it’s as if I’ve interrupted something
that was falling in a straight line
from the eye of God
– Alice Oswald
If you want to understand contemporary culture, you must realize that the internal state of most people is defined by a baseline grief-shame for which they do not have adequate language, and a painful longing for a belonging for which they, likewise, have no serviceable words.
– Paul J. Pastor
To gain your own voice,
forget about having it heard.
Become a saint of your own
province and your own
consciousness.
– Allen Ginsberg
A great poem of the Zen tradition ends with this description of the awakened state: To be without anxiety about imperfection.
– Adyashanti
The hallmark of independent thinking is disbelief in the fashionable religions of the day.
– @naval
Implacable sweet daemon, Poetry,
What have I lost for thee!
Whose lips too sensitively well
Have shaped thy shrivelling oracle.
– Francis Thompson
Whatever the value of literature may be, it is actual only when and where good readers read. Books on a shelf are only potential literature. Literary taste is only a potentiality when we are not reading.
– C.S. Lewis
what you want is stable intimacy with Reality
you can move closer to that in stable intimacy with other people
to do that, you must develop stable intimacy with yourself
– River Kenna
People who need help often look a lot like people who don’t need help.
– Glennon Doyle
in the latter days
of a corrupt world
cherry blossoms
– Issa
Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the word is a sign, it means nothing. But if the word is a symbol, it means everything.
– CG Jung
deepest of all illusory appearances, for hiding wonder, as for many other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping appearances, space and time.
– Carlyle
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
– Adrienne Rich, North American Time
The Divine is the nuclear material at the core of the reactor,
religion is the reactor that both protects us from radiation and allows the Divine to power our lives and communities,,
& The Humanities were a nuclear reactor that got uncomfortable talking about radiation in non-metaphorical ways, so the power plant just kinda slowly wound down for a couple centuries and now there’s nothing in there
– River Kenna
what are your axioms, and categories, and systems, and aphorisms? words, words. high air-castles are cunningly built of words, the words well bedded also in good logic-mortar; wherein, however, no knowledge will come to lodge.
– Carlyle
We are all very afraid of becoming nothing. But the disintegration of the body cannot affect the dying person’s true nature. That’s why it’s very important for us to be able to look deeply to see the ways in which we are not just our bodies. Each of us is life without limit.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Going slow is usually the fastest way to get where we’re trying to go in psychotherapy
– Mary Jo Peebles
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
– William Wordsworth
People who live for the future—as we say of the insane, “not quite all there,” or here—by overeagerness they are perpetually missing the point. Foresight is bought at the price of anxiety, and, when overused, it destroys all its own advantages.
– Alan Watts
ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
thrillingly gluttonous.
For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.
And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.
– Mary Oliver
Yes, love is a matter of gifts thrown in the fire, for nothing.
– Marina Tsvetaeva
Tell them you love them. See what they say.
Or say it to yourself, and see what you say.
– Diana Khoi Nguyen
But how many daydreams we should have to analyze under the simple heading of Doors. For the door is an entire cosmos of the Half-open. In fact, it is one of its primal images, the very origin of a daydream that accumulates desires and temptations: the temptation to open up the ultimate depths of being, and the desire to conquer all reticent beings. The door schematizes two strong possibilities, which sharply classify two types of daydream. At times, it is closed, bolted, padlocked. At others, it is open, that is to say, wide open.
And what of all the doors of mere curiosity, that have tempted being for nothing, for emptiness, for an unknown that is not even imagined? Is there one of us who hasn’t in his memories a Bluebeard chamber that should not have been opened, even halfway? Or which is the same thing for a philosophy that believes in the primacy of the imagination, that should not even have been imagined open, or capable of opening half-way? How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to reopen, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life. But is he who opens a door and he who closes it the same being?
– Gaston Bachelard
For if the world is the dream of Someone, if there is Someone who is dreaming us now and who dreams the history of the universe (that is the doctrine of the idealists), then the annihilation of religions and the arts, the general burning of libraries, do not matter much more than does the destruction of the trappings of a dream. The Mind that dreamed them once will dream them again; as long as the Mind continues to dream, nothing will be lost.
– Jorge Luis Borges
At Ryoan-ji in Kyoto there is a famous rock garden; wherever in it a person stands, one of the fifteen rocks cannot be seen. The garden reminds that always something unknowable is present, just beyond what can be perceived or comprehended – and that something is as much part of the real as any other stone amid the raked gravel.
– Jane Hirshfield
Even if I see you
again, I will never see you
again.
– Margaret Atwood
LIVING INSTEAD
Nothing much we can do about it so we live
the way old bones and fossils lived, the way
long-buried cities lived: we live instead
—just as if and even believing that here
and finally now, ours could be the real world.
– William Bronk
Every generation laughs
at the old fashions,
but follows religiously
the new.
– Thoreau
When one tries desperately to be good, wonderful, perfect, then all the more the shadow develops a will to be black, evil and destructive.
– CG Jung
The star that was mine empery
In dust upon unwinnowed skies:
But primal dreams have made me wise,
And soon the shattered years shall rise
To my remembered sorcery.
– Clark Ashton Smith
It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.
– Sigmund Freud
No, since my flame is of celestial heat,
I love one who the very gods outvies:
A bold attempt must honour my defeat;
If fall I must, I would fall from the skies.
– Jean Bertaut
as blossoms drift away
just another day
of life’s turmoil
– Issa
One can be proud of what one has done, but one should be much prouder of what one has not done. Such pride has yet to be invented…
The mission of Everyman is to fulfill the lie he incarnates, to succeed in being no more than an exhausted illusion.
– Emil Cioran
The perfect spouse is the best life hack no one told you about.
– Ryan Holiday
Enemy-occupied territory — that is what this world is.
– C.S. Lewis
In Brazil
by Tracy K. Smith
for Adélia Prado
Poets swagger up and down the shore, I’ll bet,
Wagging their hips in time to the raucous tide.
They tip back their heads and life sears a path
Down the throat. At night they dance, don’t they,
Across tiles that might as well be glass, or ice.
And if they don’t want to spend the evening alone,
They don’t. And if they want to wear snow-angels
Into the sheets of some big empty bed, that’s
What they do, until a dark form takes shape
On the ceiling overhead. Then they put on a robe
And kick around looking for some slippers.
When the poem finally arrives, it grins
And watches back with wide credulous eyes.
You have to adjust to facts: you can’t have a nation, you can’t have a society, in which everyone is always occupied in intellectual and computational pursuits. A few people have to be around who know how to handle the material world in a gracious way. And for these people we provide only regretfully, as an afterthought.
– Alan Watts
“When complexities increase, the desire for essentials increases, too,” Saul Bellow reminded us in his Nobel Lecture, almost half a century ago. No one has ever regretted returning to–or excavating–what’s essential.
– Pico Iyer
Why is it that we cling to our exclusiveness of name, position and acquisition? Is anonymity degrading, and to be unknown despicable? Why do we pursue the famous, the popular?
– Krishnamurti
If you are not too long,
I will wait here for you
all my life.
– Oscar Wilde
When you see the world you see God. There is no seeing God, apart from the world. Beyond the world to see God is to be God.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
People have been saying the novel is dead for as far back as I can remember. The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes.
– Rosamond Lehmann
Ignorance does not result from what we don’t know! Ignorance results from what we think we do know—but don’t! Most ignorant people are, in fact, quite certain.
– Richard Rohr
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
– Flannery O’Connor
A Short Testament
Anne Porter
Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation
If I cannot repair it
I beg you to repair it,
And then there are all the wounded
The poor the deaf the lonely and the old
Whom I have roughly dismissed
As if I were not one of them.
Where I have wronged them by it
And cannot make amends
I ask you
To comfort them to overflowing,
And where there are lives I may have withered around me,
Or lives of strangers far or near
That I’ve destroyed in blind complicity,
And if I cannot find them
Or have no way to serve them,
Remember them. I beg you to remember them
When winter is over
And all your unimaginable promises
Burst into song on death’s bare branches.
What crazies we writers are, our heads full of language like buckets of minnows standing in the moonlight on a dock.
– Hayden Carruth
COMPASSION
Today I imagined my inner self as a place crowded with pins and needles. How could I receive anyone in my prayer when there is no place for them to be free and relaxed? When I am still so full of preoccupations, jealousies, angry feelings, anyone who enters will get hurt.
I had a very vivid realization that I must create some free space in my innermost self so that I may indeed invite others to enter and be healed. To pray for others means to offer others a hospitable place where I can really listen to their needs and pains. Compassion, therefore, calls for a self-scrutiny that can lead to inner gentleness.
– Henri Nouwen
Elements
But enough about me. Have you ever noticed
that your mind is everywhere and nowhere
you look or grope, and that it’s odd how clearly
you can see yourself not seeing yourself at all?
This raises the inevitable question: What’s your policy
on fog? When it gets in bed with you, who’s on top?
Dances with you, who leads? And if I admit
that it’s my doppelgänger, that I aspire
to its humid spiritualism of touching entire skies
and horizons at once, that I am transparent
in my lack of clarity vis à vis the faces of likewise
apparently solid but actually silkily composed
and wispy beings, will you, as a fellow wisp,
recognize that fog is the truest biography
of the species, and cling to me and get lost
in my embrace as I cling to your diffuse
and unbearable yearning?
I’m sorry. We just met. Interrogation
isn’t the way to get to know someone. Sometimes
I simply want us all to meld together, and fog
has more magic up its sleeves than I have magic
or sleeves, is unified and glorified and uncuttable
with a knife or remark and reminds me
that I am a constant presence in my life
sometimes, since I am elsewhere now
and somewhere often and usually everywhere
missing a screw or faith, for though I want to believe
in life after death, I struggle to believe
in spring after winter, roses after tulips,
and that stuffing my pockets with fire and dried leaves
to burn myself down and start over with ashes
to fashion a new day will lead to anything
more lasting than bones made of smoke
that know better than to stay.
– Bob Hicok
You want to believe that there must be intelligent and honest people somewhere inside the Trump economic policy trying to limit the damage … but as with the existence of leprechauns, there is no empirical basis for this belief.
– David Frum
…what’s happening now goes deeper than privatization. What we’re witnessing is a deliberate redefinition of what government is for—and who it serves.
This isn’t just about economics. It’s about power, and the values behind it.
Governments, in theory, exist to support the conditions of life—through education, health, infrastructure, and care. But when states retreat from that role, they don’t stop governing. They just start governing differently—by deciding whose lives are worth protecting, and whose aren’t. That’s the shift underway.
– James B. Greenberg
He gained height, grew thin, the hair on his temples had begun to grey, but, now as then, he had none of that useful sense of proportion, nor could he ever develop anything of the sort, which might have helped him distinguish between the continuous flux of the universe of which he constituted a part (though a necessarily fleeting part) and the passage of time, the perception of which might have led to an intuitive & wise acceptance of fate.
– László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance
Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.
– Angela Carter
To be wild is not to be crazy like a criminal or psychotic, but “mad as the mist and snow.” The marks of wildness are a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and a vivacious curiosity in the face of the unknown.
– Robert Bly
We all have made the mistake of thinking someone else can be our healer, our thriller, our filling. It takes a long time to find it is not so, mostly because we project the wound outside ourselves instead of ministering to it within.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
It’s been a long, cold, lonely winter
– Here Comes The Sun, The Beatles
Men who give way easily to tears are good. I have nothing to do with those whose hearts are dry and whose eyes are dry!
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities
If we conceive that anyone loves, desires, or hates anything which we ourselves love, desire, or hate, we shall thereupon regard the thing in question with more steadfast love, etc. On the contrary, if we think that anyone shrinks from something that we love, we shall undergo vacillation of the soul.
– Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
I would rather live in a universe I cannot explain – not because of a want of trying or a lack of skill, but because some things exceed grasping – than live in a Universe fully articulated, fully reducible to signification, fully recoverable to meaning.
If you asked me what haunts my work and thought, what beats steadily as a rhythm in the place where a heart might be, it would be this: a prayer that creation isn’t complete. That there are colours we have not seen, and hues that cannot be seen; that names do not encompass their owners, and identities are merely holding sites for something so profoundly sacred as to be orgasmically migrant; that our lives are too ‘large’ to be reduced to the duration of our living, and that death is so ecstatically vibrant that it requires ever new bacchanal cosmologies to meet it in its dance.
My work is a prayer. That the world is still being made. And that whatever one might say about it: whether it was summoned by gods or the mindless poetry of chemistry and maths; whether it was birthed by a cosmic goddess or midwifed by chance; whether it is composed of atoms and doom, or fairies that bloom…that the world’s most abundant constituent is surprise.
– Bayo Akomolafe
The Mother Tantra says that if one is not aware in vision, it is unlikely that one will be aware in behavior. If one is not aware in behavior, one is unlikely to be aware in dream. And if one is not aware in dream, then one is unlikely to be aware in the bardo after death.
– Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY
You do not have to get over it.
You will carry your grief
and be carried by loss
in any way the carrying happens.
As if you had a choice.
Grief builds rooms inside you
no one else will ever see,
rooms with doors
only you can pass through
filled with songs or silence
only you can hear.
Rest here. Or dance here.
Shout. Or whisper. Rise
like milkweed seeds on the wind.
Or lie. Here, you can only do it right.
Here, there are no other eyes
or ears to tell you what to do
or how long it will take
or what choices to make.
And if you are weeping, weep.
And if you are dry, you are dry.
The rest of the world
can talk about stages
of grief and how it should be,
but you, you do not have to listen.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Have you noticed how often it happens that a really good idea – the kind of idea that looks, as it approaches, like the explanation for everything about everything – tends to hover near at hand when you are thinking hard about something quite different? There you are, halfway into a taxi, thinking about the condition of the cartilage in the right knee joint, and suddenly, with a whirring sound, in flies a new notion looking for a place to light. You’d better be sure you have a few bare spots, denuded of anything like thought, ready for its perching, or it will fly away into the dark.
– Lewis Thomas
…there was something inexpressibly broken in my heart as though I’d lived before and walked this trail, under similar circumstances with a fellow Bodhisattva, but maybe on a more important journey, I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.
… to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin.
– Jack Kerouac
The paradox: vulnerability is the last thing I want you to see in me and the first thing I look for in you.
– Brene Brown
When we speak the word “life,” it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.
– Antonin Artaud
Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.
– Gilles Deleuze
There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.
– Anne Carson
The opposite of anxiety is not calmness, it is desire. Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility of relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known. There is nothing mysterious about the anxious state; it leaves one teetering in an untenable and all too familiar isolation. There is rarely desire without some associated anxiety: We seem to be wired to have apprehension about that which we cannot control, so in this way, the two are not really complete opposites. But desire gives one a reason to tolerate anxiety and a willingness to push through it.
– Mark Epstein
You read a
hundred
military manuals
you won’t
find the word
kill they trick
you into killing
– Anne Carson
let us stay home together my love
and not know
as the rain does not know where it came from
and the sea that is
all around us
does not know its beginning
– W.S. Merwin
Today it rained hard for much of the afternoon. It got dark fast, let go a hard, final downpour, and now the streets are clear and sharp-smelling. The light, these long last days of summer, is low enough to jewel and yellow, blur, and now, if I tilt my head, rainbow all the drops hanging from the phone line. It’s that the colors weight the drops, slick them with fire and sea greens in shifts.
I walk through this rain thinking at one time I would point this all out to you in person, hold these drops on the wire against those astral stalks, iridesce the water, roll a pearly drop toward you, fray and sift asparagal light. But now you live in another city and you, in another country, and you (who have not yet even made an appearance here) and I no longer speak of such things.
But I want the shine to live. And before I know it, I am offering, tilting into the light and bringing forth … something: fine beads aloft, an abacus of pearls, say. I’m sowing some new green, but it’s for you, Reader, whom I both know and do not know, who both exist and do not exist, who constitute an elsewhere far, further than I can imagine, years, maybe centuries away.
