discretion.
– Joseph Addison

What we call ordinary life is sacred to someone. Protect it like it’s yours—because it is.
– Lawrence Nault

Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.
– Karl Marx

Spirit, like God, denotes an object of psychic experience which cannot be proved to exist in the external world and cannot be understood rationally.
– Carl Jung

Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit.
– Bernard Williams

And, though I hadn’t worked out how I felt about the Christianity of my childhood, I did know how I felt about my mother. Her devotion, her faith, they moved me. I was protective of her right to find comfort in whatever ways she saw fit. Didn’t she deserve at least that much? We have to get through this life somehow.
– Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life.
– Maslow

The movements of the stars have become clearer; but to the mass of the people the movements of their masters are still incalculable.
– Bertolt Brecht

Well, what do we want, then? God knows. All we know is what we don’t want.
– George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.
– George R.R. Martin

Contemplation is a panoramic, receptive awareness whereby we take in all that a situation, moment, or person offers without judging, eliminating, or labeling anything. It is pure and positive gazing that abandons all negative pushback so we can begin to recognize inherent dignity. It takes much practice and a lot of unlearning of habitual responses.
– Richard Rohr

Your labor only may be sold, your soul must not.
– John Ruskin

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
– Aristotle

There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are eternal, universal and indestructible.
– Frederick Douglass

When we’re stressed, it’s good to remember to connect with that which you love. Start by touching your own heart. Extend that soft warmth out—to a hot coffee, to a tree, to a dog, to your children or friends. Your love is the helpful path forward.
– Waylon Lewis

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
– John Ruskin

Whatever you choose to do, leave tracks. That means do not do it just for yourself. You will want to leave the world a little better for having lived.
– R. Ginsburgh

What people know is as nothing to what they don’t know.
– Chuang Tzu

I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.
– Abraham Lincoln

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honor, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
– Wilfred Owen

In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong.
– John Ruskin

His empty, silly, futile poems! How could he ever have believed in them?
– George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Love is the rule that contains all other rules.
Love is the commandment that justifies all the
other commandments. Love is the secret of life.
– Paulo Coelho

The greater the tension, the greater is the potential. Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.
– Carl Jung

Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.
– Lucy Maud Montgomery

Creativity is not a talent. It is not a talent. It is a way of operating. An ability to play. To play is experiment. What happens if I do this? What would happen if we did that?
– John Cleese

Jazz is freedom. You think about that.
– Thelonious Monk

Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions.
– Maya Angelou

But what great thing ever came into existence that was not first fantasy.
– Carl Jung

He was nearly thirty and had accomplished nothing; only his miserable book of poems that had fallen flatter than any pancake.
– George Orwell

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.
– Anne Roiphe

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight. The truly wise person is colorblind.
– Albert Schweitzer

You’re allowed to hold out for someone who can meet you where you’re at.
– Lane Moore

Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. He had reached the age when the future ceases to be a rosy blur and becomes actual and menacing.
– George Orwell

I found that it wasn’t so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they’re kindred spirits.
– J. Carter Brown

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
– Robert Anton Wilson

I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking and speaking, because this is not only more expressive but also more exact than an abstract scientific terminology, which is wont to toy with the notion that its theoretic formulations may one fine day be resolved into algebraic equations.
– Carl Jung

It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always.
– Henry David Thoreau

Words cost money and ought not to be wasted.
– George Orwell

The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Few seek wisdom for its own sake: most desire it only as a solution to the discomforts of life.

While wisdom certainly releases man from bondage of trivial annoyances, it also bestows upon him a larger responsibility than he ever knew.

– Manly Palmer Hall

Nobody tells you
that after the spiritual highs fade,
what remains
is how gently you meet each moment.

– Sileo Cael

Knowledge is nothing unless it lifts others, heals what’s broken, and makes the world better for everyone.
– George Stamatis

Do not think of your faults, still less of other’s faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.
– John Ruskin

What I want is not capable of being had in my lifetime. I want to live after I die in that ancient way. And there’s no knowing whether that will happen, and there will be no knowing, no matter how many blue ribbons I have plastered to my corpse.
– Louise Glück

I don’t have big ideas. I sometimes have small ideas, which seem to work out.
– Matt Mullenweg

And in loneliness no decent book was ever written.
– George Orwell

Better a child should be ignorant of a thousand truths than have consecrated in its heart a single lie.
– John Ruskin

It was an example of the fact that you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don’t want it.
– George Orwell

The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience, not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.
– Leo Tolstoy

I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent and working at pace so slow, that I would be able to hear myself living.
– Elizabeth Gilbert

You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.
– John Ruskin

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them…
– Khalil Gibran

I’ve never met another man I’d rather be. And even if that’s a delusion, it’s a lucky one.
– Charles Bukowski

How can I blame the wind for the mess it made, if it was me who opened the window?
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

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 almost indestructible.
– John Steinbeck

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.
– Miles Davis

This is Not the Poem I Had Hoped to Write

This is not the poem I had hoped to write
when I sat at my desk and the page was white.
You see, there were other words I’d had in mind,
yet this is what I leave behind.

I thought it was a poem to eradicate war;
one of such power, it would heal all the sores
of a world torn apart by conflict and schism.
But it isn’t.

Lovers, I’d imagined I, would quote from it daily,
Mothers would sing it to soothe crying babies.
And whole generations would be given new hope.
Nope.

I had grand aspirations. Believe me, I tried.
Humanity examined with lessons applied.
But the right words escaped me; so often they do.
Have these in lieu.

– Brian Bilston

The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt.
– Umberto Eco

You have at least only a thin shell to break before emerging from the darkness inside the egg into the light of truth. … The egg is this world we see. The bird in it is Love, the Love which is God himself and which lives in the depths of every man, though at first as an invisible seed. When the shell is broken and the being is released, it still has this same world before it. But it is no longer inside. Space is opened and torn apart.
– Simone Weil, Seventy Letters

It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.
– John Ruskin

I think if I’ve learned anything about friendship, it’s to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don’t walk away, don’t be distracted, don’t be too busy or tired, don’t take them for granted. Friends are part of the glue that holds life and faith together. Powerful stuff.
– Jon Katz

I was wilder, prouder, emptier although more full of words.
– Friedrich Hölderlin

the novelist and the poet

they have the perfect marriage–

she’s out there weeding

he’s in here re-shelving books

– Alec Finlay

If you have selfish, ignorant citizens,
you’re gonna get selfish, ignorant leaders.
– George Carlin

Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
– Bertolt Brecht

Most men can be easily transplanted from here to there, for they have so little root — no tap-root — or their roots penetrate so little way, that you can thrust a shovel quite under them and take them up, roots and all.
– Thoreau

If we clearly see that nothing is more important than developing our bodhicitta to higher and higher levels and eventually attaining complete enlightenment, then before we know it we will get there. And I don’t think it will be as hard as becoming an Olympic gymnast, or even a doctor or lawyer. That is because the Buddha’s wisdom and methods don’t require working with external circumstances beyond our control. Just having our very own mind and following the instructions on internal practices such as tonglen, we can transform ourselves into bodhisattvas. The methods of lojong are intended to work gradually and peacefully. They are a gentle means of making inevitable progress along the bodhisattva path. Once we get the hang of exchanging self and other, once we get a feel for its ease and simplicity, we can make progress in a state of delight, ever motivated to learn whatever we need to learn.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, The Intelligent Heart

A patriot is not a weapon. A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being, for the soul of its people.
– Adrienne Rich

What I Say into the Mirror
to Survive the Night

I know you are on your knees
and broken. I know
you believe that you are done.

Keep going. Just
keep going.

A wound is the same
as a child: it swings
its little feet in the shadows,
saying,
You have no idea,
you have absolutely no idea,
what I am going to become.

– Joseph Fasano

To paint is to know how to put nothing on canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back.
– Robert Henri

That’s how it begins, making a film,
writing a book, painting a picture,
composing a tune, generally creating something.
You have a wish.
You wish that something might exist,
and then you work on it until it does.
– Wim Wenders

The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too.
– Luther Standing Bear

I also have a slingshot that fires rock bottoms directly at the sun until change spills from its golden pockets—that’s how I got my hands on this summer afternoon.
– Andrea Gibson

Self-observation brings man to the realization of the necessity of self-change. And in observing himself a man notices that self-observation itself brings about certain changes in his inner processes. He begins to understand that self-observation is an instrument of self-change, a means of awakening.
– G. J. Gurdjieff

On Discovering a Butterfly
by Vladimir Nabokov

I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer – and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.

If you will only take time and be very patient, you will see the divine
spark deep within everyone.
– Eileen Caddy

A PHILOSOPHY OF WALKING

None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind.