Whose elsewhere is a balm and a comfort.
– Lia Purpura
“et nunc omnis ager, nunc omnis parturit arbos,
nunc frondent silvae, nunc formosissimus annus.”
And now every field, now every tree gives birth,
now forests grow leafy, now the most lovely year.
– Vergilius (Ecloga III)
Love should
grow up like a wild iris, but doesn’t, it comes from
the midst of everything else, sees like the iris
of an eye, when the light is right,
feels in blindness and when there is nothing else is
tender, blinks, and opens
face up to the skies.
– Susan Griffin
I have come to realize that being trustworthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real.
– Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person
Lives are only one with living. How dare we, in our egos, claim catastrophe in the rise and fall of the individual entity? There is only Life, and we are beads strung on its strong and endless thread.
– Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
– George Bernard Shaw
Let nothing be called natural
In an age of bloody confusion,
Ordered disorder, planned caprice,
And dehumanized humanity, lest all things
Be held unalterable!
– Bertolt Brecht
It is a sign of the inferiority of nineteenth century culture that
the man of money should be the object of so much worship and envy.
But these business men too are slaves, puppets of routine, victims of
busy-ness; they have no time for new ideas; thinking is tabou among
them, and the joys of the intellect are beyond their reach.
– Will Durant
THE DISAPPEARING
There is a heartbreaking beauty
about my crummy street
tonight, at 2 o’clock
in the first snow: I stand looking out
at this window, I think
how everything seen
is something seen for the last time…
At last I turn away,
I give up. I am tired,
I can’t mourn anymore
the loss of what I never asked for
and never understood.
– Franz Wright
Philosophy is an alpine road, and the precipitous path which leads to it is strewn with stones and thorns. The higher you climb, the lonelier, the more desolate grows the way; but he who treads it must know no fear; he must leave everything behind him; he will at last have to cut his own path through the ice. His road will often bring him to the edge of a chasm, whence he can look into the green valley beneath. Giddiness will overcome him, and strive to draw him down, but he must resist and hold himself back. In return, the world will soon lie far beneath him; its deserts and bogs will disappear from view; its irregularities grow indistinguishable; its discords cannot pierce so high; its roundness becomes discernible. The climber stands amid clear fresh air, and can behold the sun when all beneath is still shrouded in the blackness of night.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Once again, getting students to memorize and recite 75 lines of poetry in my Intro. class is one of the best pedagogical decisions I’ve ever made.
– Darren Dyck
Hillman reminds us that “our ideas about the psyche affect the psyche,” and that it matters what language we use to talk about things that matter, the language can empower or destroy,
Midgley reminds us that the myths and metaphors we use to think about something can help us or harm us, can lead us to answers or lead us to ruin
Hofstadter claims that analogy is the core of thought, and thus that the analogies we use to think about things, consciously or unconsciously, can entirely change what thoughts it is possible to think
Asma, similarly, tells us that Mythopoetic Cognition is the engine of mind, and that the embodied myths that drive our thought literally change the shape of the world we inhabit, and what actions make sense within it
Hillman, again, reminds us that myths are what constellate human energy into configurations that interpret the world for us and drive action within it
WHEN WE APPROACH SUBJECTS FROM THE WRONG MYTHS, THE WRONG ANALOGIES, THE WRONG METAPHORS AND LENSES, WE’RE WALKING INTO QUICKSAND
– River Kenna
The only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man… and as the only way one can speak of man… is to speak of him as though he were a termite.
– Samuel Beckett
Jung represents human consciousness as something like a field, a magnetic field, so to speak. As soon as a content enters the field of consciousness, it falls into a web of associations.
– Marie-Louise von Franz, Creation Myths
With truly logical people, most arguments are very short and based mainly on differing assumptions.
– @naval
We are here to find that dimension within ourselves that is deeper than thought.
– Eckhart Tolle
This world of ours,
To what shall I compare it?
To the white wake of a boat
That rows away in the early dawn.
– Shami Mansei (translated by Kenneth Rexroth)
Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas! the rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level, is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride, and submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last traces of these remarkable myrmidons.
– Baudelaire
I am not what I ought to be; I am not what I wish to be; I am not what I hope to be. But blessed be God, I am not what I used to be, and by the grace of God I am what I am.
– John Newton
the merging of rationalists and western buddhism was like, really bad. on the upside, there’s good reason to hope that in the long term, it makes both of them less apt to be taken seriously.
– River Kenna
The greater the outward show, the greater the inward poverty.
– Krishnamurti
If you live in a declining empire, skills > credentials.
Knowing how to grow food, fix systems, lead groups, and regulate nervous systems matters significantly more than degrees or job titles.
– @VinceFHorn
What you are looking for is already where you are looking from.
– St Francis of Assisi
You are just as much the dark space beyond death as you are the light interval called life. These are just two sides of you, because you is the total wave.
– Alan Watts
We all hope that our patients will finish with us and forget us, and that they will find living itself to be the therapy that makes sense.
– Donald Winnicott
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
– Joy Harjo
In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners.
– G.K. Chesterton
Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.
– Joris-Karl Huysmans
Busy yourself as much as possible with the study of divine things, not to know them merely, but to do them; and when you close the book, look round you, look within you, to see if your hand can translate into deed something you have learned.
– Moses of Evreux
Remember our poor hearts:
We never grasp the zenith of the time!
We have no spring except in winter-prayers!
– George Macdonald
Animals full of light
walk through the forest
toward someone aiming a gun
loaded with darkness
That’s the world:
God holding still
letting it happen again,
and again and again.
– William Stafford, Meditation
GRAVITY AND GRACE
Our life is impossibility, absurdity. Everything we want contradicts the conditions or the consequences attached to it, every affirmation we put forward involves a contradictory affirmation, all our feelings are mixed up with their opposites. It is because we are a contradiction, being creatures, being God and infinitely other than God.
Contradiction alone is the proof that we are not everything. Contradiction is our wretchedness, and the sense of our wretchedness is the sense of reality. For we do not invent our wretchedness. It is true. That is why we have to value
it. All the rest is imaginary.
Impossibility is the door of the supernatural. We can but knock at it. It is someone else who opens.
It is necessary to touch impossibility in order to come out of the dream world. There is no impossibility in dreams. Only impotence.
– Simone Weil
We are a forgetful species, obsessed with the succession of tasks that hover our days, and negligent of the grand celestial drama unfolding around us.
– Katherine May, Enchantment
Man has to cope with the problem of suffering. The Oriental wants to get rid of suffering by casting it off. Western man tries to suppress suffering with drugs. But suffering has to be overcome, and the only way to overcome it is to endure it.
– CG Jung
You don’t even realize how many things are draining your energy until you start looking at them one by one. Your diet. Your finances. People. Habits. Ways of thinking. Once you begin to clean this up, you take so much of your power back.
– Nika Solé
In this poem, language is primal connection, shelter, and shield. It gives us access to the stories that make us who we are, to the words [. . .] that protect us from those who wish us harm.
– Leonora Simonovis
In all probability, throughout this galaxy, and throughout other galaxies, there are human or comparable populations that arise and go, arise and go, just as we do individually. So don’t get too worried about the thought that this whole human system on this planet may go away and disappear. Because if you get too worried about it, it’s going to happen faster than if you don’t worry about it.
– Alan Watts
Hear on the wind, how the pendulum swings
Feel how the winter succumbs to the spring
Over the palisade, morning will break
Rise up to meet it, O sleeper, awake
– The Oh Hellos
tap tap tap—
a woodpecker tries
to wake the spring
– @joy_pops
I always kept some of my stories with me in my bag. A writer should always have her texts on her.
– Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
All information is useless.
The typical lightning bolt
is one inch wide and five miles long.
– Dean Young
Maturity is when you start choosing alignment over history and stop negotiating your worth, waiting for others to catch up, or shrinking to accommodate those who no longer resonate, so you can open the door for deeper connections – ones that don’t require force, just flow.
– Inner Practitioner
the man of resentiment does not know how to and does not want to love, but wants to be loved. He wants to be loved, fed, watered, caressed and put to sleep.
– Deleuze
Reading James Baldwin was extraordinary for me because he had opinions that mattered and he knew it, and I absolutely longed for that.
– Margo Jefferson
The long arc of the moral universe is no more.
– Kim Addonizio
Wise silence is best music unto bliss.
– Sir Philip Sidney
literally everyone deserves to go out for dinner, buy coffees, wear quality clothing and have fun experiences whilst also being able to afford rent, groceries, bills & have a lil left over for savings no matter what job they do. why is that so absurd to some people?
– @kidasnow
the grace
of April sunshine
on my cheeks—
I wonder if your heart
has softened, too
– @moscowdandelion
In these parts of the state, you do
not Karl Marx someone’s home
back. You Adam Smith it.
– Eric Sirota
There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Saying goodbye to a neurotic attitude is a very sad business and nobody has ever got out of it without feeling sad, for unfortunately a neurosis is a lovable condition and one resents being separated from it.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Without the balancing setting of everyday life all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
– Zadie Smith
One can learn to read and write, but intelligent thinking is another matter.
– Andrei Kurkov
Our minds are stuffed with so much knowledge that it is almost impossible to experience directly.
– Krishnamurti
so you want the government small enough to drown in a bathtub but powerful enough to inspect every uterus, library, and thought?
– JA Westenberg
Answering ‘What is Zen?’ is like answering ‘What is the ocean?’ To understand the ocean, you have to submerge yourself. You have to get wet.
– Les Kaye
If you are interested in something and pursue it in depth, you may arrive at spiritual questions. In my case, that ‘something’ happened to be music.
– Chee Shimizu
Is it an eye, is it a lens, is it a mirror? Perhaps these are similar questions that we can ask of our own mind.
– Justin von Bujdoss
As the Buddha taught, the most certain result of loving-kindness and compassion practices is the strengthening of the heart of the person doing the practice.
– Beth Roth
To me, the idea of creating compassion for our environment, for something that we take for granted daily—something that, as a human race, we are just absolutely destroying, for the most part without a care—I think that connecting compassion to that is really, really powerful.
– Emily Burke
Geniuses are always surrounded by people who don’t get it.
– Lindsay Oliveira
Sometimes healing looks like feeling safe in stillness.
No urge to perform.
No need to prove.
No rush to be anywhere else.
You’re not stuck, you’re grounded.
This is sacred work. Let it happen.
– @holistic.therapist
The earth rids itself of the cold
slowly and totally
while you are overgrown with
white petals of pain in springtime…
– Yaryna Chornohuz
(trans. Ostap Kin and Kate Tsurkan)
“there are no ‘rules of thumb’ in serving god, and this, too, is not always true.” reb yaakov yitzchak of pshushka (1766–1814). much later, poet fernando pessoa of lisbon said something similar: “there are no norms. all people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.” when you think of it, there isn’t any thing to think about. their sense is precisely in their lack of it.
– Hune Margulies
Let your children see
you have fun.
Sprinkle it in whenever you
can; dance while you’re stuck in
traffic and sing when you’re
cleaning the kitchen.
Fun doesn’t have to be reserved
for weekends & vacations.
Show your children how to
enjoy life even in the mundane
routines; they’ll watch, they’ll
learn & they’ll do the same.
– Erin Morrison
Being an English Major prepares you
for impersonating authority.
– Garrison Keillor
To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you… a truth… that used to elude you.
– Norman Mailer
Our eyes are like octopus suckers.
We attach with our eyes.
Dolphins connect with thir ears.
Dogs put their noses together.
Trees use their roots.
Getting together is important.
– George Gorman
A philosophy of aesthetic quietism that prevents the insults and humiliation inflicted on us by life and the living from ever becoming more than a despicable periphery around our sensibility, beyond the outer wall of the conscious soul.
– Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
She came to understand that
people had to decide, really, how
they were going to live.
– elizabeth strout
We should keep our feet on the ground to signify that nothing is beneath us, but we should also lift up our eyes to say nothing is beyond us.
– Seamus Heaney
Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back.
– Eve Ensler
Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
– CG Jung
The worst men have the best jobs, the best men have the worst jobs or are unemployed or locked in madhouses.
– Charles Bukowski
It appears the stock market is showing Americans in quantifiable numbers the actual cost of hate.
– Christine Elbert
God’s Doom was ever the master then of every man in deeds fulfilled, even as yet now it is.
– Beowulf (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Yes: I think that ‘victors’ never can enjoy ‘victory’ – not in the terms that they envisaged; and in so far as they fought for something to be enjoyed by themselves (whether acquisition or mere preservation) the less satisfactory will ‘victory’ seem.
– Tolkien, Letter 181
A great deal of attention has been paid … to the technical languages in which men of science do their specialized thinking … But the colloquial usages of everyday speech, the literary and philosophical dialects in which men do their thinking about the problems of morals, politics, religion and psychology — these have been strangely neglected. We talk about ‘mere matters of words’ in a tone which implies that we regard words as things beneath the notice of a serious-minded person. This is a most unfortunate attitude. For the fact is that words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study. The old idea that words possess magical powers is false; but its falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect — but not in the way that magicians supposed, and not on the objects they were trying to influence. Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them. ‘A mere matter of words,’ we say contemptuously, forgetting that words have power to mould men’s thinking, to canalize their feeling, to direct their willing and acting. Conduct and character are largely determined by the nature of the words we currently use to discuss ourselves and the world around us.
– Aldous Huxley, Words and Their Meaning
It shouldn’t be so easy to nudge people toward what might be their own destruction.
– Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents
There is absolutely no reason in the world why a man in America may not write exactly what he feels, in any form that suits him, and if he has what is known as talent, or even genius, there is no reason why it should not be published and be read and understood by many other Americans. It doesn’t have to be a “novel,” or a “memoir,” or a “diary,” or a “travel book,” or an “essay.” It can be just plainly and simply a book. The writing does not have to be “good writing,” that is, artistically labored writing with significant absences of statement of feeling. It can be ordinary writing and full of feeling.
– Jack Kerouac
The best-educated doctor in the world is standing on a low island in the middle of a sea of ignorance.
– Stephen King, Salem’s Lot
We cripple ourselves by
only gazing from within
our caves of reflection. If
we would see with the eyes
of freedom, we must be as
open and as unceasing as
the Sea.
– Susie Motz
Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.
– Rumi
Dorothy Wordsworth
by Jennifer Chang
The daffodils can go fuck themselves.
I’m tired of their crowds, yellow rantings
about the spastic sun that shines and shines
and shines. How are they any different
from me? I, too, have a big messy head
on a fragile stalk. I spin with the wind.
I flower and don’t apologize. There’s nothing
funny about good weather. Oh, spring again,
the critics nod. They know the old joy,
that wakeful quotidian, the dark plot
of future growing things, each one
labeled Narcissus nobilis or Jennifer Chang.
If I died falling from a helicopter, then
this would be an important poem. Then
the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore
declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous
youth. O, Flower, one said, why aren’t you
meat? But I won’t be another bashful shank.
The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre,
the lilacs their taunt. Fractious petals, stop
interrupting me with your boring beauty.
All the boys are in the field gnawing raw
bones of ambition and calling it ardor. Who
the hell are they? This is a poem about war.
used to have a lot of family
but most of them legends
now, fables used to lure in
the youngins to
join the crew
when the time came
for their spines to grow
into final form.
– Najya Williams
A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.
– Noam Chomsky
But he who knows what insanity is, is sane; whereas insanity can no more be
sensible of its own existence, than blindness can see itself.
– Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (Apuleius)
…and at the table next to her was a little boy in a soccer uniform sitting with his mother who told him, The plural of elf is elves. A wave of happiness came over me. It felt giddy to be part of it all. To be drinking a cup of coffee like a normal person. I wanted to shout out: The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!
– Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
There’s one problem with all psychological knowledge – nobody can apply it to themselves. People can be incredibly astute about the shortcomings of their friends, spouses, children. But they have no insight into themselves at all. The same people who are coldly clear-eyed about the world around them have nothing but fantasies about themselves. Psychological knowledge doesn’t work if you look in a mirror. This bizarre fact is, as far as I know, unexplained.
– Michael Crichton
There are many teachers
who could ruin you.
Before you know it,
you could be a pale copy
of this teacher or that teacher.
You have to evolve on your own.
– Berenice Abbott
Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.
– Hélène Cixous
The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central.
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not–which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.
– CG Jung
The real way of mending a man’s taste is not to denigrate his present favorites but to teach him how to enjoy something better.
– C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
Depth psychology demonstrated that we do not have just one will, consciously controlled, but many motivational centers that move us often unconsciously and that may at times work at cross-purposes.
– Keiron Le Grice
Contentment in every circumstance, in all situations, is the trademark of a spiritual seeker.
– Amma (Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi)
I lie for hours in the reclining chair in a twilight state, like that of my grandparents, which I used to marvel at when I was a child.
– Franz Kafka
What everybody wants is something to happen on its own. And everybody wants that.
– Alan Watts
How easily we destroy the delicate sensitivity of our being! The incessant strife and struggle, the anxious escapes and fears, soon dull the mind and heart.
– Krishnamurti
WHAT HE GAVE ME
at first i didn’t care
he gave me stars & suns & love & peace
i said i liked him
he gave me stars & suns & love
we went places together
he gave me stars & suns
we began to argue
he gave me stars
i said i loved him
he forgave me and left
– Wanda Coleman
The greatest gift you can give to others is to become less of a problem through understanding yourself.
– Larry Rosenberg
who can tell
what’s behind a face
every apple
in the market
perfectly polished
– @NituYumnam
“He that hath little busyness,” Ecclesiastes reminds us, “shall become wise,”
– Pico Iyer
I came out of the wilderness and fell in with the Beat scene, bohemian, Be Bop crowd, it was all connected. It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti –
I got in at the tail end of that and it was magic – it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Presley.
– Bob Dylan
Students should really demonstrate the basic required skills of walking before they attempt to keep up with Moore’s Law and the speed of AI.
– Andy Perrin
I am not predicting doom. But I am stating that if we ignore evil, we will move closer to doom, and the growth and triumph of evil may well result.
– Rollo May
We’re stretched thin, all of us; we vibrate; we quiver, we’re always on the alert. Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.
– Margaret Atwood
Depth psychology has presented us with the undeniable wisdom that the enemy is constructed from denied aspects of the self. Therefore, the radical commandment “Love your enemy as yourself” points the way toward both self-knowledge and peace.
– Sam Keen
overheard after a poetry reading: “it’s just me, my trump-supporting boss, & this communist from england…”
– Chen Chen
She can hear him walking away up the passage. His footsteps sound hesitant, but he doesn’t turn back. Nor will the moment return, which is true of all moments, though not equally.
– Damon Galgut, The Promise
The deeper you go, and the closer you get to the final realization, the heavier the resistance. You are coming down to those areas that are the ones that are repressed, and it’s that repression system that you have to pass through.
– Joseph Campbell
I’m sorry you’ve become a writer… I’m sorry this disaster has come for you. I love you. But you have to pay attention. It won’t help now, I don’t know what will help now, but I promise it will help later. That’s all you need to do. Pay attention.
– Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost
Full recovery is possible and inevitable for everyone who is willing to put the work in.
– Brad Schipke
Your mind is like the GPS and your goal is the destination. Without a destination, without a goal, you will go nowhere.
– Brad Schipke
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
– Henry David Thoreau
Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.
– Neil Armstrong
Get the mind with one object, so it can settle down and have a good solid foundation that doesn’t shift around all the time. The more you shift around, the less you see.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written.
– Ernest Hemingway
We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.
– Franklin Delano Roosevelt
It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.
– Voltaire
A LITTLE EDUCATION
GOES A LONG WAY
R. is lately taken
with the abyss, invoking
Kierkegaard’s notion of
the despair of possible infinity
v. the despair of infinite possibility.
We agree that any artist
worth/with a grain of salt
must face the latter
and set to fashioning variations
of our own (the infinite
possibility of despair).
I begin an essay on this
as it is manifested in popular music
(“So Many Men, So Little Time”).
But since I’ve been obsessed
with ice cream lately, I abandon
it in favor of one on which poets
liked ice cream (Schuyler)
and which ones did not (O’Hara).
To do this properly, I stop
reading their poems
and provide no footnotes.
Dead poets only—
that way, they can’t
call me up and say,
Hey jerk blah blah blah blah blah.
Of course, they’d only be talking
to my answering machine, next to
which I may or may not be
asleep, a magazine
covering my face.
– Mark Bibbins
With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.
– Norman Mailer
The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.
– Sylvia Plath
The resurrection is the reconstitution of our nature in its original form.
– Gregory of Nyssa
I don’t want to be worshipped. I want to be met—wild, willing, and full of hunger.
– Lilith
This is what idealists and visionaries ask of you—to make their mistakes for them.
– Robert Jackson Bennett
When it comes to talking about art, objectivity is a unicorn; you might convince yourself it exists, but good luck ever locating it.
– Jason Warburg
Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.
– Wellington
Animals and AI cannot select, create, or pursue new goals. This alone shines a light on what humans should lean into: imagination, creativity, agency.
– Dan Koe
You can’t use logic to destroy fear, just like you can’t use logic to create fear.
– Miloš Marinković
Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
– William S. Burroughs
A life’s work is also a landscape.
– Maaria Wirkkala
A tree is not made of wood; it is wood.
A mountain is not made of rock; it is rock.
– Alan Watts
You have two options. You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same.
– Joni Mitchell
Poets and anarchists
are always the first to go.
Where.
To the frontline.
Wherever it is.
– Giannina Braschi
The US post World War II was the global stabilizer, now we are the global destabilizer, that is a very hard thing to say.
– JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon
Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one.
– John Steinbeck
It must be lifted from the mind
must be lifted and placed elsewhere
must not remain in the mind alone.
– Frank Bidart
There’s always something in Buddhist teaching being said no to—and a true experience being affirmed.
– Ethan Nichtern
It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.
– Sir Tom Stoppard
Capitalism without democracy is fascism.
– Yanis Varoufakis
What does beyond ego look like? – you’re helping vs. judging – you have power to act vs. stuck as a victim of your circumstances – you have an open mind vs. narrow thinking-you want to be right vs. happy – you have a clear vision of reality vs. believing your stories.
– Cy Wakeman
Each of us only needs one thing: a heart beating within us that’s free of blame, contempt, irritation, and ill will toward others. Therefore, every act that makes you irritated with people and distances you from them rather than bringing you closer to them is a waste.
– Leo Tolstoy
You don’t need another random workout.
You need a battle plan to reclaim your physicality.
A full on Movement Practice.
– @moveorparish
You always admire what you really don’t understand.
– Blaise Pascal
The very man who has argued you down, will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said.
– C.S. Lewis
I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say ‘look how beautiful it is,’ and I’ll agree. Then he says ‘I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,’ and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
– Richard Feynman
I believe in books that do not go to a ready-made public. I’m looking for readers I would like to make. To win them, to create readers rather than to give something that readers are expecting. That would bore me to death.
– Carlos Fuentes
My moods are inversely related to the clarity of the sky.
– Glenn Gould
When you can bear your own silence, you are free.
– Mooji
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Charm is the ability to make others
forget that you look as you do.
– Jean-Paul Belmondo
The activity of belief is confusing and destructive; it may at first seem orderly and constructive, but in its wake there is conflict and misery.
– Krishnamurti
Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.
– Hermann Broch
Praise this body / For nothing has killed it yet / Even my own two hands.
– Jill Khoury
Van Gogh’s ear sends me an urgent message
that the earth is about to collapse.
– Liu Xia
Afternoon cantina
absorbing
Akhmatova
– @haikueveryday
I am rather tired, and no longer young enough to pillage the night to make up for the deficit of hours in the day…
– J.R.R. Tolkien
It is like a new account of everything old,
Matisse at Vence and a great deal more than that,
A new-colored sun, say, that will soon change forms
And spread hallucinations on every leaf.
– Wallace Stevens, St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside
What I did was to reject the world I was shown, though I later came back to it in various ways.
– Derek Mahon
We are standing in this waxing moment. And I believe we are being asked to carry what’s been refined in silence, to offer it with daring hands, and open hearts, to risk ourselves in devotion to what truly matters.
– Toko-pa Turner
I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports—using my allergies as an excuse—and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook.
– Carolyn Kizer
To view an object in the proper light we must stand away from it. The study of the classical literatures gives the aloofness which cultivates insight.
– John Spalding
The distinction can hardly be better expressed than by saying that the many use art and the few receive it. The many behave in this like a man who talks when he should listen or gives when he should take.
– C.S. Lewis
Chaos and decomposition are prerequisites for transformation. All great things came out of collapse. Acorns open in forest fires. Fallen trees become the nurse logs for new sprouts. Compost is the feast upon which new life thrives.
– Toko-pa Turner
The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed…
– C.S. Lewis
I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being.
– CG Jung
…poetry as divination, poetry as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself; poems as elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds, where the buried shard has an importance that is not diminished by the importance of the buried city…
– Seamus Heaney
All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn’t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you’re closed up tight. That’s the worst sin of all – the sin of omission.
– Simone de Beauvoir
To forget the permanent possibility of being wrong – that’s the first step in the movement toward violence.
– Matthew Brensilver
Money-making, social achievement, family and posterity are nothing but plain nature, not culture.
Culture lies outside the purpose of nature. Could by any chance culture be the meaning and purpose of the second half of life?
– Carl Jung
When a habit begins to cost money, it’s called a hobby.
– Jewish Proverb
The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood.
– Thomas Jefferson
If literature dies, it will have to be a violent death, a political assassination […]
– Gilles Deleuze
Do not swear by the moon, for she changes constantly, then your love would also change.
– William Shakespeare
A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money.
– John Ruskin
Man has to awaken wonder – and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
– Wittgenstein
I don’t think the reader should be indulged as a consumer, because he isn’t one. Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones.
– Elena Ferrante
If we use the merit we have accumulated to satisfy the self that we cling to out of delusion, our store will rapidly diminish, and our heart will become tighter and tighter. This is because focusing on the singular, isolated self is the antithesis of tsewa. The positive actions we have done in the past will continue to bear their fruit, but if we don’t continue to keep our heart open to others, we will only accumulate negativity. Our precious merit will be wasted on pleasant experiences that are fleeting and ultimately meaningless.
Therefore, the best thing we can do with our merit is to offer it freely for the benefit of others. Whenever you do anything meritorious, no matter how small, you can make a conscious wish that the positive energy from your action will have a vast effect, like an acorn growing into a giant oak tree. This is not a farfetched idea when we contemplate the interconnected nature of all things. Everything we do or even think has endless, rippling repercussions. For this reason we don’t have to feel helpless about benefiting others. We always have something to give.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Training in Tenderness
Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort.
– Roddy Doyle
There’s no shortcut to smart.
– @naval
How little people know who think that holiness is dull. When one meets the real thing… it is irresistible.
– C.S. Lewis
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of earth. …
And I, what sort of fire am I among
This conflagration of spring? the gap in it all—!
– D.H. Lawrence
But the songs wither, and the world worsens.
– Tolkien
There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents… The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy.
– Thomas Jefferson
Life’s under no obligation
to give us what we expect.
– Margaret Mitchel
So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
– Jane Hirshfield
Truth did not come into the world naked,
but it came in types and images.
The world will not receive truth in any other way.
– Gospel of Philip
In Bodhi there is no tree,
Nor a mirror bright,
From the beginning not a thing is,
Where can the dust alight?
– Hui-neng
Stay, stay at home my heart, and rest;
Home-keeping hearts are happiest,
For those that wander, they know not where,
Are full of trouble and full of care;
To stay at home is best.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Art like any other disaster
happens very slowly
and then all at once
– Anne Enright
The creativity of people on the schizophrenic end of the human continuum is a creativity that springs from the inability to accept the standardized cultural denials of the real nature of experience. And the price of this kind of almost “extra human” creativity is to live on the brink of madness, as men have long known.
– Ernest Becker
Beauty is an answer to anguish.
– Maud Casey
I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn.
– Langston Hughes
Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic heart.
– William Butler Yeats
How much of human life is lost in waiting?
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I’m walking with
one foot in the ocean.
– Neil Hilborn
The library is a place, a practice, a tradition, which encourages people to become more human, more connected to themselves and the entire world.
– Junot Díaz
Over a lifetime I’ve written poems
only when I felt I had poems to write.
I do not feel apologetic
about refusing to convert myself into a machine
for producing verse.
Sometimes I think that poets have become
a nation of monsters.
– Stanley Kunitz
In a war situation or where violence
and injustice are prevalent,
poetry is called upon to be something more
than a thing of beauty.
– Seamus Heaney
If I had to pick one place to hang out, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, it would be a bookstore.
– Gloria Steinem
Teaching is the original act of believing in people.
– Alaina Clark
If you think of freedom as a state, you are in effect looking for a kind of heaven. Instead, think of freedom as a way of experiencing life itself—a continuous flow in which you meet what arises.
– Ken McLeod
The old, hardy, indomitable male is gone. His fierce singleness is quenched. The last sparks are dying out…Nothing left but the herd-proletariat and the herd-equality mongrelism, and the wistful poisonous self-sacrificial cultured soul. How detestable.
– D.H. Lawrence
I think a spiritual journey is not so much a journey of discovery. It’s a journey of recovery. It’s a journey of uncovering your own inner nature. It’s already there.
– Billy Corgan
Yes, the mind is brilliant, but the more we observe it, the more we see it is also obsessive and repetitive.
– Richard Rohr
the reason why so many false effects are credited to the moon, is that there are some true, as the tide.
– pascal
zen garden
i plant myself
in the mist
– @Andddrrrew
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
– Jane Kenyon
I couldn’t have found God in the seminary, he thought,
as he looked at the sunrise.
– Paulo Coelho
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Since every one hath, every one, one shade,
And you, but one, can every shadow lend.
– William Shakespeare
The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
– G. K. Chesterton
Investigate yourself before you investigate the world.
– Ryan Holiday
There are only two types of people: Complete idiots and people who are not complete idiots.
– Slavoj Zizek
We find [mercy] in the most unlikely places, never where we first look.
– Anne Lamott
stargazing
seeing skies as
they once were
– Charlie Lawler
Desires are just waves in the mind. You know a wave when you see one. A desire is just a thing among many. I feel no urge to satisfy it, no action needs to be taken on it. Freedom from desire means this: the compulsion to satisfy is absent.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
What Medicine Buddha actually reveals is that we have to take our practice into the world, we take our practice into dismantling and challenging systems that create and perpetuate suffering and inequality for others.
– Lama Rod Owens
Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past?
– Mark Strand
For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.
– C.S. Lewis
The way we are living,
timorous or bold,
will have been our life.
– Seamus Heaney
To a Christian, the true tragedy of Nero must be not that he fiddled while the city was on fire but that he fiddled on the brink of hell.
– C.S. Lewis
In the end, the end, / thanks, and the quiet come / in place of the noise.
– Aharon Shabtai
Train yourself to be indifferent to false claims about you. Without such indifference you can’t be free.
– Leo Tolstoy
You ought to be able to grow up in a place and not have to get the hell out of it when you turn eighteen.
– Philipp Meyer
How beautiful, the doomed love! How gorgeous and ambient, the ways we abandon each other! The lovely wars we die in, the poetry of disease!
– Rebecca Makkai
Self-care, relieving one’s own everyday anxieties, avoiding stress: these had become some of our society’s highest goals — higher, apparently, than the salvation of society itself.