When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze.

– Frederic Gros

When you are unsure about the future, keep doing what is in front of you with all your heart and with love, and what is meant for you will find you.
– Gurumayi Chidvilasananda

If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it ’cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he’s poor in hisself, there ain’t no million acres gonna make hit feel rich in make him he’s disappointed that nothin’ he can do feel rich.
– John Steinbeck

The day you open your mind to music,
you’re halfway to opening
your mind to life.
– Pete Townshend

We can’t grieve
our losses until
we name them.
– Linda Thai

There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.
– Charles Bukowski

If you practice to
become a buddha,
that’s the surest
way to never
become one.

– Yasutani Roshi

Sing, sing, while you know you’re still living.
– Yusuf / Cat Stevens

You might feel inadequate because you have a sick father and a crazy mother and you have to take care of them, or because you have a distorted life and money problems… A lot of these situations could be regarded as expressions of your own timidity and cowardice. They could all be regarded as expression of your poverty mentality.⁣ ⁣ You should also begin to build up confidence and joy in your own richness… Even if you are abandoned in the middle of the desert and you want a pillow, you can find a piece of rock with moss on it that is quite comfortable to put your head on.⁣ ⁣ We have found that a lot of people complain that they are involved in intense domestic situations; they relate with everything in their lives purely on the level of pennies, tiny stitches, drops of water, grains of rice. But we do not have to do that – we can expand our vision by means of generosity. We can give something to others. We don’t always have to receive something first in order to give something away… The nature of generosity is to be free from desire, free from attachment, able to let go of anything.
– Chögyam Trungpa

My joy is of another sort, it’s like a long-awaited encounter, or like a tree you see from very far away, on the horizon, and which you finally reach after walking and walking, and the tree gets greener and more beautiful as you approach.
– Julio Cortázar

In eternity everything is just beginning.
– Elias Canetti

As he approached her door, he was once more conscious of the curious way in which she reversed his values, and of the need of thinking himself into conditions incredibly different from any that he knew if he were to be of use in her present difficulty.
– Edith Wharton

If this world was small, so was theirs, and that the only way to enlarge either was to reach a stage of manners where they would naturally merge.
– Edith Wharton

Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all virtues.
– Joseph Hall

To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
– Simone de Beauvoir

It is strange, but true, that the most important turning-points of life often come at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected ways.
– Napoleon Hill

The right most valued by all civilized men is the right to be left alone.
– Louis D. Brandeis

Feeling guilt is a reflection of your capacity for empathy, not an indication that you have made a mistake.
– Alexandra H. Solomon

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, The Hero’s Journey

Through all his deeper feelings, tasted the pleasurable excitement of being in a world where action followed an emotion with such Olympian speed.
– Edith Wharton

Many of the confused controversies of modern philosophy are like the legends and gods of classical poetry. They recur in every system, but always in a new form.
– Friedrich Schlegel

Vanity can easily overtake wisdom. It usually overtakes common sense.
– Julian Casablancas

I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for, something I must do before I can go.
– William S. Burroughs

If you know exactly what to be in life, you will become it, that is your punishment. Actually not knowing what you want to be, reinventing yourself every morning, not being a noun, but being a verb, being moving in life, not being fixed in life, is a privilege.
– Oscar Wilde

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as a secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
– Leonard Cohen

We’re all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron,
Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ.
– Ray Bradbury

And soon all of us will sleep under the earth,
we who never let each other sleep above it.
– Marina Tsvetaeva

Escape
by D.H. Lawrence

When we get out of the glass bottles of our own
ego, and when we escape like squirrels from
turning in the cages of our personality
and get into the forest again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don’t know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper.

“Let Jesus be your breath.”
– St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain

Let Jesus be your breath.
He is the Door that is always
already open.
The frame and lintel have a shape,
but the passageway is empty.
Let La-Ilaha be your breath.
The arrow floats back to the bow.
This is how true warriors
win battles before they begin.
The whisper of Hu dissolving
crystals into sweetness.
Let Kali be your breath,
searing your midnight nerves
into bolts of lightning.
At dawn, the sound in your chest
is a forest full of exultation
about nest-building.
Fierce flowering may appear
to be a universe outside you,
but its roots are golden pathways
leading through your body
toward one seed of death,
one intimate drowning.
I, a wave in the ocean of Am.
The All-Pervading
encircled in a drop.
No distance, no pilgrimage.
The honeybee can’t fly,
his feet are so weighty with
umami galaxies of lethal pollen.
This is how the face of the Beloved
lures you inward toward the kiss
of annihilation.
When our lips touch
there is no breath at all,
and it will be a thousand years
until your next heartbeat.

– Fred LaMotte

Time of Tyranny, 49
by Lyn Hejinian

We live in toppled times under a feat of tyranny; let’s not fake getting lost, let’s do it, let’s not do it intermittently, let’s be lost, disoriented and never to be bound so all can hear the hiss of the adverbs we shoot into tyrants’ eyes, quivering shafts slippery from limbs and aimed by eyes under feathered lids. Our features are like stale bread, my headache bad as a blueprint for butter. Windows: how stupidly the intensity of glass returns to us the terror of love. Things diverge, separate like the forks of the Eel River to which the competing lies of two tyrants are but split stones shaken by earthquakes of stupefying times, of minutes through a glorious forest, of women who are personal friends, the flanks of a prevented rabbit: to scatter and ambiguate, obviate, surreptitiously flesh and hurry to find things to recombine.

When you reach the edge of
all the light you carry,
and must take a step into
darkness of the unknown,
one of two things will happen:
Either you’ll find
something solid to stand on
or you will learn how to fly.

– Patrick Overton

You can be the best person out there, but someone who has a tainted and cynical vision of the world will see you the way they see the world. It has nothing to do
with you.
– Najwa Zebian

Maturity is often more absurd than youth
and very frequently is most unjust to youth.
– Thomas Alva Edison

who told you that this or that would last forever?
– Stanisław Barańczak

Though we seem to be sleeping
there is a spirit that directs the dream
that will eventually startle us back
to the truth of who we are.
– Rumi

Today, in our “shut up, get over it, and move on” mentality, our society misses so much, it’s no wonder we are a generation that longs to tell our stories.
– Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

When we can settle back into the moment, realizing that past and future are simply thoughts in the present, then we free ourselves from the bondage of ‘time.’
– Joseph Goldstein

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
– Simone Weil

Buddhist teaching offers a way to live in the world without being overcome by the world, following a life of generosity, virtue, and meditation to strengthen the noble qualities of mind that lead to the end of suffering.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu

The economic crisis is at the door…. Holding onto things has become the monopoly of a few powerful people who, God knows, are no more human than the many; for the most part, they are more barbaric, but not in the good way.
– Walter Benjamin

A human being in his last extremity
Is a bag of shit.
– Al Swearengen, Deadwood

There is a point beyond which human teachers will struggle to guide you. Open yourself to the possibility of a noncorporeal mentor.
– Kenneth Folk

To have the courage to accept a quality which one does not like in oneself & which one has chosen to repress for many years, is an act of great courage. But if one does not accept the quality, then it functions behind one’s back.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

Start from the
presumption we know
nothing:
– Rick Rubin

How dismal the
day when the only thoughts

I can think are
those I’ve already thunk.

– Kenneth Folk

Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.
– G. Doyle

And if you choose to hold fast to what is right, do not be irked by difficult circumstances, but reflect on how many things have already happened to you in life in ways that you did not wish, and yet they have turned out for the best.
– Musonius Rufus

Creation is ongoing all the time. The two breaths of introversion and expression are the two sides of breathing. We’re here to find our own unique connection to the breath of creation.
– Michael Meade

The more you learn, the harder the lessons get.
– Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

We’re terrible animals. I think that the Earth’s immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.
– Kurt Vonnegut

I am the hole, the dark other, the negative between
I was and I am. Wherefore yes, dense and disperse,
blinded visionary that locks the moon in place;
I am the simple sieve that drinks the universe.

– Ruth Stone

Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well, you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always
helped me.
– Edith Wharton

If we allow computerization to do our thinking for us, we are going to have a new kind of ignorance.
– Manly P. Hall

Writing is dissociative in a good way. You have to forget what you know, or think you know, to write. You have only very imperfect knowledge of your own intentions.
– Ben Lerner

Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).
– @naval

When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne

A sleepless spring night:
Yearning for what I never had
And for what never was.