– Sigrid Nunez
It’s best for my heart to have hours and hours each day to write.
– R. O. Kwon
Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: people are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.
– Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
Know that there are vulgar people everywhere… They speak like fools and impudently criticize others. Great disciples of ignorance, godfathers of idiocy, avid for degrading gossip. Pay no attention to what they say, and less to what they feel.
– Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom
you are not breathing oxygen.
you are breathing the confession of every tree
who ever wanted to make love to the sky.
– Christopher Sexton
But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
– Aldous Huxley
Once upon a time giants sculpted the sand, but now it is us who are the giants. The question we must ask now is how we use our power.
– Nick Hunt
Reality is always
More or less
Than what we want.
Only we are always
Equal to ourselves.
– Fernando Pessoa
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
– James Baldwin
Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’
– Lao Tzu
There is no way to do differently than to receive from an analyst what disturbs the defence.
– Jacques Lacan
Man has ever a silent listener at his side—his subconscious mind.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.
– Anne Lamott
Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless.
– Maggie Nelson
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.
– Anais Nin
American Abyss
by Cynthia Dewi Oka
I followed here the heart
I built for you. Here it is, blue
as the preening peacock’s crest, bruise
renewed again and again. Blue as
children made vapor, families ground
to grist raining on the accordion
chest of the sea. I followed here my own
forgetting of the fireflies that blink
like prayers in belligerent grasses; my
dreams of mattering, as in, appearing—
a noun in your syntax. That stone
you strike for water. Is this not
the Dream? To take more than
bodies have to give, then eat without
discord? I want you to know I have
always understood my place. That
the only feeling more beautiful than
your fear is your want. Look,
how your flowers light the world.
The things the body needs are easily available to everyone without labour and trouble; things that need labour and trouble and burden life are desired, not by the body, but by a bad state of mind.
– Democritus
Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman.
– Donald Winnicott
Once upon a time, wasn’t singing a part of everyday life as much as talking, physical exercise, and religion? Our distant ancestors, wherever they were in this world, sang while pounding grain, paddling canoes, or walking long journeys. Can we begin to make our lives once more all of a piece? Finding the right songs and singing them over and over is a way to start. And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.
– Pete Seeger
Only if I move my arm a certain way, it comes back. Or the way the light bends in the trees this time of year, so a scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart. I carry this in my body, seed in an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe. But they guard me, these small pains, from growing sure of myself and perhaps forgetting.
– Jane Hirschfield
Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it sees and moves itself, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of my body; they are incrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body. These reversals, these antinomies, are different ways of saying that vision is caught or is made in the middle of things, where something visible undertakes to see, becomes visible for itself and through the vision of all things, where the indivision of the sensing and the sensed persists, like the original fluid within the crystal.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty
A story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And ‘making sense’ must be here understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are.
– David Abram
Fling me across the fabric of time and the seas of space. Make me nothing and from nothing-everything.
– Rumi
This was an important idea for me—that an artist was someone who worked, not some special being exempt from the claims of ordinary life.
– Tobias Wolff
That the world is, is the mystical.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Breathing
I love to feel as if, I’m just another body,
a breather along with the others:
blackbirds taking sips of air, garter snakes
lapping it up with their split tongues,
and all those plants
that open and close and throw up streamers of oxygen:
maybe that cottonwood that tilts across the creekbed
is the very one that just sucked up carbon dioxide
and let me breathe, maybe I should hang a card around it,
Thank you for the next two minutes of my life,
maybe some of the air
I just swallowed used to be inside the hot larynx of a fox,
or the bill of an ash-throated flycatcher,
maybe it just coursed past
the scales of a lizard—a blue-belly—
as he wrapped himself around his mate,
maybe he took an extra breath and let it out
and that’s the one I got.
Maybe all of us are standing side by side on the earth
our chests moving up and down,
every single one of us, opening a window,
loosening a belt, unzipping a pair of pants to let our bellies swell,
while in the pond a water beetle
clips a bubble of air to its shell and comes back up for another.
You want sanitary? Go to some other planet:
I’m breathing the same air as the drunk Southerner,
the one who rolls cigarettes with stained yellow thumbs
on the bench in the train station,
I’m breathing the same air as the Siamese twins
at the circus, their heads talking to each other,
quarreling about what they want to do with their one pair of hands
and their one heart.
Tires have run over this air,
it’s passed right over the stiff hair of jackrabbits and roadkill,
drifted through clouds of algae and cumulus,
passed through jetprops,
blades of helicopters,
through spiderlings that balloon over the Tetons,
through sudden masses of smoke and sulfur,
the bleared Buick filled with smoke
from the Lucky Strikes my mother lit, one after another.
Though, as a child, I tried my best not to breathe,
I wanted to take only the faintest sips,
just enough to keep the sponges inside,
all the lung sacs, rising and falling.
I have never noticed it enough,
this colorless stuff I can’t see,
circulated by fans, pumped into tires,
sullenly exploding into bubbles of marsh gas,
while the man on the gurney drags it in and out of his lungs
until it leaves his corpse and floats past doorknobs
and gets trapped in an ice cube, dropped into a glass.
After all, we’re just hanging out here in our sneakers
or hooves or talons, gripping a branch, or thudding against the sidewalk:
as I hold onto my lover
and both of us breathe in the smell of wire screens on the windows
and the odor of buckeye.
This isn’t to say I haven’t had trouble breathing, I have:
sometimes I have to pull the car over and roll down the window,
and take in air, I have to remember I’m an animal,
I have to breathe with the other breathers,
even the stars breathe, even the soil,
even the sun is breathing up there,
all that helium and oxygen,
all those gases blowing and shredding into the solar wind.
– Ellery Akers
All day I have been reading
about the invisible world, the one
that’s always trying to reach us.
What if we could hear
the small round o’s of dirt,
the chant of stars and plants,
carbon and sulphur, calling to each other, innumerable
to innumerable, a throat at every blade of grass.
– Ellery Akers
Everyone’s a little high
on love or grief. All of us moving
toward or away from something
we want.
– Joy Sullivan
Emotions help us navigate a complex world that we don’t fully comprehend. They are our body’s way of ensuring that we do what is best for us.
– Frans de Waal
We men do nothing but lie and make ourselves important. Speech was invented for the purpose of magnifying all of our sensations and impressions — perhaps so that we could believe in them.
– Miguel de Unamuno
We often wish things that are rooted in our weakness and compensate for it; we dream of ourselves as famous, all powerful, loved by everybody, etc. But sometimes we dream of wishes which are the anticipation of our most valuable goals. We can see ourselves as dancing or flying; we see the city of light; we experience the happy presence of friends. Even if we are not yet capable in our waking life to experience the joy of the dream, the dream experience shows that we are at least capable of wishing it and seeing it fulfilled in a dream fantasy. Fantasies and dreams are the beginning of many deeds, and nothing would be worse than to discourage or depreciate them. What matters is the kind of fantasy which we have-does it lead us forward or does it hold us back in the chains of
unproductiveness?
– Erich Fromm
Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class-the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn’t want you to know something, it won’t be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.
– George Carlin
About stopping terrorism.
Well, there’s really an easy way:
Stop participating in it.
– Noam Chomsky
The word kin is in the word kind. If we notice that we are inextricably kin to everyone, isn’t it easier to be kind?
– Gunilla Norris
Most egos operate like a fierce cheiftain, extending their control over the landscape, the people in it, the hunting grounds,,
things get better when the ego sheds, shrinks, becomes one of the deer grazing in the landscape, following the whims and drives of the forest it’s a part of
Nuzzle up in the roots of a tree while the forest unfolds. Nothing to conquer, nothing to control. Just a role to play, following its own wordless nature.
– River Kenna
To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them.
– Montesquieu
Clarity cannot be given by another. Confusion is in us; we have brought it about and we have to clear it away.
– Krishnamurti
We don’t conserve a glitch.
We don’t pin down a poem collapsing into quantum interference.
We don’t catalogue a rehearsal.
And maybe the future of curation looks more like a poem:
unfinished, shifting,
speaking in monospaces
and just visible enough
to slip away.
– Laura Kerr
When Ram Dass said, “What you can’t be with won’t let you be,” what he meant is that when you can’t be with your experience, it will, in fact, not go away. It will show up in an incessant story you tell yourself; it will show up in discomfort and anxiety. You can try to distract yourself from it or suppress it, but it comes knocking on your door in some way or some form—often when you least want or expect it to.
However, when you allow yourself to be with the experience—to be present with it, allowing yourself to feel the experience with compassionate presence—somehow, quite magically, the feeling transforms, and you can let go of it. Some people spend their whole lives running away from themselves, when if they would just turn toward themselves, the feeling they are running from would begin to change.
– Laura Matsue
Silence is essential. We need silence just as much as we need air, just as much as plants need light. If our minds are crowded with words and thoughts, there is no space for us.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
The opposite of life is not death. It’s opposite is the machine.
– Ian McGilchrist
Believers in progress rightly note that in the world of machines the new model supersedes the old; from this they falsely infer a similar kind of supercession in such things as virtue and wisdom.
– C.S. Lewis
More and more, people don’t care about expert views. That’s according to Tom Nichols, author of “The Death of Expertise,” who says Americans have become insufferable know-it-alls, locked in constant conflict and debate with others over topics they actually know almost nothing about.
– PBS Newshour, 2019
I have always held that writers don’t really have biographies, and that the best way to find out about them is to read their books. The reason why they don’t have biographies is not because nothing interesting ever happens in their lives, or because they’re people of a special kind whose lives take a different route from everybody else’s, but because writing takes up too much of a person’s inner time, and so in many cases there isn’t enough of it left for other activities.
– Olga Tokarczuk
Love is the experience that others are not others. Beauty is the experience that objects are not objects.
– Rupert Spira
One cannot contemplate a flower, watch a play, or pluck a strawberry from a punnet without being situated within an irrefrangible intentional continuum that extends all the way to God in his fullness.
– David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods
The cloth has been put over the icon:
The mysterious face is invisible.
The ship glides across the blue expanse:
On the dark sea-bed burns a ring.
– Vyacheslav Ivanov
(translated by Pamela Davidson)
As well as we know our grown children and relatives, we don’t know how much energy they have to put into simply keeping their lives together at all.
– Anne Lamott
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
– Carl Sandburg
I have never believed that man’s freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Thought cannot solve any human problem, for thought itself is the problem.
– J. Krishnamurti
The mesa country breeds a quietness in a man.
– J. Frank Dobie
If I were a doctor and someone asked me my opinion about humans, I would say: Silence! Prescribe silence for them.
– Søren Kierkegaard
As we face what is only ours to face, those who love us befriend us like the moon, always there, even when out of view.
– Mark Nepo
Buddhism is saying that you do not need any gizmos to be in the know. You do not need a religion. You do not need any Buddha statues, temples, Buddhist rosaries, and all that jazz. But when you get to the point that you know you do not need any of those things, you do not need a religion at all; then it is fun to have one. Then you can be trusted to use rosaries, ring bells, hit drums and clappers, and chant sutras. But those things will not help you a bit. They will just tie you up in knots if you use them as methods of catching hold of something. So every teacher of Buddhism is a debunker, not to be a smart aleck and show how clever he is, but out of compassion. Just as when a surgeon chops off a bad growth or a dentist pulls out a rotten tooth, so the Buddhist teacher is getting rid of your crazy ideas for you, which you use to cling to life and make it dead.
– Alan Watts
I hope the leaving is joyful; and I hope never to return.
– Frida Kahlo
A country that destroys (public) education never does it just for money, or because resources are lacking, or the costs are too high. A country that demolishes education is already governed by those who have everything to lose by the dissemination of knowledge.
– Italo Calvino
The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.
– Cormac McCarthy
There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
– Salvador Dali
The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.
– Charles Bukowski
I promise I shall never give up, and that I’ll die yelling and laughing, and that until then I’ll rush around this world I insist is holy and pull at everyone’s lapel and make them confess to me and to all.
– Jack Kerouac
Libraries were a good start, but we really need to keep working on the number of places where people shouldn’t be allowed to talk.
– Bridger Winegar
Relatability isn’t the only way of enjoying art.
– Anthony Fantano
When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d– and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
– Walt Whitman
When she does not find love,
she may find poetry.
– Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Living without reading is dangerous,
it forces us to settle for life.
– Michel Houellebecq
wake up, wake up!
I long to be your friend
sweet sleeping butterfly
– Basho
Meditation is not a quick cure or cover-up for the complicated or embarrassing aspects of ourselves.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Shift and drift during meditation are part of the process, it means your brain is growing.
– Brad Schipke
There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
– Arundhati Roy
Our dreams have been doctored. We belong no where. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter…
– Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Harvard’s response: No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.
– Harvard President, Alan Garber
As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.
– Emil Cioran
Passion’s precipice is steep.
Be kind,
step away.
Step away,
be kind.
– Vladimir Mayakovsky
In Buddhism, they talk about how there is necessary suffering in life (unavoidable) and unnecessary suffering (avoidable). The necessary suffering means that you will age, you will get sick, you will die, you will lose people you love, and you will face the consequences of your past actions (karma). The unnecessary suffering is the suffering many people pile on top of this suffering. This can include the mental anguish you create from the stories you tell yourself in your mind, the identification with your pain, and your resistance to reality via wanting things to be different rather than accepting the way things are.
Most people’s complaints in this world are unnecessary suffering, which they most likely have layered onto their lives to avoid facing the necessary suffering.
Through meditation, you learn to witness your pain without identification. Through psychological inner work, you can learn how to see through the false stories you tell yourself.
In time, this path of awareness allows you to suffer less—you become a witness to your pain rather than identifying with it. This allows you to live with greater presence, compassion, and peace.
– Laura Matsue
The citizen and the novelist in me are always at war, and that can be enormously productive, as long as neither of them wins.
– Javier Cercas
I was uneasy with my presence in life. Who was I, anyway? What was I supposed to do?
– Joy Williams
Do not measure your practice by the experience of others. My experience is mine; yours is yours. Indeed, I should not even try to replicate my own experience in zazen. What comes just comes—or it does not.
– Myozan Ian Kilroy
Blessed are the bitter things of God
Not as I desire but as I need
He pricks my pride and lets my spirit bleed.
Blessed are the fevers of the heart.
He tries me with the heat and with the cold.
I will be tempered steel when I am old.
– Joy Davidman
Our greatest weariness comes from work not done.
– Eric Hoffer, Evergreen
under pressure
nations ruled by lies
cannot stand
– Andy Perrin
To the Rain
Mother rain, manifold, measureless, falling on fallow, on field and forest, on house-roof, low hovel, high tower, downwelling waters all-washing, wider than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster than countrysides, calming, recalling: return to us, teaching our troubled souls in your ceaseless descent to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root, to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the sea.
– Ursula L. LeGuin
the lonely splendor
of an empty sky
I imagine a bird
or two
~
~
– @Jocelynx44
I have found faith to be not a comfort but a provocation to a life I never seem to live up to, an eruption of joy that evaporates the instant I recognize it as such, an agony of absence that assaults me like a psychic wound.
– Christian Wiman
A hundred years are gone, and yet are near / The ebbing hours of that last pilgrimage
– John Drinkwater
At Chicago all they wanted to know was, What’s the theory? At Yale all they wanted to know was, What’s the technique? At City College all they wanted to know was, How does this relate to real life?
– Vivian Gornick
Shrink not at the difficulty of the journey back.
– Søren Kierkegaard
flow of the river —
I gather wisdom
at every turn
– Pravat Kumar Padhy
It won’t be like this forever. One day, someone’s going to
want your voice as the soundtrack to the rest of their life.
– Maxwell Diawuoh
Hope is a practice. Like tai chi or gardening, it is something we do rather than have.