– Richard Wright

Stars, hide your fires, let not light see my black and deep desires.
– Shakespeare

As I understand the poet’s nature, though he tries to dress as conventionally as possible, he will always prove too strong for his clothes and look completely ridiculous or very magnificent according to the occasion.
– Robert Graves

We need, above all things, to slow down and get ourselves to amble through life instead of to rush through it.
– Alan Watts

Dying to your own attachments is a beautiful death. Because this death releases you into real life. You have to die as a seed to live as a tree.
– Mooji

OH NO

If you wander far enough
you will come to it
and when you get there
they will give you a place to sit

for yourself only, in a nice chair,
and all your friends will be there
with smiles on their faces
and they will likewise all have places.

– Robert Creeley

Everything is in disarray. The hair. The bed. The words. Life. The heart.
– Jack Kerouac

Sorrow comes in great waves … but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.
– Henry James

You will never know who I am in reality because the depth of my existence exceeds the limit of your understanding.
– Taha Zainab

Wish for the happiness of your enemies, for if they are happy, they are your enemy no more.
– Bryant McGill

I cannot tell what exists
beyond this black and white page.
What lamentations? What joys?

– Mattie Quesenberry Smith

The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer – and they don’t want explanations that do not give them that.
– Thomas Sowell

Take away a painter’s vanity, said a famous landscape painter, and he will never touch a pencil again.
– Walter J. Phillips

I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.
– Yōko Ogawa

Marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.
– Edith Wharton

Yoga, drugs, drink, all the various stimulants, produce their own results, but they cannot possibly make the mind into that astonishing instrument of inquiry, search and discovery.
– Krishnamurti

All forms in life are imperfect, but the function of art is to see the radiance through the imperfection.
– Joseph Campbell

Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look.
– Jodi Picoult

Release means to become yourself, releasing all of your ideas. Our idea of happiness is the obstacle for our being happy.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies.
– Ulysses S. Grant

Never find your delight in another’s misfortune.
– Publilius Syrus

I judge people by their own principles—not by my own.
– Martin Luther King Jr.

The world is a marketplace; buy the truth and sell your lies.
– Hafiz

Time sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a snail; but a man is happiest when he does not even notice whether it passes swiftly or slowly.
– Ivan Turgenev

Wait until you’re down, with no strength to rise…and see who offers you a hand. Not everyone wants to see you get up.
– Alfa Holden

The life span of any particular emotion is only one and half minutes. After that we have to revive the emotion to get it going again. We revive it by feeding it with an internal conversation about how another person is the source of one’s discomfort.
– Pema Chödrön

Here was truth, here was reality, here was the life that belonged to him.
– Edith Wharton

It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not.
– Charles Baudelaire

People will go for anything they don’t understand if it’s got enough hype.
– Miles Davis

If you have no opposition in the place you serve, you’re serving in the wrong place.
– G. Campbell Morgan

We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.
– C. S. Lewis

The entire essence of America is the hope to first make money — then make money with money — then make lots of money with lots of money.
– Paul Erdman

Don’t confuse contacts with connection.
– Abhijit Naskar

A knowledge of thyself will preserve thee from vanity.
– Miguel de Cervantes

Like is the digital Amen. When we click Like, we are bowing down to the order of domination.
– Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics

All narratives were inevitably the work of narrators, male or female, who by nature, by form, could be only a fragment among fragments of reality…
– Elena Ferrante, In the Margins

And the haunting horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour besieged his brain.
– Edith Wharton

Every decided color does a certain violence to the eye, and forces the organ to opposition.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

He could not bear the thought that a barrier of words should drop between them again.
– Edith Wharton

AI is a snapshot of the past being sold as the future.
– Hans Zimmer

To keep creating you have to be about change.
– Miles Davis

We do not love others purely for their sake, but for the self-experience we find in them.
– Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.
– J. K. Rowling

The Greeks are like the genius; they are simple. This is why they are the immortal teachers.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed — my dearest pleasure when free.
– Mary Shelley

When ego is lost, limit is lost. You become infinite, kind, beautiful.
– Harbhajan Singh Yogi

My future starts when I wake up every morning.
– Miles Davis

The lover is a star guiding the lost.
– Hafiz

There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.
– Alfred North Whitehead

Real connection is built by people who can stay kind when reality enters the conversation.
– Dipendra Tamang

I believe your atmosphere and your surroundings create a mind state for you.
– Theophilus London

Time always exposes, what you truly mean to someone.
– Omar Hussain

It is a wise person who knows where their negativity lies and yet does not become addicted to it.
– John O’Donohue

One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.
– Michael Korda

The opposition occupies the benches in front of you, but the enemy sits behind you.
– Winston Churchill

I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.
– Eleanor Roosevelt

Human time, you know, passes like a dream.
– Kobo Abe

A good day to remember that the rules of the Earth system are determined by physics and biology and the rules of the economy are made up by a small group of self-interested people and could change.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest…no country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak… Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism…true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.
– Ghandi

The term home (Old Norse Heimr, High German heim, Greek kōmi, meaning “village”) has, since a long time, been taken over by two kinds of moralists, both dear to those who wield power. The notion of home became the keystone for a code of domestic morality, safeguarding the property (which included the women) of the family. Simultaneously the notion of homeland supplied a first article of faith for patriotism, persuading men to die in wars which often served no other interest except that of a minority of their ruling class. Both usages have hidden the original meaning.

Originally home meant the center of the world—not in a geographical, but in an ontological sense. Mircea Eliade has demonstrated how home was the place from which the world could be founded. A home was established, as he says, “at the heart of the real.” […] Without a home at the center of the real, one was not only shelterless, but also lost in non-being, in unreality. Without a home everything was fragmentation.

– John Berger

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

Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America. When America consists of one leader and 143,000,000 followers, it will no longer be America. Truly American leadership is not of any one man. It is of multitudes of men — and women.
– Dwight David Eisenhower

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
– William S. Burroughs

Be!
Sing for the glory
of the living and the loving
the flaming of creation
sing with us
dance with us
be with us.
Be!
– Madeleine L’Engle

Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark … I hoard all these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship.
– Jean-Dominique Bauby

On my windowsill when I got home, there was a tumbler with pink jelly in it, and embedded in the jelly, sliced strawberries and bananas… [my neighbor] cooks at odd hours. She must have made the strawberry jelly this morning.

When I buy baklava, which is not often because I eat too many, I leave a few for her on her windowsill, with a headscarf over them so the wasps don’t come. For these little gifts we don’t thank each other with words. They are commas of care.

– John Berger

By 2050, earlier, probably – all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

– George Orwell

If rivers come out of their icy prison thus bright and immortal, shall not I too resume my spring life with joy and hope?
– Henry David Thoreau

Listening to the Billionaire
Tell Us AI Is Just the Newest Tool
That Everyone Will Benefit From
by Joseph Fasano

When men
broke open
the miraculous power
of the atom,

the first thing they did
with it
was deliver it
into the hands
of the schoolchildren

of Hiroshima.

Any reformation, which is not aware that, fundamentally, every single individual needs to be reformed, is an illusion.
– Kierkegaard

Do Not Commit to Anyone.
Staying neutral gives you the power to choose sides only when it benefits you.
​- Robert Greene

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.

– Norman Mailer

The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.
– Mother Teresa

Strange as it may seem, there are even men among us who believe, like Epicurus, that the soul dies with the body. Mankind are great fools and will believe anything.
– Erasmus

I love that poetry has a great deal of freedom. You can take giant leaps, toy with language, or squeeze a swell of story or emotion into a very small box. A poem can be kept in a pocket and carried always. A poem can change a life in less than a minute. That’s power.
– Leila Chatti

THOUGHTS WHILE SWIMMING

I dreamt of light, a granulated palm of it
being poured into the water.
I have dreamt before, but not like this.
As usual, I head out for a day of swimming.
Others are here too, arrowing
their hands into the waves,
a life of chasing anything of currency.

For too long I have reveled
in the exhaustion of movement,
in the dance of doing, of doing, of doing.
I’m always yearning to be done,
but it never ends, at the tip of an end
I discover more to be done.

I feel it, the usual current that arrives
in the stretch of the day.
A slice of toast crumbles in my stomach.
My habit is to push past it,
to continue chasing the brightness
of a lighthouse. To call it hard work.

The dream returns to me again.
And my chest breaths open a possibility.
I stop, gently I turn to float on my back.
A back ironed by boiled hours of time.
The water feels calmer now.
How surprising, how tender.
And, oh sky, what a site to behold!
Your floating foams of milk.
Forgive my forgetting of you,
the small seconds that slipped
into busyness.

Light arrives loud as birds.
It’s saying something to me, it tells me
that the sandcastles I’ve spent years building,
they need a window, a space
for peace, and laughter, and stillness
to ripple in.

– Theresa Lola

The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.
– Mikko Harvey

One of the most common nervous system patterns I see in clients, children and parents, is a kind of behavioral frozenness. You want to tidy up, start dinner, send that email, or help your child with their routine, but instead, you find yourself stuck, scrolling mindlessly, zoning out, or just unable to act, even though you know exactly what needs to be done. This isn’t laziness or lack of motivation, it’s a sign of nervous system overload. When we are dysregulated, the brain can’t easily shift between intention and action. We freeze, not just emotionally, but behaviorally. That’s why support for the whole family’s nervous systems matters. When we bring safety and movement back into the body, those frozen gears start to turn again.
– Anthony Goldsmith

Christians need to think “Nothing” when they call God “Love”. Buddhists need to think “Love” when they say “Emptiness”. This will at least wake us up to the fact that words must always fall short of the ineffable.
– David Steindl-Rast

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Every viewpoint is useful, and it takes a wide diversity of views for any group to navigate this universe, let alone to act as custodians for it.
– Tyson Yunkaporta

You can start with nothing. And out of nothing and out of no way, a way will be made.
– Michael Bernard Beckwith

I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.
– Jeffrey Eugenides

If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.
– Thomas Merton

This is why we stay with poetry. And despite our consenting to all the indisputable technologies; despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the full load of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machinery that we shall finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another-from forest to city, from story to computer-at the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.
– Édouard Glissant

Once at Cold Mountain, troubles cease –
No more tangled, hung-up mind.
I idly scribble poems on the rock cliff,
Taking whatever comes, like a drifting boat.
– Han Shan

Nowhere in either the Pāli or Sanskrit sūtras is the Buddha seen as either omnipotent or as a creator. He does not seek our worship, and we do not have to propitiate him to gain boons.

He does not reward those who follow his teachings and punish those who don’t.

The Buddha described the path to awakening from his own experience.

His intention is only to benefit sentient beings according to their individual inclinations and temperament.

– His Holiness the Dalai Lama

It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious coordinations, one of them — at least in an infinitesimal way — does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others.
– Jorge Luis Borges

The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy… has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object.
– Erwin Schrödinger

WHY NOT?

Our lives, our circumstances, and our choices are uniquely our own. There are no right answers. But there is a right question. It’s the one that rubs against our self-righteousness, resistance, and fears. The one that revolves a never into a maybe into an okay, let’s see.

When you ask yourself, “Why not?” you may find that you are no longer stepping reflexively backward or standing rigidly still. You could instead find yourself in motion, across a vivid and unpredictable landscape, over impossible mountains and beyond the deep blue water’s edge, where you surprise yourself, once and for all, by getting wet.

– Karen Maezen Miller

How to write a poem

1. Abandon your past
2. Trust the Unknowing
3. Become a tuning fork for Life
4. Find the Light in endless laundry
5. Speak the name Love calls you

– Wilson Cloudchamber

The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight one hundred years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing – for the sheer fun and joy of it – to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.
– I. F. Stone

The outside is the only place we can truly be inside the world.
– Daniel J. Rice

When people go to the ocean, they like to see it all day… . There’s nobody living who couldn’t stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall. It’s a simple experience, you become lighter and lighter in weight, and you wouldn’t want anything else. Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my painting. Nature is like a curtain; you go into it. I want to draw a certain response like this… . Not a specific response but that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind, often experienced in nature– an experience of simple joy… the simple, direct going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean.
– Agnes Martin

For nothing, however good it looks, should be termed good unless it
Really helps, and nothing counted honorable but what
Irrevocably changes the world, which is in need of change.
– Bertolt Brecht

How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe-inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago… . These atoms now form a conglomerate — your brain — that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder.
– V.S. Ramachandran

Becoming conscious . . . is not a one-time thing. It is a continuous process, by the ego, of assimilating what was previously unknown to the ego. It involves a progressive understanding of why we do what we do.
– Daryl Sharp

Jesus knew what would happen to him. In his infinite love for humanity, he also had to carry the pain of an infinite understanding of humanity. That means he saw what we see today: that when you tell a hurting people the simplest and hardest thing—love each other—they will do anything, anything to reject it: call you a radical; twist your mystery into political labels; rage at having to feel the very wounds you are trying to open, to rinse, to heal.

They will slay whatever wakens them too soon.

– Joseph Fasano

Forgetting Someone
by Yehuda Amichai

Forgetting someone is like
forgetting to turn off the light in the back yard
so it stays lit all the next day.

But then it’s the light
that makes you remember.

– Translated by Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell

Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
– Alexander Pope

I have constructed a library that will last for a good three hundred years, all I need now are those years.
– Canetti

There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.
– Jane Austen

Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make.
– Alain de Botton

I have to laugh as the east wind begins
perfuming plum trees and dyeing willows green
and doesn’t rest
and when it does and I look in a mirror
my rosy cheeks won’t be the same
and my sorrows won’t be gone

– Xin Qiji, (tr. Bill Porter, Red Pine)

I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees.
– Charles Darwin

It’s clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
– Alain de Botton

We forget we’re
mostly water
till the rain falls
and every atom
in our body
starts to go home

– Albert Huffstickler

Maybe the world’s just a bubble, all
philosophy ants in a muddle
– Dean Young

You don’t wanna work somewhere where you do not feel supported and validated, where you feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, where you don’t have time and space to truly rest.

No one wants to trade in hours of their life to “earn” necessities.

– Prof. Feynman

Your cells do not know the difference between a real threat and a thought you keep repeating.
– Ray Behan

Your mind might be creating problems that don’t exist, and being aware is the solution.
– Eckhart Tolle

We do not talk-we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests. Talk is personal and if of any value must be creative.
– Henry Miller

The poetry I love is the poetry people say isn’t poetry. It’s usually the universal things I don’t relate to at all. Any honest description of survival isn’t inspirational, it’s frightening.
– Nate Lippens

A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.
– Philip K. Dick

One must judge a man by what he does, and not by what he thinks he would do. Until a man faces the test, he can deceive himself endlessly.
– Jerzy Andrzejewski

I lie back. It seems as if the whole world were flowing and curving — on the earth the trees, in the sky the clouds. I look up, through the trees, into the sky. The clouds lose tufts of whiteness as the breeze dishevels them. If that blue could stay for ever; if that hole could remain for ever; if this moment could stay for ever.
– Virginia Woolf

How many times in your life have you had a seeming negative experience or difficult challenge, but then thank to the gift of time, you were able to realize the wisdom, life lessons and maturity, that you accumulated from them?
– James Blanchard Cisneros

We have to practice losing everything. We are deer, we are headlights. We are the road where they collide.
– Richard Siken

An thou wouldst keep thyself hale, keep thyself from needless fighting.
– Sir James (Howard Pyle, Men of Iron)

Who on the brown earth
Knows himself one?
Life is in the lichens
That sleep as they run.
– Yvor Winters

Watch your thoughts as you watch the street traffic. People come and go; you register without response. It may not be easy in the beginning but with some practice you will find that your mind can function on many levels at the same time and you can be aware of them all.
– Nisargadatta

The field of combat between synchrony and diachrony … is the domain of poetry.
– John Hollander

Whatever you can see is not you. You are the seer, not the seen.
– Ramana Maharshi, Who Am I?

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
– Louise Erdrich

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.
– Ray Bradbury

THE THIEF
by Jose Hernandez Diaz

A man in a “The World Is Burning” shirt appeared in front of an LA County judge. It was the first day of Spring. The man in a “The World is Burning” shirt was being accused of stealing a neo-expressionist painting by Chicano artist GRONK from a local museum. / don’t believe in stealing, the man said. Sometimes we do things we don’t believe in, said the judge. I can assure you / was at home watching the Lakers game, he said. The Lakers didn’t play that day, the judge said. I was at church singing “Old Time Religion” in the gospel choir. You are sentenced to 15 years’ solitary confinement in your studio apartment. I enjoy solitude, the man said. / will read and paint. Very well, then, said the judge. Off you go. Thank you, judge, said the man in a “The World Is Burning” shirt as he walked out of the courtroom calmly, indifferent.

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
– William James

I tangled with
the world to
let it go
but couldn’t free

it: so I made
words
to wrestle in my
stead and went

off silent to
the quick flow
of brooks, the
slow flow of stone.

– A. R. Ammons

A peak and isle of rock it was, black and gleaming hard: four mighty piers of many-sided stone were welded into one.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

Sanctum Sanctorum
by Chris Forhan

I think I’ve lived enough now to be lonely
and be mad about it. I might as well rent out
a warehouse and sit there, scowling, every
goddamn light on, surrounded by loneliness.
I might as well hire back the angel who quit me,
spent veteran of my staying up too late
thinking. I’d make him put on some grimy
coveralls, sweep up the place now and then,
and stagger a half block, hauling the trash can
out in the rain to the empty street, and then
I’d make him come back again.