– Joanna Macy
I have lost friends, some by death, others by sheer inability to cross the street.
– Virginia Woolf
Just because you are soft doesn’t mean you are not a force. Honey and wildfire are both the colour gold.
– Victoria Erickson
‘When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.’
– Donna Tartt
I believe poetry happens to a poet long before they ever write it.
– Enzo Silon Surin
I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, it’s malignity.
– Sylvia Plath
If you want to be a clear thinker, you cannot pay attention to politics. It will destroy your ability to think.
– Naval Ravikant
art is simply what we call our most constructive coping mechanism for the incomprehension of life and mortality.
– Maria Popova
We have overcome all enemies but ourselves.
– John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
laughter helps one to find a place in the world, but ironically, which is to say, without selling one’s soul to it. Pleasure, which is fundamentally the intensified awareness of reality, springs from a passionate openness to the world and love of it. Not even the knowledge that man may be destroyed by the world detracts from the “tragic pleasure”.
– Hannah Arendt
Variability is the world’s most fundamental quality.
– Vadim Zeland
If you expect nothing from somebody, you are never disappointed.
– Sylvia Plath
Forgiveness … is a gift of high value. Yet its cost is nothing.
– Betty Smith
We also need massive education and publicity to turn around the national narrative so that people will stop voting for, supporting, and enabling draconian anti-immigrant policies.
– Aviva Chomsky
Accessibility isn’t a virtue. It’s a prison.
– Carl Jung
Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
– John Green
I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!
– Louise Bogan
I think too much. I think
ahead. I think behind. I think
sideways. I think it all. If it
exists, I’ve fucking thought
of it.
– Winona Ryder
Don’t go searching
for something in someone
who has nothing to give.
– Cheryl Strayed
If you start with a problem and try to solve the problem then this is good dharma practice, but not Dzogchen. In Dzogchen we start with the absence of a problem.
– James Low
Harvard university has been here for a 140 years longer than America.
We are told that when Hölderlin went ‘mad,’ he constantly repeated, ‘Nothing is happening to me, nothing is happening to me.’
– Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; tr. Andrea Tarnowski
Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused … Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.
– George Saunders
I didn’t feel any rancor against society because I didn’t belong in it. I had long ago adjusted to that fact.
– Charles Bukowski
I dream of a language
whose words, like fists,
would fracture jaws.
– Emil Cioran
If words are outlawed, only outlaws will have words!
– Poet Val
Our problem is not just receiving criticism, but learning to be skillful in the way we speak to others.
– Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.
– John Updike
be careful how you speak
because the ocean will
finish your sentences
– Phil SaintDenisSanchez
Are racist people like “ugh, my open minded uncle is going to be at Thanksgiving this year.”
– Jesse McLaren
I have to tell you
by Dorothea Grossman
I have to tell you,
there are times when
the sun strikes me
like a gong,
and I remember everything,
even your ears.
Being alive here on earth has always been a mixed grill at best, lovely, hard, and confusing. Good and bad things happen to good and bad people. That’s not much of a system: a better one would be a silverware drawer for joy, sorrows, doldrums, madness, ease.
– Anne Lamott
And joy is everywhere; it is in the earth’s green covering of grass; in the blue serenity of the sky.
– Rabindranath Tagore
You are an alchemist; make gold of that.
– William Shakespeare
The peace and mindfulness gained from sitting with yourself, in quiet, shows up in your daily life when, we are patient instead of anxious, loving instead of unkind, and compassionate instead of judgmental.
– Barb Schmidt
Being peaceful is internal order. It’s skill and discipline. It’s a willingness to hold a boundary around yourself. It’s knowing that you’ve got you no matter what.
– Nika Solé
…But what a river will do,
Nobody knows.
– Hölderlin
Who, traveling through the void,
does the breath-spent here,
to one among the worlds, translate?
– Paul Celan (translated by Ian Fairley)
I write to annoy God, to make Death laugh. I write because I can’t get it right. I write because I want every woman in the world to fall in love with me.
– Charles Simic
Writing, if nothing else, is a bridge between two people, a bridge made of language. And language belongs to all of us. If I enjoy a poem, that just means I am recognizing within it something of myself, something I must already possess. Therefore, to love a poem is to love a part of myself revealed to me by another person… I really believe that writing is the closest thing we have to true magic. Where else, but in words, can we discover each other out of thin air?
– Ocean Vuong
You are like a candle. Imagine you are sending light out all around you. All your words, thoughts and actions are going in many directions. If you say something kind, your kind words go in many directions, and you yourself go with them. We are …transforming and continuing in a different form at every moment.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
It was lonely on the hill, and cold. And all you could do was keep going. You could scream, cry, and stamp your feet, but apart from making you feel warmer, it wouldn’t do any good. You could say it was unfair, and that was true, but the universe didn’t care because it didn’t know what “fair” meant. That was the big problem about being a witch. It was up to you. It was always up to you.
– Terry Pratchett
Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.
– David Abram
The finest souls are
those who gulped pain
and avoided making
others taste it.
– Nizar Qabbanini
Emotions have the great advantage over instincts that they don’t dictate specific behavior. Instincts are rigid and reflex-like. By contrast, emotions focus the mind and prepare the body while leaving room for experience and judgment. […But] based on millions of years of evolution, the emotions “know” things about the environment that we as individuals don’t always consciously know. Emotions often know better than we do what is good for us, even though not everyone is prepared to listen.
– Frans de Waal
I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.
– Malcolm X
Yes, That’s When
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
I like my body when I’m in the woods
and I forget my body. I forget that arms,
that legs, that nose. I forget that waist,
that nerve, that skin. And I aspen. I mountain.
I river. I stone. I leaf. I path. I flower.
I like when I evergreen, current and berry.
I like when I mushroom, avalanche, cliff.
And everything is yes then, and everything
new: wild iris, duft, waterfall, dew.
To die – takes just a little while –
They say it does’nt hurt –
It’s only fainter – by degrees –
And then – it’s out of sight –
A darker Ribbon – for a Day –
A Crape opon the Hat –
And then the pretty sunshine comes –
And helps us to forget –
The absent – mystic – creature –
That but for love of us –
Had gone to sleep – that soundest time –
Without the weariness –
– Emil Dickinson
Yes, substance matters. But I will say this again and again: the elected opposition to this authoritarian regime needs to stop dressing like this is business as usual, because it is not. Do away with suits and ties. A Zelensky sweater and fatigue pants would be a start.
– Clifton Lee
The whole of space exists in one bindu, one dot, which is not even a dot. It has no dimensions at all. And this contains the whole of existence, the whole of space. And it also contains the whole of time: past, present, and future—in one moment. And we can’t even call that moment the present, because the present is not a thing. It was there a second ago. Now it’s gone. You can never, ever catch the present. So, in tantra it’s called nowness, which goes beyond past, present, and future. The ever-moving moment of the present. The past which we think has happened. The future which we imagine will happen. It’s all simultaneously in nowness.
It’s possible to experience this bindu of all space and all time in meditation. It’s equally possible for it to occur spontaneously at any moment. I think it’s particularly made possible in the presence of great art. But that’s not necessary. It can just happen when you’re walking down the street. Some people think they need to go out into the countryside to experience this. But it can happen in a crowded tube train, can happen when you’re cooking, doing the washing up, anything, whatever.
The more one practices meditation, though, the more opportunity there is for these spontaneous experiences to arise. This space is called the ground of being. It is an experience that we all can have, and which is really the purpose of meditation. But you can also see it as the story of the whole universe. When we talk about how the universe came into being; how the six realms of beings developed; why we’re here at all as human beings on this earth—we’re talking about the same thing, our own minds, our own day-to-day experience.
– Francesca Fremantle
The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.
– Corrie ten Boom
Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
– Chuck Palahniuk
Describing something is like using it – it destroys; the colours wear off, the corners lose their definition, and in the end what’s been described begins to fade, to disappear.
– Olga Tokarczuk
The problems of everyday life are a way of destroying our credentials, our comfort and security.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.
– Margaret Atwood
It is not the struggle of opinions that has made history so violent, but rather the struggle of belief in opinions, that is, the struggle of convictions.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
In a revolutionary period it is always the best who die. The law of sacrifice leaves the last word to the cowards and the timorous since the others have lost it by giving the best of themselves. The ability to speak always implies that one has betrayed.
– Albert Camus
Sure enough, wisdom is a woman, Sophia, and sure enough, she loves none but the warrior, but the warrior is not understood to be a being of air, a dancer upon the burial ground. He would be amidst all the dangers, really fighting the battle of life, not dancing in the clouds.
– Carl Jung
Every man has some peculiar train of thought which he falls back upon when he is alone. This, to a great degree, moulds the man.
– Dugald Stewart
We must not work or think on a heroic scale… heroes too lightly risk the lives of people, places, and things they do not see.
– Wendell Berry
If you want to save the planet and transform society, you need brotherhood and sisterhood; you need togetherness…Technical solutions have to be supported by togetherness, understanding, and compassion.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
But what great thing ever came into
existence that was not first fantasy?
– Carl Jung
For those who dominate and oppress us benefit most when we have nothing to give our own, when they have so taken from us our dignity, our humanness that we have nothing left, no ‘homeplace’ where we can recover ourselves.
– bell hooks
The path of discovery will inevitably raise the exact fears that hold the heart captive.
– Michael Meade
For effective functioning in the world, knowledge is not the main factor, but clarity of perception.
– Sadhguru
Beauty is a metaphysical, sedimented residue. Something older than our language for it. Older than syntax and description, which came fumbling behind form. Perhaps it is the reason we invented language to begin with.
– @eutaktos
All mystics speak the same language because they come from the same country.
– Louis Claude de St Martin
There was absolutely a style from the very beginning, and people used to tease me for it, saying, Could you write a longer sentence? But there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve made every effort.
– Colm Tóibín
Tell those who worry about their health that they may be already dead.
– Thoreau
The disappearance of otherness happens at the same time as the disappearance of the ego.
One who has eliminated his ego sees others as part of himself, just as arms, legs, feet etc. are part of one body. All is one.
– Annaimalai Swami
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
– Prof. Feynman
The people around you will carry much of the burden of what you do not address within yourself.
– Nika Solé
oh, spring!
how wonderful is spring!
and the list goes on…
– Basho
As the mind relaxes with complex methods, simplicity becomes possible and even preferable.
– Guo Gu
It is well to be outwardly simple, but it is far more important to be inwardly simple and clear.
– Krishnamurti
I dream because I wallow
In the unreal river of that recollected music.
My soul is a ragged child
Sleeping in a dusky corner.
All I have of my own
In true, waking reality
Are the tatters of my abandoned soul
And my head that’s dreaming next to the wall.
– Fernando Pessoa (translated by Richard Zenith)
This takes place in man when the heart and mind are joined in eternal union. It occurs when the positive and negative poles within are united, and from that union is made the “Philosopher’s Stone”.
– Manly P. Hall
The floor seemed wonderfully
solid. It was comforting to
know I had fallen and could fall
no farther.
– Sylvia Plath
A divine ‘punishment’ is also a divine ‘gift’, if accepted, since its object is ultimate blessing, and the supreme inventiveness of the Creator will make ‘punishments’ (that is changes of design) produce a good not otherwise to be attained…
– J.R.R. Tolkien
One of the most life-changing realizations you can have is ‘I don’t have to believe my thoughts . . . they are just thoughts!’
– Tara Brach
Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.
– Isak Dinesen
To let go does not mean to get rid of. To let go means to let be. When we let be with compassion, things come and go on their own.
– Jack Kornfield
If we all got angry together something might be done.
– Robin (Tolkien, The Return of the King)
If a meditation teacher used drugs in the past that’s fine and normal but if they’re still using them it does lower my opinion of their teachings.
– inner naturalist
Keep your mind clean and clear. It is an important and sacred place.
– Ryan Holiday
Let’s not wait until the end of our lives to be grateful for the simple things.
– Laura Burges
Comfort zones leak.
– Anne Lamott
To look not at the sea, but over it.
In winter, not at the tree, but through it.
With art, not to look at or through but with it.
– Roger Ackling
I rarely actually feel what a line says. I get interested in the words, which seem to come from nowhere.
– Louise Glück
Break often – not like porcelain, but like waves.
– Scherezade Siobhan
To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self. […] All literature carries exile within it.
– Roberto Bolaño
Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.
– Lloyd Alexander
so many languages have fallen
off of the edge of the world
into the dragon’s mouth. some
where there be monsters whose teeth
are sharp and sparkle with lost
people. lost poems. who
among us can imagine ourselves
unimagined? who
among us can speak with so fragile
tongue and remain proud?
– Lucille Clifton
To love another is something / like prayer and can’t be planned, you just fall / into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
– Anne Sexton
Your creative endeavors can never be thoroughly mapped out ahead of time. You have to allow for the suddenly altered landscape, the change in plan, the accidental spark– and you have to see it as a stroke of luck rather than a disturbance of your perfect scheme. Habitually creative people are, in E. B. White’s phrase, ‘prepared to be lucky.’
– Twyla Tharp
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her.
– Wallace Stevens
I’m so heartless seven species of bees
Are now endangered and I didn’t do a thing
Didn’t even send any money
To anybody doing anything good
– Camille Guthrie
A poem cannot stop a bullet. A novel can’t defuse a bomb. But we are not helpless. We can sing the truth and name the liars.
– Salman Rushdie
Been down in the dumps for a day or two
Thinkin’ baby, it was time for me to make a move
Late night skyline that’s when it hit me
Well, I got to have me some of that New York City
– Delbert McClinton
H. sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
– Joyce Carol Oates
When the soul frees itself from vices like anger, greed, ego, and attachment, it begins to radiate purity and peace. As your inner world transforms, the outer world starts reflecting that beauty — creating harmony, happiness, and a world of your choice.
– Brahma Kumaris
The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
– C.S. Lewis
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
– Cynthia Ozick
I laugh at myself for
creating emotions that
make me upset.
– Phakchok Rinpoche
Once they find a way to measure level of consciousness, it’s over for most “intellectuals.”
– Nika Solé
But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself…Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
– C.S. Lewis
I have in my mind five hundred examples of novels that have given me pleasure, and I try to do work that gives back some of what those five hundred books have given me.
– Jonathan Franzen
I now see how much more powerful stamina can be than talent; or, to say it another way, how powerless talent is, on its own, without stamina—rather like what is said about the body once the soul has left it.
– Carl Phillips
I love a lot of music, I listen to music constantly, but, personally, I know nothing else like Nightswimming by R.E.M. What that song captures, and it’s different for every listener, it does it in a way that hits harder than any other song. It’s so moving it’s a form of magic
– Raoul Duke
by walking together
they will not feel all alone
– David Antin
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh
You know, once they’re declaring a renaissance, my God, that means that some dark age will be fast upon us.
– Tobias Wolff
Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn’t stop for anybody.
– Stephen Chbosky
Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Live your life as it comes, but alertly, watchfully, allowing everything to happen as it happens, doing the natural things the natural way, suffering, rejoicing – as life brings. This is a way.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Some of us are actually healing, while others are just learning what it looks like and sounds like, without actually doing the work.
– @EarthToGazelle
Behind every word is a whole world.
– Heinrich Böll
let me be yo wil
derness let me be yo wind
blowing you all day.
– Sonia Sanchez
The Falling Star
Sara Teasdale
I saw a star slide down the sky,
Blinding the north as it went by,
Too burning and too quick to hold,
Too lovely to be bought or sold,
Good only to make wishes on
And then forever to be gone.
What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.
– Jane Hirshfield
Society has generally stopped seeing poets as prophets—and it shows!
– Bret van den Brink
Mostly love is about grunt work,
heaving unwieldy pieces of furniture
up a trackless mountain,
the heat and humidity punishing,
mosquitoes ravenous.
– Francesca Bell
and his handwriting like a field of flowers
– Friederike Mayröcker; tr. Roslyn Theobald
Tell me that to be here, with you, meant something,
when you said you loved me, you meant it.
In another life, you did not rip away even the hairs from my arms.
Instead, you took soil & carried the lashes on my eyes to water.
– Jacqueline Jiang
I hold trees dear. Long in the growing, swift shall they be in the felling, and…little mourned in their passing…Would that the trees might speak on behalf of all things that have roots, and punish those that wrong them!
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Not another God, nor angel, nor demon, nor wisdom, nor anything else in essence, but the Lord alone is the creator of all, the all-perfect Word of all things.
– Thucydides
People shouldn’t be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people.
– Alan Moore
We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.
– Henry David Thoreau
I’ve been in Japan for the past 10 days and can assure you, I want high speed rail.
– Sophie Vershbow
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledged once to hope,-cleft to despair?
– Hart Crane, The Broken Tower
like a poppy
back and forth it sways…
front tooth
– Kobayashi Issa
I went out to LA with the idea of becoming nothing. I thought of LA as the burnout capital of the country. You’re never going to amount to anything, so just go and be burnt out.
– Gary Indiana
We just will not admit the shadow.
– C.G. Jung
Right now, as we face social uncertainty, economic fragility, and the vulnerability of our own bodies, is there something deeper that we can surrender to, that can ground us in disruption?
– Richard Rohr
There is no mathematical
substitute for philosophy.
– Saul Kripke
We’ve had 250 years of training. We know what to do.
– Rachel Maddow
In our former lives, we have all been earth, stone, dew, wind, fire, moss, tree, insect, fish, turtle, bird and mammal
– Thich Nhat Hanh (quoting the Buddha)
One of the central myths of American romance right now is this notion that you and your partner should be able to tell each other anything and everything
I am begging you not to do this
– @VividVoid_
People often say that the core of Star Wars is primarily driven by eastern or New Age philosophy, and that may be there, but I believe the more fruitful direction of analysis is Campbell –> Jung –> Plato.
– Andrew Snyder
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.
– Kent M. Keith
Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song.
– Henry Miller
Meditation is the ultimate mobile device; you can use it anywhere, anytime, unobtrusively.
– Sharon Salzberg
Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision.
– David Hume
There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can’t afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.
– George Eliot
What I am going to tell now is a stupidity, a misunderstanding, a great Jamesian life-mistake: an embarrassment and a life-shame.
– Cynthia Ozick, The Lesson of the Master
Any calls for pacifism, meekness, or simplicity that come insistently from the powerful are attempts to keep the oppressed docile and poor.
– Maki Ashe Van Steenwyk
I have been laughed at by those who thought the practice of chanting the title of a sutra was ridiculous. I have been questioned about the legitimacy of that chanting because all real Buddhists practiced silent meditation just like the eternal Buddha Shakyamuni.
– Myokei Caine-Barrett
I almost feel the music becomes sentient, like it has its own opinion and starts to make its own choices. You have to be open to hearing what the music wants. If I try to impose my idea, it’s not as successful, not as interesting.
– Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
He who knows how to speak, knows also when.
– Archimedes
I don’t really determine whether a particular narrative becomes a short story or a screenplay. I’ve always been a fiction writer first, and the screenplays have grown out of my fiction.
– Zheng Zhi
The more evil triumphs, the more reasons there are to create art.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
It is not who is right,
but what is right,
that is important.
– Thomas Huxley
Everything is ecstasy, inside… Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-endings drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside…and you will remember.
– Jack Kerouac
Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep ordinary person on course.
– Reinhold Niebuhr
What you are, the world is. Without your transformation, there is no transformation of the world.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Harvard’s resistance is symbolic: Knowledge vs. Ignorance. A fight through the ages.
– Shane Joseph
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
– Mark Twain
If Jesus meant for his followers to rule the world, then why did he teach them to wash feet?
– Barbara Brown Taylor
Your kidneys don’t just balance fluids.
They store every fear you swallowed instead of facing.
That’s why you feel stuck, unsafe, and exhausted at the root.
Always recalibrate at the root.
– Marinet Matthee
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity, and once more in old age.
– Robertson Davies
It’s not the world that’s cruel.
It’s the people in it.
– Nora Sakavic
Melancholy, my most tender lover.
Unforgiving in its crown.
– J Luna
To set up what you like against what you dislike, this is the disease of the mind.
– Zen Master Seng-tsan
The first start toward success is to be glad you are yourself, and know that the ground you are on is holy ground and that you expand into the Divine Plan of your life. In the Divine Plan, every righteous desire of the heart is satisfied.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Dear poet,
You are not behind.
You are arriving
with the sun.
– @ethereal.oveal
God has no religion.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Ritual begins the moment someone says “Here’s my mess,” and you choose to light a candle instead of run.
– @thedrabstories
Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action are miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do.
– Bhagavad Gita
We are kept from our goal, not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal.
– Bhagavad Gita
Sacred rebellion is quiet.
It looks like alignment
when everyone else is performing.
– @jromeshaw
No one should abandon duties because he sees defects in them. Every action, every activity, is surrounded by defects as a fire is surrounded by smoke.
– Bhagavad Gita
After that first kiss, I wouldn’t have questioned anything. Possibility, freedom. If a great winged angel had come up from the earth and burst apart, I would have gathered its feathers.
– Kaveh Akbar
Someone who is committed to growth can never remain in alignment with someone who is committed to comfort.
– Micheal Sinclair
The start of a quarrel is like a leak in a dam, so stop it before it bursts.
– Proverbs 17:14
In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.
– William Burroughs
Life stared at him, filled with secrets, a somber unfathomable world, a rigid forest bristling with fairy-tale dangers-but these were mother secrets, they came from her, led to her, they were the small dark circle, the tiny threatening abyss in her clear eye.
– Hermann Hesse
I cannot control how others perceive me or what others say about me. Any attempts I have made to control such matters have only caused me grief.
– Brad Warner
Book of Job, Chapter 38
1 Then the LORD spoke to Job out of the storm. He said:
2 “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge?
3 Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone—
7 while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?
8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb,
9 when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness,
10 when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place,
11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt’?
12 “Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place,
13 that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it?
14 The earth takes shape like clay under a seal; its features stand out like those of a garment.
15 The wicked are denied their light, and their upraised arm is broken.
16 “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep?
17 Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
18 Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth? Tell me, if you know all this.
19 “What is the way to the abode of light? And where does darkness reside?
20 Can you take them to their places? Do you know the paths to their dwellings?
21 Surely you know, for you were already born! You have lived so many years!
22 “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail,
23 which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle?
24 What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth?
25 Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm,
26 to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert,
27 to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass?
28 Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew?
29 From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
30 when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen?
31 “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion’s belt?
32 Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its cubs?
33 Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth?
34 “Can you raise your voice to the clouds and cover yourself with a flood of water?
35 Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?
36 Who gives the ibis wisdom or gives the rooster understanding?
37 Who has the wisdom to count the clouds? Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens
38 when the dust becomes hard and the clods of earth stick together?
39 “Do you hunt the prey for the lioness and satisfy the hunger of the lions
40 when they crouch in their dens or lie in wait in a thicket?
41 Who provides food for the raven when its young cry out to God and wander about for lack of food?
I think it’s better to know that you don’t know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that’s why so many people are so lost.
– James Baldwin
gorgeous rich and rogue
is my ideal of a poet
– Jolanda Insana
The Eagles are a dangerous ‘machine’. I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness.
– Tolkien
The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you will never have.
– Søren Kierkegaard
We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves.
– Carl Sagan
PEOPLE’S VOICE?
Barabbas!
Barabbas!
Shouted the masses?
Or was it only certain classes?
Money changers
No strangers
to cash flow
guaranteed
Scribes who scribbled praise
of Caesar, and local appointees
Any carpenters?
Any small merchants, fishermen?
Scribes who wrote,
Orators who spoke
Outside of approved narrations?
Any minstrels,
who played rhythms
outside of military step?
Orations
from the stage
Soldiers
at attention.
Commanders
surveying with eyes, ears;
with inner detection devices.
Was anyone there without an invitation?
Give us Barabbas!
shouted the masses?
Or was it only certain classes?
– Jerry Pendergast
I have a certain amount of small-change
intelligence which I carry around
for the needs of the non-writing day.
But I am fully intelligent only when I write.
– Elizabeth Bowen
What you need in order to write a good novel is to be happy, to have a sort of comfort somewhere, to stop fussing. To know that what you’re writing is good—that’s the most wonderful thing in the world.
– Jane Gardam
Abundance is nothing but dust,
when knowledge is selfish.
– @DeepDwell
To live means to finesse the processes
to which one is subjugated.
– Bertolt Brecht
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists
in order to end in a book.
Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
– Susan Sontag
Was not the earth the true healer?
A night’s sleep deep in the forest.
A quiet day in the company of
birds. River water. Bitter herbs.
This was the slow medicine that
healed us from the soles of our feet
upward.
– Sophie Strand
The rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books.
They are people who do not leave.
– Anne Sexton
This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given to us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, ‘Volo ut sis (I want you to be),’ without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.
– Hannah Arendt
Maybe love, too, is beautiful because it has a wildness that cannot be tamed. I don’t know. All I know is that passion can take you up like a house of cards in a tornado, leaving destruction in its wake. Or it can let you alone because you’ve built a stone wall against it, set out the armed guards to keep it from touching you. The real trick is to let it in, but to hold on. To understand that the heart is as wide and vast as the universe, but that we come to know it best from here, this place of gravity and stability, where our feet can still touch ground.
– Deb Caletti
. . . we are currently neglecting reality because our efforts to describe and understand the world are directed away from the experience of being alive and being in relationship. In other words: We consider the practice of love a private matter, rather than an instrument of knowledge.
– Andreas Weber
Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.
– Sebastian Junger
Explain how poetry pursues the human like the smitten moon above the weeping, laughing earth; how we make prayers of it.
– Carol Ann Duffy
The winters of your life are very important, and how you live your winters, or how you develop yourself and hone your inherent potential during those winters, is how beautifully the cherry blossoms of your life will blossom.
– Nakuul Mehta
the / mercy of perfect sunlight after days // of dark,will climb; will blossom: will sing (like / april’s own april and awake’s awake)
– E. E. Cummings
There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.
– Virginia Woolf
The elder said: Humility is acquired after struggles. When you know yourself you acquire humility, which becomes a (permanent) condition. Otherwise one can become humble for a moment, but your thought will say to you that you are something although in reality you’re nothing – and you’ll be deluded like that to the moment of death. If death finds you with the thought that you are nothing, then God will speak. If however your thought says at the hour of death that you are something and you don’t understand it, all your effort goes to waste.
– Elder Paisios of Mount Athos
The primitive, pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding limbic system acts too quickly for our more deliberative, rational prefrontal cortex to catch up, rendering us stupefied by distractions.
– Stuart Langfield
Arkansas Good Friday
I
Everyone knows what the cross means, or will
before long
It is the body
It resembles the first stick-figure depictions
of it found in caves (some
with the heads of birds)
Depictions reproduced to this day by young children
just learning to draw
Its aerodynamic properties ought to be obvious I suppose
to us,
the wingless
How many years we have been carrying it
And before too much longer it will reveal itself
the source of a forsakenness and agony
nobody would have dared foresee
I saw it
over twenty years ago
Every day as the darkness came down on New York
I went up to my father and saw
(More and more I meet him
in the mirror, it is his blood I have
to clean up if I shave—…)
And I was born just as I found him there
a little bald
toothless man
screaming,
not for long though
(I refer to Mother Morphine’s left tit)
II
Now I’ll tell you something you don’t know, you hurt
by the past, just like me, crushed
by the future and blind
to the present,
blind
to the moment—
But there is nothing you don’t know
I got up every morning here
a long way from home
and cried for ten minutes
then showered and dressed
and got back down to work
assisted, on occasion, by one or two magical mystery
pills
III
I can tell you this
Who dwarfs my pain I cling to
the genuinely broken
and poor
And I cling to the Before
The spirit face
behind the face
yearning for light
the water and the light
And I am flowing back to the Before, the infinite
years which transpired while I was not
here, and did not know
I was not
here…
I came just like you
from inconceivableness, the eternal
before-we-arrived, flowing
from God’s mouth, and come here to say
“this world” and
“God,” as if
they needed
names
And what lies beyond is no doubt the beginning
I wouldn’t know but I’m going
to find out
The what lies beyond
this loneliness and panic
I call dying, time, remorse, this cold
and purifying
fire, which hurts so much, which burns
away the world and all I was
who walked and breathed and spoke
how real it all seemed
for a few years, but I was always
immortal and will be
once more, when I return
to the infinite time
which elapsed before I was conceived;
when the heavenward face is burned away
and its scared eyes
and its tears
and its euphoria, which no one can imagine
(wrong: someone in love can imagine!)
And I have heard God’s silence like the sun
now I long to return to it
no matter my infantile clinging
to this gorgeous material of such early wisteria and
lilacs, the wind
in the redbud and light-giving new heart-shaped leaves
music visible if completely unheard, I’ll return
The angel’s going to raise his arms and sing that time is
no more
nor tears: that numbered
sea of them is gone—
now there is a new sea, a new earth, a new sky—
and I will know what to say at the end: What end?
And I can add I found this world sufficiently miraculous
for me, before I’m changed.
– Franz Wright
When the middle classes get passionate about politics, they’re arguing about their treats – their tax breaks and their investments. When the poor get passionate about politics, they’re fighting for their lives.
Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That’s why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won’t vote. That’s why the poor are seen as more vital, more animalistic. No classical music for us – no walking around National Trust properties or buying reclaimed flooring. We don’t have nostalgia. We don’t do yesterday. We can’t bear it. We don’t want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful: dying in mines, and slums, without literacy, or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate then. That’s why the present and the future is for the poor – that’s the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better later. We live now – for our instant, hot, fast treats, to pep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio.
– Caitlin Moran
You write because you have to. If you rationalize it, it seems as if you’ve seen this sight, felt this feeling, had this vision, and have got to find a combination of words that will preserve it by setting it off in other people.
– Philip Larkin
Christ wins through “a renunciation of violence.”
– René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
Earthly water makes one thirsty again, whereas the water of Jesus quenches thirst for evermore. … It is at the moment when he suffers the most absolute thirst that Jesus pours himself forth as the everlasting spring.
– Hans Urs von Balthasar
For the finite journeying has never an end
But clairvoyant the ash of all our heart
– Marguerite Young
TYRANNOSAUR
Not so scary now
that science has discovered
your possible feathers
so sparse and so fine.
– Hedgie Choi
The statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known with different degrees of certainty.
– Prof. Feynman
Hi, yea it seems that you are still living in the old model of reality and I simply am not able to meet you there.
– Nika Solé
If we are honest with ourselves, we are obliged to admit that there was no significant psychological or spiritual growth in our life without the experience of suffering. This is why Jung defined neurosis as suffering which has not yet found its meaning, not that suffering could be eliminated.
– James Hollis
What is conquered has to be conquered again and again, and so conflict is made endless.
– Krishnamurti
Listen. This is modern times all over the world
Go sit under a tree.
Who studies the physics
Of nonentities?
– Lorenzo Thomas, Displacement
Even if we are never forgiven, we can still feel sincere regret for the suffering we’ve caused.
– Gina Sharpe
May you quickly discern the difference between a detour and your destination.
– Dr. Thema
A person of abundance cannot live in the vibration of lack.
– Nika Solé
Your progress in life begins in your own mind and ends in the same place.
– Napoleon Hill
Such Is the Story Made of Stubbornness and a Little Air
by Ilya Kaminsky
Such is the story made of stubbornness and a little air—
a story signed by those who danced wordless before God.
Who whirled and leapt. Giving voice to consonants that rise
with no protection but each other’s ears.