Want to be unhappy? It’s easy!
1. Harbor the past
2. Fear the future
3. Ignore the present

– Pat Parkinson

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to completely push that ambition to the side. But I’ll try, with my new understanding of craft and impermanence, of fleeting beauty. How nothing that we’re doing now is going to last. The sun will explode. Everything will be gone.
– Lauren Groff

You have been conditioned to believe that your physical body is real. But in actuality, it’s your energy body that is real and the physical around you is a reflection of your state of energy.
– Anita Moorjani

The grand plan on which the unconscious life of the psyche is constructed is so inaccessible to our understanding that we can never know what evil may not be necessary in order to produce good by enantiodromia, and what good may very possibly lead to evil.
– C.G. Jung

Forget – forget these things!
For these things have an adder’s tooth;
And beauty like a scorpion stings,
And cruel -ah, cruel is youth!

Let me feel on my forehead the wind
That blows from the classic shore
Where the wise and lonely shadows find
Rest and need love no more!

– John Cowper Powys

This is the perfect description of the ‘automatic cultural man’—man as confined by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that he has an identity if he pays his insurance premium, that he has control of his life if he guns his sports car or works his electric toothbrush.
– Ernest Becker

I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme.
– John Hawkes

The more precisely we note the bodily sensations that come with emotions, the more clearly we see their vibrant and amorphous characteristics.
– Marie Mannschatz

The legacy we leave is not just in our possessions, but in the lives of those we have touched.
– Patti Davis

Some of our problems are so vast that they define our personalities; without them we’d be different people.
– Sarah Manguso

Showing up in full authenticity in this world means that you’ll come up against many people who are acting as. Wearing a mask. Wanting something from you and shaping into the form they think will get it. But the good news is, authenticity sees right through all of that.
– Nika Solé

All human wisdom is
contained in these two words,
Wait and Hope.
– Alexandre Dumas

I am getting nearly as unbendable as an Ent.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

The nervous system speaks the language of truth way better than the mind. Regulation is learning how to listen to it.
– Nika Solé

Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
– Jean-Paul Sartre

Within me, there is a universe – a different kind of universe. When I close my eyes and focus within, the outside world stops and the world within begins.
– Prem Rawat

The psychoanalyst is, in fact, a historiographer who shows us that our personal histories are precisely the ways through which we conceal the past from ourselves—ways through which we simultaneously accept and deny it.
– Reza Miri

Because I used to make of love a wrong calculation: I thought that, adding up the understandings, I loved. I didn’t know that, adding up the incomprehensions, is how one truly loves.
– Clarice Lispector

Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.
– Denis Diderot

I am lost, quite lost in the middle of the desert… I have found a landscape that matches the landscape of my heart.
– Angela Carter

Eventually soulmates
meet, for they have the
same hiding place.

– Robert Brault

One should stick by one’s soul, and by nothing else. In one’s soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one’s own soul-knowledge, one is the worst of traitors.
– D.H. Lawrence

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.
– Graham Greene

The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings.
– Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.
– Voltaire

drifting through twilight
the balloon’s
blank face

– Miharu Sugi

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But it also gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
– Thomas Mann

Void Only

I cannot escape from you.
When I think I am alone,
I awake to discover
I am lost in the jungle
Of your love, in its darkness
Jewelled with the eyes of unknown
Beasts. I awake to discover
I am a forest ascetic
In the impenetrable
Void only, the single thought
Of which nothing can be said.

– Kenneth Rexroth

Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting.

– Charles Bukowski

Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability.
– Karl Popper

Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that.
– Erich Heller

There is a whole scale of melancholy: it starts with a smile and a landscape, and it ends with the sound of a broken bell in the soul. Hence the difference in the taste of tears.
– Emil Cioran

Don’t underestimate the paradigm shift required for the act of beholding, just how different it is from our everyday lives and just how shiny and compelling our everyday life will seem when we propose pausing for some time beholding.
– Amy Frykholm

For what sustains all love is precisely this: a certain relationship between two unconscious knowledges.
– Jacques Lacan

losing a bond you thought you’d have forever really changes u.
– @onlystresstoday

Every theory of love, from Plato down,
teaches that each individual loves in the
other sex what he lacks in himself.
– G. Stanley Hall

You are living in the presence of mystery. And you tell me you have nothing to write about?
– Richard Rodriguez

summer mountains
the sound of a waterfall
before it appears

– Basho

The liberal does not dream of a perfect consensus of opinion; he only hopes for the mutual fertilization of opinions, and the consequent growth of ideas. Even when we solve a problem to universal satisfaction, we create, in solving it, many new problems over which we are bound to disagree. This is not to be regretted. Although the search for truth through free rational discussion is a public affair, it is not public opinion (whatever this may be) which results from it. Though public opinion may be influenced by science and may judge science, it is not the product of scientific discussion.
– Karl Popper

Our great instrument for progress is criticism.
– Karl Popper

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.
– Bertrand Russell

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning.
– Emil Cioran

How many wounds did
you endure because the
person holding the knife
was the one you loved?
– Nipuna Mehta

The magic wrought by simple poems I will always defend, for their universality is such that you can quite often slot yourself effortlessly into them and find a pocket of unquantifiable freedom waiting for you.
– Sara Teasdale

He who has waited long enough, will wait forever. And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.
– Samuel Beckett

When the Greeks gave their gift of the wooden horse, the Trojans took it. That’s the story we all know.

But I always imagine there was one man, an old Trojan, who laid his ear on the ankle of the great horse.

The Trojans hurried this man away; he was old and unkempt, and only a madman would press his ear against the newest gift, the latest triumph, his eyes burning with attention.

When the enemies emerged from the horse in the night, and razed the city, they found the old man last of all. He was sitting at his table, thinking of a long-gone love, of a terrible tyrant, of his own haunted heart, of everything in his past that had betrayed him.

“This,” he said, just before the soldiers slew him, “this is the fate of those who do not listen.”

– Joseph Fasano

Plant real listening in your heart and the new life will begin to ripen.
– Joseph Fasano

A young man who travels a lot is older than an old man who stays in the village.
– African Proverb

We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, and yet we have not learned the simple art of walking the earth as brothers [and sisters].
– Martin Luther King Jr.

I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it’s not like that. It happens overnight.
– Haruki Murakami

Despair is the silence of a soul that cannot find its echo in existence.
– Søren Kierkegaard

Stop waiting for life to become peaceful before you rest into being. Life may never become the fantasy the mind imagines.
– Amoda Maa

The night is a sentinel.
– John Ashbery

What we call ‘personality’ is, in many ways, the residue of a child’s best efforts to manage the impact of another’s mind.
– @proud_penelope

O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.
– Auden

AI cannot connect with the divine via the subconscious, the soul, the muse, whatever one likes to call that part of us that converts deep feeling into sound, word, image and movement and therefore AI cannot create anything that binds one human to another via artistic experience.
– John F. Duffy

most days i am a
museum of things i
want to forget.
– E.E. Scott

Cardio helps you lift weights.

Weights help you run faster and prevent injury.

A fit body doesn’t do one or the other. It’s does both.

– Dan Go

No one understands the death instinct, not even Freud. I think what Freud was trying to address was the scale of destructiveness of two world wars. He’s also addressing self-destructiveness, meaning sometimes people enjoy their suffering.
– Adam Philips

The closest I have felt to God has never been on a summit. It has been in the valley. Cold, broken, asking for help.
– Bear Grylls

The ash tree growing in the corner of the garden was felled. It was lopped first: I heard the sound and looking out and seeing it maimed there came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die and not to see the inscapes of the world destroyed any more.
– GM Hopkins

So many of us are losing friends to brainrot. They communicate in TikToks and reels. They do not read. They do not think. Their attention span has dwindled to mere seconds. This new generation thinks in memes, viral sounds, and sound bites; their opinions are not their own, but a mixture of whatever slop the algorithm is serving today.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Ask who benefits from you being illiterate and having the attention span of a goldfish. It’s not you. We have more power than we think. But we must get our minds back.