We are on our bellies in this quiet, Lord.
Let us wash our faces in the wind and forget the strict shapes of affection.
Let the pregnant woman hold something of clay in her hand.
She believes in God, yes, but also in the mothers
of her country who take off their shoes
and walk. Their footsteps erase our syntax.
Let her man kneel on the roof, clearing his throat
(for the secret of patience is his wife’s patience).
He who loves roofs, tonight and tonight, making love to her and to her forgetting,
let them borrow the light from the blind.
There will be evidence, there will be evidence.
While helicopters bomb the streets, whatever they will open, will open.
What is silence? Something of the sky in us.
California has immense contrasts. The utmost wealth and the most hideous squalor. But there is beauty and interest everywhere.
– Oliver Sacks
The higher force doesn’t listen to words, but only responds to what is in our heart.
– Rav Michael Laitman
When one reaches out to help another, he [she] touches the face of God.
– Walt Whitman
Rest is not an option, it is the foundation.
– @dailystoic
Poets have a hundred times more good sense
than philosophers. In seeking the beautiful, they
find more truths than philosophers do in seeking
the true.
– Joubert
i come from two failed countries / & i give them back
– Safia Elhillo
A retreat can be a time not for looking within, but looking without: leaving the self behind and being enveloped by the large and constantly shifting, surprising world. A journey out of one’s head and into real life.
– Pico Iyer
A true awakening would expand the awareness of those impacted by our thought, speech, and bodily action to include not only other people but all beings we recognize as living—plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria—and even those existences we consider nonliving—rocks, water, and sunlight.
– @chozenbays
An honest man, is always a child.
– Socrates
Overeating dulls the brain, calorie restriction sharpens it.
– @GuruAnaerobic
Be the kind of person who says yes to the last-minute road trip.
– @outsidemagazine
I will not say the Day is done,
nor bid the Stars farewell.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
I am a collage of my curiosities, interests, ideas, influences, inspirations be they books, films, art, music or simply the beauty, wonder, & delight of the world when I see past the mire of social media to the heart of understanding.
– Elliott Blackwell
Daily Prayer and meditation are all wonderful therapeutic agencies in building up peace and happiness within an individual.
– Swami Chinmayananda
The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword.
– Vladimir Nabokov
If we don’t develop a compassionate, loving view, our lives become more painful—we’re literally in danger without it.
– Norman Fischer
You are stuck with that early self for good or ill, and you can’t do anything about it even if you want to—short of total suppression.
– Gore Vidal
This is the paradoxical miracle, and tragedy, of restraint––how it multiplies meaning rather than diminishing it. How we use the same language, same alphabet, to speak of love as well as violence.
– Kate Millar, On Hannah Bonner’s Another Woman
In the end all that’s left are : Works of Art; the Beauty of Nature; Pure Sciences. In that holy trinity.
– Arno Schmidt
It may be that I sometimes give the impression of having a somewhat sullen predilection for considering the impossible. I could answer that with a single sentence. But I shall not do so today.
– Georges Bataille, The College of Sociology
The gifts of grace are added to us in order to enhance the gifts of nature, not take them away. The native light of reason is not obliterated by the light of faith gratuitously shed on us. Hence Christian theology enlists the help of philosophy and the sciences.
– Thomas Aquinas
Wherever we look in the dharma, it’s clear that the teachings of the Buddha are innately connected to nature as a resource for our own awakening.
– Juliana Sloane
When you love beings… not for their intelligence, etc., but for what they have in their very depths, for their soul… you love them equally…
– Simone de Beauvoir
God is revealed in this crucified man — giving of himself to the very last breath, giving and forgiving.
– Brian McLaren
She saw words like small stones scattered into the black space of the night. Later, a swan on little wheels passed by, with a great red bow tied to its question mark of a neck.
– Alejandra Pizarnik; tr. Yvette Siegert
Each spring
will be a sword you’ll
sharpen.
– Anne Sexton
I don’t think that poetry leads to self-destructiveness. It’s life that gets people there.
– Edward Hirsch
Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
– Haruki Murakami
Reading was an interior exile, so that I didn’t have to look away from home … just further in.
– Richard Howard
Never say you know the last word about any human heart.
– Henry James
The Worse the Better: Accelerationism and Nihilism
Accelerationism (from the right) is a theoretical counter-proposal to resistance (from the left); a destabilizing force for fighting the ills of capitalism. As Benjamin Noys summarizes it in his Malign Velocities (2014):
Instead of rejecting the increasing tempo of capitalist production [proponents] argue that we should embrace and accelerate it. We haven’t seen anything yet as regards what speed can do. Such a counsel seems to be one of cynicism, suggesting we come to terms with capitalism as a dynamic of increasing value by actively becoming hyper-capitalist subjects. What interests me is a further turn of the screw of this narrative: the only way out of capitalism is to take it further, to follow its lines of flight or deterritorialization to the absolute end, to speed-up beyond the limits of production and so to rupture the limit of capital itself. (Noys 2014, i)
Accelerationism proposes that we collectively let things unravel to their full extent – socially, politically, economically, environmentally–by stoking, rather than seeking to mitigate–the forces that drive us toward devastation. In the accelerationist imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame of the totalizing undoing of capitalism by capitalism.
Accelerationism locates resistance to capitalism as a byproduct of capitalism itself that by its nature reproduces it, and that such resistance can never fully stand outside of it to fight it, or really even be complete. It also suggests a foregone and nihilist conclusion to the contemporary status of global humanity, which, it asserts, was completely and inextricably captured within the capitalist orbit. It is thus an ideology offering no new ideas or no possibility for meaningful change beyond the total, inevitable collapse of the global system. In its early instantiations, accelerationism was a declaration about capitalism as a kind of alien invader from the future (Mackay 2012). It sees the outcome of late-stage capitalism as pushed by growth and profit to the point of spectacular self-destruction, an outcome that it welcomes.
Accelerationism as a political philosophy, with its goal of bringing about the end of the status quo (capitalism) by accelerating the world into full-blown crisis, has adherents on the left. Some leftists identify with the anti-capitalist endgame and see accelerationism as a means to implement a radical call for anti-work, full automation, and so on (Terranova 2014).[2] Yet, more significantly, it seems to have been taken up by the right, the outcome of a certain nihilism rooted in a sense of inevitability about the end of the world as we know it—due to environmental failures, natural (man-made) disasters and global warming, and so on—and a science fiction-influenced, technologically-driven fascination with concepts of spaceward expansionism, extraction and conquest. This right-wing strain is most commonly identified with Nick Land, once of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, or Ccru, at the University of Warwick (UK).
As his editor and onetime student Robin Mackay explains in the introduction to a collection of Land’s writings, “Marxists in particular were outraged by Land’s aggressive championing of the sociopathic heresy urging the ‘ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field’—[hence] the acceleration, rather than the critique, of Capitalism’s disintegration of society” (Land 2017, 3).
Capitalism demands competition, which, in turn, relies on technological deployments, which, in turn, rely on the exploitation of cheap nature and labor, and reliable but unequal global flows (Moore 2014). Humans are not at the center, they merely serve toward the rendering of a technofuture, and then become superfluous. According to Alex Williams, in Nick Land’s envisioning of a post-capitalist future, “the human can eventually be discarded as mere drag to an abstract planetary intelligence rapidly constructing itself from the bricolaged fragments of former civilisations” (Williams 2013, 2). As for Land, he left his university post and has retreated to Shanghai to ruminate and produce paranoid speculative fiction with an accelerationist bent, his erstwhile right-curious politics having fully morphed into open and unabashed fascism.
In sum, what accelerationism as a political philosophy offers its adherents is a profoundly nihilistic view that suspends any hope in the ability of humans to intercede meaningfully in the world as it is. Instead, it hangs its hopes on an End Times of its own, awaiting a sort of secular Rapture that compels acolytes to not only await, but celebrate, the inevitable unravelling of the social order and collapse of the world as we know it For many, its proponents would claim, the worse things get, the better. Sound familiar?
When viewed through the dual lens of prepperdom and nihilistic accelerationism—both of which hold out for global disaster with a certain amount of titillation and glee—the large-scale projects for which techno-élites like Musk have become famous can be seen in another light entirely: as dismal, fatalistic projects that have given up any faith (pun intended) in the ability to resolve the human condition or life on Earth, in general, or perhaps, even more specifically, that there would be inherent value in such an effort at all. Indeed, the projects promoted by this technocratic élite do not scope into something favorable for a majority of the world’s inhabitants or life as we now know it; instead, they are so narrowly aimed as to solve very little about the ruinous conditions for vast swaths of the world’s population and, in many cases, quite literally seek to abandon Earth entirely.
Examples such Musk’s investments in SpaceX, his ruminations that we are all likely living in a computer simulation, or the desire to colonize Mars, all point toward his belief that life on Earth is largely unsalvageable; his billions of dollars of wealth and his unfettered access to resources therefore follow suit. In this regard, a recent musing from him on Twitter takes on an ominous undertone; his idle, passive musing about migrant children placed in cages in detention centers by the Trump Administration proposes no solution, no alternative, no call to act. Perhaps, in accordance with his world view, he sees no reason to. The game has already been lost and those in the know have moved on.
– Sarah T. Roberts and Mél Hogan
Letting go is leaving things as they are. It does not mean that you annihilate them or throw them away.
– Ajahn Sumedho
PICKLED PLUMS
I dub them, those three
citizens of my womb, the ones
I didn’t deport. Although I know
plums are hard to grow
on foreign soil. Plums are finicky,
unreliable, quick to revolt
or pout. Like my mother, I plant-
ed a Romanian plum sapling
in the northeast corner of
the yard to keep evil away.
Like my father, I take three
thimbles of tuica before dinner
to prepare the throat for
what the mouth may say.
– Alina Ştefănescu
The elegant wounds will close
With all of us safe inside.
– Vicki Hearne, Good Friday
The real flex is having a good heart.
– @EarthToGazelle
When the Buddha speaks on renunciation, he doesn’t blame the sensual world itself—just our attachment to it.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
The most powerful mental skill isn’t intelligence but the willingness to change your mind.
– Shane Parrish
If we think about our own life we will see that we have spent many years with no interest in spiritual practice, and that now, even if we have the wish to practice , still, due to laziness, we do not practice purely.
– Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
You cannot conquer Ireland; you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom then our children will win it by a better deed.
– Pádraig Pearse
He subdued the world not by the sword, but by the Cross.
– St. Augustine
i’m pretty sure practice without right view makes things worse – if not on the personal level, then on the cultural level for sure.
– River Kenna
25% of young people are now deemed NEETs—meaning they are no longer in education, employment, or training, per FORTUNE.
– @unusual_whales
another deadline
blown away with the petals
from cherry blossoms
– Kathy Watts
Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time left!
– Trotsky
Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort.
– Jane Austen
the most insidious censorship silences the people you disagree with before it comes for you.
– Shane Parrish
the statue. stoic you stand but we all know the truth: you
must be a natural thing to love the poet.
– Lisa Marie Basile
Poetry lovers of the world, unite! Go on, spread a little poetry, spread a little hope.
– Anne Tannam
Choosing the easy way today
Often leads to quiet regret tomorrow.
Choose the path that builds you,
Not just the one that soothes you.
– @ruthblooming
What do we hold fast, what do we let go?
– Cynthia Zarin
And the Lord Himself gives no greater gift to anyone than patience in afflictions; and let blessed Job persuade you (Job 31:26), that these [afflictions] have accomplished things brighter for him than the eye of the sun.
– Evagrios Pontikos
Rhapsody
by Frank O’Hara
515 Madison Avenue
door to heaven? portal
stopped realities and eternal licentiousness
or at least the jungle of impossible eagerness
your marble is bronze and your lianas elevator cables
swinging from the myth of ascending
I would join
or declining the challenge of racial attractions
they zing on (into the lynch, dear friends)
while everywhere love is breathing draftily
like a doorway linking 53rd with 54th
the east-bound with the west-bound traffic by 8,000,000s
o midtown tunnels and the tunnels, too, of Holland
where is the summit where all aims are clear
the pin-point light upon a fear of lust
as agony’s needlework grows up around the unicorn
and fences him for milk- and yoghurt-work
when I see Gianni I know he’s thinking of John Ericson
playing the Rachmaninoff 2nd or Elizabeth Taylor
taking sleeping-pills and Jane thinks of Manderley
and Irkutsk while I cough lightly in the smog of desire
and my eyes water achingly imitating the true blue
a sight of Manahatta in the towering needle
multi-faceted insight of the fly in the stringless labyrinth
Canada plans a higher place than the Empire State Building
I am getting into a cab at 9th Street and 1st Avenue
and the Negro driver tells me about a $120 apartment
“where you can’t walk across the floor after 10 at night
not even to pee, cause it keeps them awake downstairs”
no, I don’t like that “well, I didn’t take it”
perfect in the hot humid morning on my way to work
a little supper-club conversation for the mill of the gods
you were there always and you know all about these things
as indifferent as an encyclopedia with your calm brown eyes
it isn’t enough to smile when you run the gauntlet
you’ve got to spit like Niagara Falls on everybody or
Victoria Falls or at least the beautiful urban fountains of Madrid
as the Niger joins the Gulf of Guinea near the Menemsha Bar
that is what you learn in the early morning passing Madison Avenue
where you’ve never spent any time and stores eat up light
I have always wanted to be near it
though the day is long (and I don’t mean Madison Avenue)
lying in a hammock on St. Mark’s Place sorting my poems
in the rancid nourishment of this mountainous island
they are coming and we holy ones must go
is Tibet historically a part of China? as I historically
belong to the enormous bliss of American death
There’s a space at the bottom of an exhale,
a little hitch between taking in and letting out
that’s a perfect zero you can go into.
There’s a rest point between the heart muscle’s
close and open—an instant of keenest living
when you’re momentarily dead.
You can rest there.
– Mary Karr, Lit: A Memoir
Bad poetry is something you can understand.
– Robert Bly
Ps – he means poetry that doesn’t evoke our imaginal dreaming mind.
– David Bedrick
Make the language take really desperate jumps.
– Theodore Roethke
“Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?” Well, yeah. Because there’s nothing out there.
– Charles Bukowski
Shakespeare wrote: ‘There is nothing more confining than the prison we don’t know we are in.’ In other words, whatever we are not conscious of can have a deep hold on us. In critical moments, we can wind up doing its bidding while believing we are making our own choices in life. We are in just such a prison of our own making when we act as if the common world of fact and figures is not only the “real world,” but also the only world.
The prison of the modern mind is partly created by the common belief that “reality” can be limited to logic, statistics, and provable facts. Not that the literal world is “unreal,” rather that it is the first level of reality and can never depict all that is truly Real. Restricting all modes of presence to a single plane of being leads to being trapped in a narrow view of life and imprisoned in the linear trap of time. Too much “hard reality” and the world becomes as if flat again; we lose touch with all that makes this earth a place of wonder and beauty and hidden possibilities.
Our world is a reflection of our own soul. Because we have learned to deny the world its soul and therefore its connection to the divine, it, too, can seem to be dying. Under the spell of literalism and the tyranny of facts and statistics, the modern legacy becomes an increasingly diminished world that has been overly quantified as well as thoroughly exploited.
The rise of literalism signals the loss of imagination underlying both the fixation with measurable facts and the fundamentalism of fanatic beliefs. Literalism reduces the world to fixed ideas and rigid dogmas while isolating people at extremes of thought, feeling, and belief. Literalism takes the mystery and the natural sense of awe out of the world and eventually takes the meaning out of life. If there is no otherworld of spirit and imagination, there can be nowhere to turn when the real world becomes disorienting, when everything around us becomes both more irrational and increasingly chaotic. When life has lost its wonder and nature has lost its living halo, imagination is the missing ingredient and the necessary remedy for the disease of literalism.