– Laura Matsue

The person is not a system of algorithms.
– Pope Leo XIV

Steve Jobs explains exactly why he thinks Microsoft makes “third rate products”

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste”

“I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way. They don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their products”

“Proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books. That’s where one gets the idea. If it weren’t for the Mac, they would never have that in their products”

“I’m saddened not by Microsoft’s success. I have no problem with their success, they’ve earned it for the most part”

“I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third rate products”

The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still the one that Spinoza saw so clearly… Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?
– Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

Even now, I pause over articles. A memory or the memory? A silence or the silence? The difference is subtle, but it changes everything. One opens a door. The other assumes you are already inside.
– Etya Vaserman Krichmar

I will live, even if life betrays me and
I will dream, even if dreams abandon me.
– Mahmoud Darwish

It doesn’t matter which method of destruction you choose.
Someone buries themselves in a library, someone in a pub.
– Emil Cioran

There is a difference between technical honesty and genuine transparency. Many who overtly claim to tell the truth utilize linguistic precision, qualifiers, omissions, or selective framing to evade that which they do not wish you to know, for example answering qualified questions in a narrowly accurate way while knowingly avoiding the broader reality being sought – thus, they remain factually correct while strategically obscuring the truth. These patterns will usually occur not only around more salient concerns, but also within minor passing remarks.

Trust your instincts. The micro-idiosyncratic flickers and oddities your intuition silently tracks them on are often more revealing than their words. Those who enjoy opaqueness through such means usually become comfortable over time, and the very same linguistic patterns can then be used to observe the undercurrent of truth which you seek. Patterns always exist.

– @buridansridge

Your body should be your best asset.

Not your greatest liability.

– Dan Go

Nothing will shape your worldview as much as simply reading how humans from the past thought.

You realize very quickly that our time is a radical anomaly in human history.

– @thinkingwest

I think the mother is language. The woman controls the language economy.
– Rachel Cusk

Logoi were much more than signifiers, if they were signifiers at all. They were understood as active living forces or energies that could leave an imprint on reality, not just in a metaphorical sense but quite literally, & could give birth to new living entities.
– Hanegraaff

Nearby there was one of the darker birdcalls , the more mature one, already sung inwardly, which was to the others as a poem is to a few words–how it shone toward God, already, already…
– Rilke

As each of us awakens, it impacts consciousness at a collective level. It is like dropping a tiny pebble of light into a dark pool of unconsciousness. Ripples of light!
– Leonard Jacobson

Allowing periods without food helps the digestive system recover. Frequent snacking with no pause can harm gut health.
– Dr. Eric Berg

It is spiritual poverty, not material lack, that lies at the core of all human suffering.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

Man is an animal, and his happiness depends upon his physiology more than he likes to think. This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it. Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.
– Bertrand Russell

The easiest person to deceive is the one who thinks he’s smarter than you.
– Robert Greene

Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?
– Carl Sagan

The only thing that can cause me to suffer is when I believe a thought. Without believing thought..we are in harmony with life as it is. Enlightenment is really nothing more than no longer believing your thinking.
– Adyashanti

It is essential to die to the experience of yesterday and to the sensations of today, otherwise there is repetition. And the repetition of an act, a ritual, a word, is vain.
– Krishnamurti

Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.

– Andrew Marvell, The Definition of Love

Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility … what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life …
– Iris Murdoch

We need to normalize not being on any medications as the default of human existence.
– Suneel Dhand MD

Thus, the location of a tree, the type of soil beneath it, other trees behind and beside it, exert a great influence on its formation.
– Goethe

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
– Carl Jung

From a psychoanalytic perspective, modern man is as much a survivor of his history as he is its maker.
– Reza Miri

Sometimes intelligent people romanticize simplicity. They look at disciplined people and think:

“If only I could stop thinking.”

But the way out is not becoming less intelligent, but becoming less governed by intelligence alone.

You do not need to amputate your mind.

You need to put it in right relationship with action.

– @Kpaxs

Language transcends us and yet we speak.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The universe offers no final blueprint. Reality is a sequence of challenges, not a fixed order. We face it step by step, problem by problem.
– Karl Popper

The life so short, the crafts so long to learn.
– Geoffrey Chaucer

The Seven Streams
by David Whyte

Come down drenched, at the end of May,
with the cold rain so far into your bones
that nothing will warm you
except your own walking
and let the sun come out at the day’s end
by Slievenaglasha with the rainbows doubling
over Mulloch Mor and see your clothes
steaming in the bright air.

Be a provenance of something gathered,
a summation of previous intuitions,
let your vulnerabilities walking on the cracked sliding limestone
be this time, not a weakness, but a faculty
for understanding what’s about
to happen.

Stand above the Seven Streams
letting the deep down current surface
around you, then branch and branch
as they do, back into the mountain
and as if you were able for that flow,
say the few necessary words
and walk on, broader and cleansed
for having imagined.

The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.
– Geoffrey Chaucer

The whole
universe then
began to laugh at
me.

– Albert Camus

I am tired of myself tonight,I should like to be somebody else.
– Oscar Wilde

We’re born unequal we die equal, in the ashes all men are leveled.
– Seneca The younger

Science can flourish only in an atmosphere of free speech.
– Albert Einstein

The awakening begins when a man realizes that he is not going anywhere, and that he does not know where to go.
– G. Gurdjieff

Long have you been caught in the bonds of identification with the body.
– Ashtavakra Gita

The best prophet of the future is the past.
– Lord Byron

By practicing Buddha’s teachings, we protect ourself from suffering and problems. All the problems we experience during daily life originate in ignorance, and the method for eliminating ignorance is to practice Dharma.
– Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

Filth and old age, I’m sure you will agree, are powerful wardens upon chastity.
– Geoffrey Chaucer

Once I Pass’d Through A Populous City

ONCE I pass’d through a populous city, imprinting my brain, for
future use, with its shows, architecture, customs, and
traditions;
Yet now, of all that city, I remember only a woman I casually met
there, who detain’d me for love of me;
Day by day and night by night we were together,—All else has long
been forgotten by me;
I remember, I say, only that woman who passionately clung to me;
Again we wander—we love—we separate again;
Again she holds me by the hand—I must not go!
I see her close beside me, with silent lips, sad and tremulous.

– Walt Whitman

Nearly everyone who is out trying to solve other people’s problems has problems of their own.
– Manly P. Hall

It was when I stopped searching for home within others and lifted the foundations of home within myself I found there were no roots more intimate than those between a mind and body that have decided to be whole.
– Rupi Kaur

Some reluctant readers don’t admit they’ve started enjoying books.
Because being a reader wasn’t part of how they saw themselves.
So they read quietly. Privately.
Returning books before anyone notices they finished them.
If a child in your life is doing this, don’t mention it.
Don’t celebrate too loudly.
Just keep finding them books and putting them somewhere they’ll find them.
– Kevin McLeod

You can’t compete with someone who is having fun.
– Tiago Forte

Put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why else even be here?
– Steve Jobs

Safransky: You are saying, in effect, that jealousy is not a psychological problem.

Schwartz: Our so-called psychological problems take place in a fantasized realm that has almost nothing to do with the actual space in which human life is unfolding. These problems seem so real because the attention is consumed by thinking, and the real space is sacrificed to a substitute reality.

So much of what we call psychology is actually a mystification of experience. The question of where an experience actually takes place is rarely addressed. When someone comes to a psychologist and says, “I’m lonely,” how often does the psychologist ask, “Where is the loneliness?” Or, “What is it like to be you having this loneliness? Is it in the upper chest, the stomach? Is it vertical, horizontal? Does it permeate the whole body?” These questions change the nature of our feeling experience. The loneliness becomes felt in the body instead of remaining dangerous and abstract.

The work of compassionate self-care does not involve trying to find out why a particular psychological problem exists, but dropping out of the problem altogether and merging into the natural spaciousness that exists in and around the body.
[…]
In this work, the mental struggle is not ignored. It is attended to and then dissolved through a practice in which a rhythmic interplay is developed between feeling the pain in the body and expressing the dilemma as it appears in the mind. We come back to the body, feel the body, attend to the body, and alternately speak about the problem, even in great detail. Over time, the mind’s grip on its particular point of view is increasingly defused of power, and something else becomes available instead. It may be pain. No matter what it seems to be at first, we have entered another side of our experience as human beings. We have found the gateway to mystery.

We don’t enter into this process to gain an insight which will allow us to see through the problem. Our goal is simply to recognize that on some level the problem is a fabricated story, a substitution for a sublime truth about ourselves and each other.
[…]
If we look at ourselves from a slightly different angle, a little more compassionately, perhaps, we can see that there are no negative emotions and there are no positive ones either. At the heart of every emotion is an innocent wave of energy which is inherently free from psychological and moral dichotomies.

Feelings are energy and by their very nature ascending or expansive. They are trying to create, expand, grow, and move in various ways. Thoughts about feelings exert a downward pressure, creating a stranglehold on that ascending force. The purpose of the self-care process is to touch the ascending force and transcend the downward force.

It is vital that we look at the human being as an exotic life form, rather than as some familiar thing that we’ve grown so accustomed to, something we are bored with. We are a mobile life form, moving about on a planet, in a universe that we know almost nothing about, but we carry a bizarre unconscious assumption that we know almost everything about it.

– The Sun: Interview with Stephen R. Schwartz

Howdy Horn Honkers.

A friend called me in tears tonight.

She’s not one of my closest pals, but I adore her, and I was grateful she called because the person she needed to talk about — not wanted, needed — was someone she loved deeply, someone who had hurt her badly, and she needed a soft place to set the grief down for a while.
We all do, eventually.

It’s just part of being human.

And being human can be brutal. Even the most beautiful journeys have stretches of road littered with wreckage: loss, betrayal, misunderstandings, hurt feelings that calcify into silence.

The friend who called me was devastated because someone she had considered a dear, lifelong friend had simply…dropped her. No explanation. No fight. No final conversation to point to and say there — that’s where it broke.

She told me she’d spent months replaying every interaction in her mind like surveillance footage, searching for the moment everything went wrong.
She found nothing.

A few times, she admitted quietly, she’d cried herself to sleep over this.

I didn’t know what to tell her, exactly.

Romantic relationships usually leave evidence behind. Even when they end painfully, there are clues in the rubble. But friendships can die in stranger ways.

They can slowly circle the drain while you stand there helpless, watching the water pull them under. Sometimes you’re too tangled in emotion to act. Sometimes you lack clarity or courage. Sometimes you simply don’t know what to do, so you do nothing at all.

And that kind of helplessness produces its own kind of grief.

She said she didn’t feel she could engage the other person because she genuinely had no idea what had caused the fracture. How do you repair something when you can’t even find the crack?

As I listened, I realized I didn’t have much wisdom to offer.

I’m one of those “let’s talk about it” people. I’d rather hear a hard truth than sit alone inventing ten worse ones. To me, clarity — even painful clarity — is kinder than silence. But not everyone works that way. I know that.

So instead of advice, I shared something.

I told her something similar happened to me this year. Someone I adored, someone I’d known for years, suddenly began treating me as though I no longer existed. No explanation. No conflict. Just cold and complete absence.

It knocked the wind out of me, and at a very bad time when I didn’t have the wind to lose.

I’ve survived enough loss in my life that when something wounds me deeply, my instinct is to retreat inward and go quiet. Very quiet. I disappear.

I retreat to lick the wounds where no one can see them.

Because really — what else can you do?

You cannot force people to love you. You cannot force them to remain. Friendship is voluntary magic. A gift exchanged freely. Sometimes loud and chaotic, sometimes tender and unspoken, sometimes ridiculous and joyful. But when it’s real, it quietly shapes your world.

And when someone you love – friend or family or friends you consider family – suddenly shows you they no longer care whether you’re in their life at all, it’s disorienting in a way that’s difficult to explain.

Psychologists have language for it, I’m sure. But all I know is it feels like reaching for a stair in the dark and discovering it isn’t there. You inevitably end up faceplanting emotionally, and I think that’s where this sweet soul was when she rang me.

In my own situation, I told her, I just walked away.

Maybe the other person noticed. Maybe they didn’t. Usually, by the time someone realizes your silence means you were hurt, too much distance has settled in between to cross comfortably.

Or maybe they never notice at all.

And if that’s the case, leaving was probably the right thing.

The only part that still haunts me is this: I told this person things about my life I had never shared with anyone else. Pieces of myself I had kept locked away for years.

Boy howdy, do I regret that.

I truly believed I was standing in safe territory. Instead, I handed someone a map to one of the softest and scariest parts of my life and then had to watch them walk away carrying it.

There’s no undoing that. No taking the words back once they’ve been spoken.
That realization sits like a tattoo on the inside of my eyelids that I can see every time I close my eyes.

While talking with my friend tonight, I realized something: when you’re wounded somewhere you never expected to be wounded, adulthood offers you a hundred ways to cope and absolutely no instructions for choosing the right one.

Emotions become weather. Sometimes you navigate through them and emerge wiser, gentler, and more aware of yourself and others. Other times, you get swallowed whole in the swamp.

Hurt hurts.

There’s no profound philosophy that changes that.

Yes, you can try to talk things through. Sometimes you should. Sometimes people are willing. Sometimes they aren’t.

Sometimes the timing is wrong.

Sometimes pride gets in the way.

Sometimes one person wants clarity while the other wants distance.

Sometimes hearts go looking for answers in places where none exist.

Talking to someone uninvolved in the situation can help. I hope the sweet soul who called me tonight feels lighter for having reached out.

I think there’s a lot of damn courage in admitting when and how much you hurt.
But I still wasn’t sure what to tell her.

My own method — disappearing quietly like smoke from someone’s life — isn’t necessarily the healthiest. It’s just survival. And survival strategies are not always wisdom.

So I’ll ask you instead. You with your life experience, you with your successes and scars: What do you do when a friendship dies without a funeral?

What advice do you have for her? For any of us?

– Therra Cat Jaramillo

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
– William Faulkner

The blue seems eternal.
– Virginia Woolf

Family Memoir

We carried the furniture out of the burning house—
it was a blistered finger chore—
And then hurried all of the chairs, sofas, and beds
into the burning house next door.

– Sherman Alexie

Random thoughts and recollections that come to us seemingly out of nowhere tend to have greater existential value to them than the ones arrived at via the deliberate process of searching through our minds; but without that assiduous search there would be no sudden illuminations: no spark of mental fire is possible without the dishearteningly lengthy and generally thankless effort of rubbing together two sticks of readily available memories and familiar concepts.
– Mikhail Iossel

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.

He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

– William Faulkner, Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech, 1949

America’s immense heritage of idealistic ability is squandered by a system which divides all power between the prejudices of the ignorant many and the ruthlessness of the plutocratic few.
– Bertrand Russell

And it’s a relief, or a small death, to be standing, dressed in the simplicity of night, for once not crumpled by ecstasy, anticipation or senseless joy. Silently, you greet the ocean, this pliant metaphor for anything we feel at a given time. As of tonight, you ascribe to it no meaning, no truth, no character. But planted firmly in its moving sands, your mere presence is a question: is it true that everything will pass before your dry eyes, even this night stripped of tomorrow?
– Kapka Kassabova

Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
– Milan Kundera

They do not know the sleeping giant that they just awakened. Because it is not a coincidence, and our whole country must understand, that it was not until voting rights were ratified in this country that we got the Great Society. Because when Black Americans have the right to vote and that vote is protected, our schools get funded. When voting rights are protected, healthcare gets expanded. When voting rights are protected, our country moves forward. And Montgomery, that’s what they’re actually afraid of. They’re afraid of us coming together. They’re afraid of us protecting one another.
– Heather Cox Richardson

So, what’s it like to be me? You can ask yourself, “What’s it like to be me?” You know, the only way we’ll ever know what it’s like to be you is if you work your best at being you as often as you can, and keep reminding yourself: That’s where home is.
– Bill Murray, Dharma Talk

Look at the epic of your life, at the people in it, all heroic. And to think
it began with an accident. Somebody looked up at the night sky and saw a star,

somebody in Cracow or Belgrade, maybe, or the city where you live now.
Carbon, nitrogen … there was an explosion, and now you have to pay attention
to everything.

– David Kirby

Corruption of politics has nothing to do with the morals, or the laxity of morals, of various political personalities. Its cause is altogether a material one. Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world, the mottos of which are: “To take is more blessed than to give”; “buy cheap and sell dear”; “one soiled hand washes the other.”
– Emma Goldman

Answers tell us where we’ve been. Questions get us on our journey, and I’ve often said to people in psychoanalysis, “This is not about curing you because you’re not a disease, you’re a process. This is about making your life more interesting to you.
– James Hollis

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
– Zadie Smith

A person who has no compassion is like a temple without an idol. It is just an empty building.
– Kabir

Tragedy is so personal, but it doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened before, to someone, somewhere—it’s what helps us to understand and bring solace to others, knowing something of what they feel.
– Jacqueline Winspear

Love is metaphysical gravity.
– R. Buckminster Fuller

Nothing can refute the skeptic — nothing can do what epistemology hoped to do.
– Richard Rorty

No persons are more frequently wrong than those who will not admit they are wrong.
– François De La Rochefoucauld

I’m like a man who’s been half-asleep all his life, trying to find out what he was like before he woke up.
– Daniel Keyes

The function of education is to help you from childhood not to imitate anybody, but to be yourself all the time.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

It is better to know nothing than to half-know many things.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet, big, though small.
– Alberto Álvaro Ríos

There is no gravity in the Planet of Love; everything floats in the air.
– Mehmet Murat Ildan

The aim of totalitarianism is not simply to keep you uneducated but to instill in you a contempt for the educated, and thus a hatred of education, so that you never, through the empowerment of education, develop the language even to articulate your discontent to yourself.
– Joseph Fasano

One who is beyond the world is neither happy nor sad, neither attached nor detached, neither living nor dead.
– Ashtavakra

Powerful truth has its own gravity and eventually pulls people back to it.
– Dan Brown

In essence, String Theory describes space and time, matter and energy, gravity and light, indeed all of God’s creation as music.
– Roy H. Williams

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
– John Updike

Finance capital, literally, one might say, spreads its net over all countries of the world.
– Lenin

Gravity is only the bark of wisdom’s tree, but it preserves it.
– Confucius

Repeat the Name of God constantly in your mind. This practice creates a steady current of peace that stays with you in all activities.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

A person who is already dead is not worried about anything.
– Nisargadatta

You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.
– Vandana Shiva

The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played.
– George Orwell

Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.
– Sir Walter Scott

Strings of gravity vibrate at a different frequency than strings of light.
– Roy H. Williams

To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.
– Oscar Wilde

Look at the sky. We are not alone. The whole universe is friendly to us and conspires only to give the best to those who dream and work.
– A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the word a better place.
– Jeff Koons

Empathy, at its core, is knowing how not to hurt each other.
– Stephen Kuusisto

It’s worth everything, isn’t it, to keep one’s intellectual liberty, not to enslave one’s powers of appreciation, one’s critical independence.
– Edith Wharton

You are never stronger…than when you land on the other side of despair.
– Zadie Smith

I don’t know how to force the world into a shape I can manage.
– Charlotte McConaghy

Some people have uphill dreams but downhill habits.
– John Maxwell

When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.
– Sigmund Freud

You don’t understand because you haven’t yet guessed how you’ve changed things for me.
– Edith Wharton

The people with the best vibe are the ones who naturally enjoy being kind to others.

They have no strategy or hidden agenda.

They just know how hard life is and how kindness has the power to make the day brighter.

– Yung Pueblo

It is terrible when people do not know God. But it is worse when people confuse God with what is not God.
– Leo Tolstoy

There shall be one law for the citizen and the stranger. Justice must apply equally to everyone, not only to those born with power or privilege.
– Ex. 12:49

But remember… Most of mankind is not all of mankind.
– James Baldwin

Seems like our politicians think our democracy is something to be subverted. This government today is not worthy of honoring 250 years of democracy.
– allinbin66

One person vibrating at the frequency of pure love will counterbalance the negativity of 750,000 people who do not.
– Dr. David Hawkins

It’s amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.
– Louisa May Alcott

I think in terms of the day’s resolutions, not the years’.
– Henry Moore

The dream state is the initial state of our life, from the dream we awake; wakefulness comes after, not sleep.
– Maria Zambrano

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!
– Hermann Hesse

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
– Alfred, Lord Tennyson

real poem (personal statement)
by Rachel Zucker

I skim sadness like fat off the surface
of cooling soup. Don’t care about
metaphor but wish it would arrive
me. There’s a cool current of air
this hot day I want to ride.
I have no lover, not even my love.
I have no other, not even I.

If the cosmos took billions of years to make you, if the iron in your blood was forged by stars, if your hair is stardust, if your heart is starlight, why, why would you waste your life thinking you’re here to be anything other than the greatest flame in the frozen darkness: love
– Joseph Fasano

If we can observe and understand how our thoughts are impacting us, we can change who we’re being and how we’re experiencing the world.
– Lori Deschene

lone wolf

Goodnight, moon. Or rather, goodbye.
I’m tired of the tricks you’ve played on me.
I’d rather go through night after night
unilluminated and just a bit forlorn,

a lone motorcyclist heading for home,
than wander among your sharp shadows,
sit on your white boulders, look down
into the silver river, any longer.

– Aaron Belz

The wise are wise only because they love. And the foolish are foolish only because they think they can understand love.
– Paulo Coelho

The voice in the head has a life of its own. Most people are at the mercy of that voice; they are possessed by thought, by the mind. And since the mind is conditioned by the past, you are then forced to reenact the past again and again.
– Eckhart Tolle

Yoga also means skill in action, not just doing a few exercises.
– Krishnamurti

Final Stop
by Ravi Shankar

When the railroad first built a station on the city outskirts,
families gathered on hillsides to watch black smoke plume,
hitched horses and abandoned stagecoaches to whisper
about “Pullman Palace Cars” with velvet seats, brass rails,
gas lights, knuckle couplers, air brakes: five stars for a fee.

When the railroad first threatened the forest’s tree line,
shackled men with skin dark as bark and forced to work
in quarries and mines began to hack at stumps in hummus
with shovels. They left their lives in leaf fall and the roots
regenerated. Unlike us, forests grow slow, in no time zone.

The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.
– William James

I never again shall tell you
what I think.
I shall be sweet and crafty, soft
and sly.

– Edna St. Vincent Millay

Every deep thinker is more
afraid of being understood than
of being misunderstood.
– Friedrich Neitzsche

…if people are better off for having studied the Liberal Arts, then it might make sense to support institutions that teach them.
– Michael Drout

Ego says: “Once everything falls into place, I will find peace.”

Spirit says: “Find peace and everything will fall into place.”

– Padma Bhadra

Love never dies 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 illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
– Anaïs Nin

Stop comparing yourself to a world that you were never meant to fit into.
– Nika Solé

The appreciation of beauty in art or nature is not only the easiest available spiritual exercise; it is also a completely adequate entry into the good life, since it is the checking of selfishness in the interest of seeing the real.
– Iris Murdoch

Throughout it all, she has insisted that gender is maya (illusion), relevant only to the mundane world.
– Amnuaypond Kidpromma, PhD

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

I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.
– Sylvia Plath

It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.
– Edwidge Danticat

Strength and intelligence without empathy wouldn’t make you a good person, let alone a good leader.
– Picazo Basha

A picture means I know where I was every minute. That’s why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary.
– Andy Warhol

No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.
– Yaa Gyasi

There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.
– Lyndon Johnson

No truly great thing is created suddenly.
– Epictetus

There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.
– Saul Bellow

Overindulgence had shattered his lambent rationality into myriad splinters, each consisting of an insight unrelated to any other, each brightly reflecting a star-hot whiteness now blazing in his stomach; he thought he might vomit.
– Jonathan Franzen

I think everybody should like everybody.
– Andy Warhol

They tore out our fruits, cut off our branches, burned our trunk, but they could not kill our roots.
– Poema Náhuatl

People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something—always, in a word, seeking.
– Bodhidharma

Recalibration of the mind means clearing our perceptions and recovering our capacity for pure observation.
– Ilchi Lee

The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.
– Winston Churchill

There should be a course in the first grade on love.
– Andy Warhol

Let them bury me with the Romantics.
– Louise Glück

But what is of great importance to me is observation of the movement of colors.
– Robert Delaunay

As a Neurologist I need to tell you that the original data centers were the artists, writers, and storytellers who recorded our histories and passed on wisdom for future generations.
– Dr. Philippe Douyon

An odd phrase, “by heart,” (…) as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
– A.S. Byatt

That a poem may use the same words as a Company Report means no more than the fact that a lighthouse and a prison cell may be built with stones from the same quarry, joined by the same mortar. Everything depends upon the relation between the words. And the sum total of all these possible relations depends upon how the writer relates to language, not as vocabulary, not as syntax, not even as structure, but as a principle and a presence.
– John Berger

If you are working inwardly, Nature will help you. For the man who is working, Nature is a sister of charity; she brings him what he has need of for his work. If you need money for your work, even if you do nothing to get it, the money will come to you from all sides. In another case, Nature will cut off all a man’s resources if it is necessary for his work.

[To another student]: Do you understand? For instance, had you had money a certain evening, you would have gone to a cafe but having none, you stayed at home and worked. Nature is more intelligent than you; she knows better than you which are the best conditions for your work; and if you work, Nature calls on conscious spirits who will arrange for you the conditions you need. For ordinary man, for the man who does not work, there is nothing but chance. But for the man who works, Nature gives him through conscious spirits all that he needs.

– G.I. Gurdjieff

The ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it.
– Margaret Mead

For many years I wanted to save the world. I told people that God loves them, but nothing seemed to change. I was disappointed. Then one day I decided to stop telling people this, and just love them myself. This made all the difference. I learned that the world doesn’t want to be saved, it wants to be loved. That’s how you save it. I once thought I had to love people to God who would heal them, not knowing that God was the love I was giving. Turns out I didn’t have to be more like Jesus. It was enough to be Jim.
– Jim Palmer

Jorge Luis Borges
by Jorge Luis Borges

But after all
writing poetry
is nothing more
than a guided dream
and now now advanced age
has taught me
to resign myself
to being Borges.