– Michael Meade, Awakening the Soul
i’ve forgotten
i too should be loved
when making monsoons of melancholy
when i am the darkest of nights
forgetting i also contain
the North Star to my joy
– FreeQuency
We do not see the connection between things, but live under the illusion that things are separate. In the same way we exist only in a moment. Actually things interact continuously. Interchange goes on without ceasing. Because we fail to see this, we see the world as dead. For the same reason we fail to realize that we ourselves are a process.
– Sophie Grigorievna Ouspensky
Why do people read? The answer, as regards the great majority, is: They don’t.
– Bertrand Russell
Don’t claim anything. Enjoy it but don’t claim it as yours. It doesn’t belong to you, nothing belongs to you. You are free, totally unattached.
– Robert Adams
The academic life is not the same thing as the intellectual life.
(and, I would add, the intellectual life is not the same thing as the spiritual life)
– Jeff Reimer
If one investigates all the possible ways in which a person can orient his life, then one comes to this conclusion: In the end, a person orients his life either toward having or toward being.
– Erich Fromm
Whatever problem, question, or confusion we have, whatever seems impossible in our lives—if we go toward it, see it, feel it, make a relationship with it, use it—becomes our path.
– John Welwood
Look, if I don’t flirt with you, you should take that as a compliment. I don’t always respect myself, but I almost never respect men. They’re like flowers, all showy, a lot of color and lust. You pick them and throw them on the ground. But you I respect. I always did. From the first day I saw you.
– Barbara Kingsolver
In the best fiction, there exists a palpable sense of discovery.
– Lan Samantha Chang
You can train your brain to react differently, realizing the situation for what it really is.
– Brad Schipke
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people’s charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself.
– Lorrie Moore
Revolutions are born from the flames of injustice.
– Paul Revere
Of the fifty or hundred systems of philosophy that have been advanced at different times of the world’s history, perhaps the larger number have been, not so much results of historical evolution, as happy thoughts which have accidentally occurred to their authors.
– Charles Sanders Peirce
Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.
– Sun Tzu
You seem to want instant insight, forgetting that the instant is always preceded by a long preparation. The fruit falls suddenly, but the ripening takes time.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Look at that castle which overhangs yon precipice; and that also on the island, almost concealed amongst the foliage of those lovely trees; and now that group of labourers coming from among their vines; and that village half hid in the recess of the mountain.
– Mary Shelley
It is not only our right but our duty to stand against tyranny.
– Paul Revere
A good citizen is not necessarily a good man, but a good man is bound to be a right citizen, not of any particular society or country.
– Krishnamurti
The antidote for fifty enemies is one friend.
– Aristotle
I’ll never get quite used to being alive. It’s a mystery. Always startled to find I have survived.
– John Steinbeck
Can anyone be found willing to be fastened to the accursed tree?
– Seneca
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom.
– Clarence Darrow
History remembers those who did not wait for others to take a stand.
– Paul Revere
It is the highest honor to be misunderstood by history after being disregarded by your own age.
– @eutaktos
The supreme function of reason is to show man that there are things beyond reason.
– Blaise Pascal
I wish they would only take me as I am.
– Vincent Van Gogh
Tyranny cannot exist if people refuse to submit to it.
– Robert Reich
Prefer knowledge to wealth,
for the one is transitory, the
other perpetual.
– Socrates
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
– Margaret Atwood
Your task is not figuring out how to quiet the mind, your task is figuring out how to genuinely want to.
– James Pierce
I am made of the same material as the walls I am trapped behind.
– Franz Kafka
The voice of the
intellect is a soft
one, but it does not
rest until it has
gained a hearing.
– Sigmund Freud
A majority of life’s errors are caused by forgetting what one is really trying to do.
– Charlie Munger
A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
– John Burroughs
history, despite its wrenching pain
cannot be unlived, but if faced
with courage, need not be lived again.
– Maya Angelou
I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it — to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once.
– Haruki Murakami
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
– Sylvia Plath
People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
– Doris Lessing
Freedom of speech does not protect you from the consequences of saying stupid shit.
– Jim C. Hines
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
– Longfellow, Paul Revere’s Ride
We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.
– Charles Bukowski
When you fall apart, don’t forget to love the pieces.
– Bayo Akomolafe
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
– Oscar Wilde
I romanticized my agony for so long,
I began to court it with roses.
– J Luna
Stick to the point.
– W. Somerset Maugham
People pay more attention when they think you’re up to something.
– Bill Watterson
It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas.
– Charles Peguy
Something in
me wants more,
I can’t rest.
– Sylvia Plath
God has more thoughts of mercy than you have of rebellion.
– Thomas Goodwin
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag.
– Doris Lessing
Tyranny divided people from each other and forced them into small, closed circles—now opened up by the loosening of its grip.
– @YassinHSaleh
Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered…
– Rilke
This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across the universe in the midst of the silence, like two notes, separate yet melting into one, like pure and heart-rending harmony.
– Simone Weil
Love’s as hard as nails
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (with all that is)
Our cross, and His.
– C.S. Lewis
A man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself. Until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position.
– Alan Watts
The birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus means that one day everything sad will come untrue.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The poet must not close his eyes.
– Werner Herzog
Love’s vast sea cannot be emptied.
And springs of grace flow easily everywhere.
Where is nirvana?
Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten.
– John Balaban
You can only grow if you’re willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.
– Brian Tracy
As the Taoists said way back in the Axial Age, to expect certainty from religion is immature and unrealistic. It was a sign of an undeveloped spirituality, a childish viewpoint. There is no certainty. The Taoists found a great freedom in not being certain about things.
– Karen Armstrong
how can you
suspect danger
when it is the
love of your life
who delivers it?
– Najya Williams
We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can not be wise with other men’s wisdom.
– Michel de Montaigne
What the warrior renounces is anything in his experience that is a barrier between himself and others.
– Chögyam Trungpa
How cool the sea looks
all those blue miles to itself
the sun on the estuary.
And the river is lost
in a glitter it doesn’t own.
– Jenny Pollak
Freedom lies beyond conformity or rebellion.
– Sam Keen
La Guerre (II)
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring)
– E.E. Cummings
The ocean stirs the heart, inspires the imagination and brings eternal joy to the soul.
– Robert Wyland
Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.
– Leonardo da Vinci
jazz and rain,
few words to say
in the space
of missing you,
only this blue wound
– Joyce Wong
I believe that there is only one kind of love—real love—trying to come alive in us despite our limiting assumptions, the distortions of our culture, and the habits of fear, self-condemnation, and isolation that we tend to acquire just by living a life.
– Sharon Salzberg
Even if I now saw you
only once,
I would long for you
through worlds,
worlds.
– Izumi Shikibu
Highly sensitive people are too often perceived as weaklings or damaged goods. To feel intensely is not a symptom of weakness, it is the trademark of the truly alive and compassionate. It is not the empath who is broken, it is society that has become dysfunctional and emotionally disabled. There is no shame in expressing your authentic feelings. Those who are at times described as being a ‘hot mess’ or having ‘too many issues’ are the very fabric of what keeps the dream alive for a more caring, humane world. Never be ashamed to let your tears shine a light in this world.
– Anthon St. Maarten
Shout out to planet K2-18b!
– James Ford
when i say “wake the gods,” part of it is that some gods are already very much woken up and on the move…
and when they aren’t in a balanced ecosystem of gods, they get unbalanced and weird and fucked up,
and we’ve reeeaaallly gotta wake up some of the other ones for balance
– River Kenna
We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
– Denis Diderot
When we can open to care, blessings will come. If we have questions, answers will come. If we have pain that we ourselves do not recognize, healing will come. When we ourselves care, we can receive such blessings.
. . .
If we wish to care, the unity of head and heart is a good place to begin. When we can bring our being into harmony, blessings can flow, and then care becomes integral to our being. There are no concerns left unanswered, no antagonisms. Care is the solvent for all problems.
– Tarthang Tulku, Caring
Definition: A calm, lengthy intent consideration.
Sometimes even the most profound insights can seem like just another thought, with no power to bring about change.
But contemplation gives you a way to transform those thoughts to reality.
Just ask what you can do to protect goodness?
How can you improve right now?
How can you make changes in the next twenty-four hours?
The next week?
The connection to goodness can be found in your heart.
Make the connection, and your life can become an artistic creation filled with joy.
– Tarthang Tulku
That’s the final outcome: the Supreme Being as a human being, it descends in us to become us, so it can then know Itself through us, as us. I know that this is not just a teaching, it’s a showing, it’s a proof that this is true, and the cells of your body, if proportional to how open your system is, will know this. We’ll start singing in resonance in the recognition of the opportunity, so you become a demonstration…
– Sat Shree
The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown The traveller hastens toward the town, And the tide rises, the tide falls.
Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands, Efface the footprints in the sands, And the tide rises, the tide falls.
The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore Returns the traveller to the shore, And the tide rises, the tide falls.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there’s no forcing it.
– Leo Tolstoy
If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.
– Anne Lamott
If the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be. Kant—in this respect almost alone among the philosophers—was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications.
– Hannah Arendt
I want to live, I want to give, I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold.
– Neil Young
But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.
– Madeline Miller
To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.
– David Brooks
The most secure password is the password one cannot remember.
– Roselyn Thalathara, American mystic, philosopher
We don’t invent our desires, we borrow them.
– René Girard
God strengthen me to bear myself;
That heaviest weight of all to bear,
Inalienable weight of care.
All others are outside myself;
I lock my door and bar them out,
The turmoil, tedium, gad-about.
I lock my door upon myself,
And bar them out; but who shall wall
Self from myself, most loathed of all?
– Christina Rossetti
The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are *still* here. It is phenomenal just to be.
– Anne Lamott
If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.
– Mikhail Bakunin
Christianity says that pain is so great a reality that even the Creator could feel it.
– G. K. Chesterton
Just like a low resting heart rate is the byproduct of intense exercise, low anxiety is the byproduct of intense self-examination.
– Naval Ravikant
As he grew older, he loved the word etcetera and refused
to abbreviate it.
– Mary Ruefle
“You must get rid of the pianist in you,” Mahler told Max Marschalk in an 1896 letter. “You must banish the pianist in order to compose for the orchestra; begin instead with the violin and the voice, expand your margins. Change and contrast!”
Eating the same meals every day is a low key weight loss hack.
– Dan Go
They do realize
we are always
in space, right?
– Andy Perrin
An astonishing thing is that one does learn with age, although what one learns is not what one hoped to learn.
– Cynthia Zarin
I’ve done what I know how to do. Then people opine.
– Louise Glück
The dominance of the ego and its images in our culture is seen in the plethora of words that surround the modern individual … In their desperate search for meaning, people turn to words when their real need is for feeling.
– Alexander Lowen
You need to train your attention in a way that’s gentle, almost painless, and organic.
– Kathy Wesley
Carry your heart through this world like a life-giving sun.
– Hafiz
I’m unhappy, mostly, when I’m not writing, unless I’ve just written something, in which case I’m euphoric because I don’t have to try and write something again.
– Louise Glück
midlife crisis;
maybe it’s time for
a new hair cut
– Mueder Krieger
Letting go of inner resistance, you often find circumstances change for the better.
– Eckhart Tolle
neither for me honey nor the honey bee
– Sappho, (tr. Anne Carson)
I am looking for the human who admits his flaws
Who shocks the adversary
By being kinder not stronger
What would that be like?
We don’t even know
– Naomi Shihab Nye
I’m having a harder and harder time telling what’s a perceptual mishap and what’s the World, and I should maybe just bite the bullet and stop thinking there’s a difference.
– River Pilgrim
bright-eyed
wonder-child
comes
Revolution.
– Etheridge Knight
That the soul be without pleasure is not good any more than that it be without knowledge.
– Thomas Lynch
I have seen the cross hanging in the cool church vaults.
At times it resembles a split-second snapshot of something moving at tremendous speed.
– Tomas Transtromer
All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was.
“No,” said the old man, “that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.”
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Nevertheless, scholars keep obsessing about selfish motives, simply because both economics and behaviorism have indoctrinated them that incentives drive everything that animals or humans do. I don’t believe a word of it, though, and a recent ingenious experiment on children drives home why. The German psychologist Felix Warneken investigated how young chimpanzees and children assist human adults. The experimenter was using a tool but dropped it in midjob: would they pick it up? The experimenter’s hands were full: would they open a cupboard for him? Both species did so voluntarily and eagerly, showing that they understood the experimenter’s problem. Once Warneken started to reward the children for their assistance, however, they became less helpful. The rewards, it seems, distracted them from sympathizing with the clumsy experimenter.50 I am trying to figure how this would work in real life. Imagine that every time I offered a helping hand to a colleague or neighbor—keeping a door open or picking up their mail—they stuffed a few dollars in my shirt pocket. I’d be deeply offended, as if all I cared about was money! And it would surely not encourage me to do more for them. I might even start avoiding them as being too manipulative. It is curious to think that human behavior is entirely driven by tangible rewards, given that most of the time rewards are nowhere in sight. What are the rewards for someone who takes care of a spouse with Alzheimer’s? What payoffs does someone derive from sending money to a good cause? Internal rewards (feeling good) may very well come into play, but they work only via the amelioration of the other’s situation. They are nature’s way of making sure that we are other-oriented rather than self-oriented.
– Frans de Waal
Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Do anything, but let it produce joy.
– Walt Whitman
Every step of the way to heaven is heaven.
– Catherine of Siena
WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE TO BE ALIVE? Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face? Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where maples grow straight and their leaves lean down. For a joke you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling! It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit. Who turned on the lights? You did, by waking up: You flipped the light switch, started up the wind machine, kicked on the flywheel that spins the years. Can you catch hold of a treetop, or will you fly off the diving planet as she rolls? Can you ride out the big blow on the trunk of a coconut palm till the winds let up and you fall back asleep? You do, you fall asleep again, and you slide in a dream to the palm tree’s base; the winds die off, the lights dim, the years slip away as you idle there till you die in your sleep, till death sets you cruising. Knowing you are alive is feeling the planet buck under you—rear, kick, and try to throw you—while you hang on to the ring. It is riding the planet like a log downstream, whooping. Or, conversely, you step aside from the dreaming fast loud routine and feel time as a stillness about you, and hear the silent air ask in so thin a voice, Have you noticed yet that you will die? Do you remember, remember, remember? Then you may feel your life as a weekend, a weekend you cannot extend.
– Annie Dillard
There is little I love more than hearing
Someone trying to sing a better world
Into being.
– Jared Singer
Enough, please. Let us all say: Enough, please! Stop the war.
– Pope Francis
How is freedom exercised?… Willfully, Irregularly. Through refutation of the custom. The breaking of patterns. Being unseen. Solitude. Social indifference. Fighting ill-wrought power. Irreverence for authority. Moving without limit or schedule through the day and the world. Choosing when to participate and when to withdraw.
– Dave Eggers
The truth sometimes reminds me of a city buried in sand. As time passes, the sand piles up even thicker, and occasionally it’s blown away and what’s below is revealed.
– Haruki Murakami
Whenever we pluck the fruit of creativity from the golden tree our other hand plucks the fruit of destruction. Our resistance to this insight is very high! We would love to have creativity without destruction, but that is not possible.
– Robert A. Johnson
Possibly first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached.
– Susan Choi
I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.
– Pope Francis
You know how children are, sometimes they love you by cuddling you, other times by trying to remake you from the start, reinvent you, as if they thought you were badly brought up and they had to teach you how to get on in the world, what music to listen to, what books to read, what films to see, the words you should use and those you shouldn’t because they’re old now, no one says that anymore.
– Elena Ferrante
I don’t want to be a genius – I have enough problems just trying to be a man.
– Albert Camus
This happens today: if the investments in the banks fall slightly… a tragedy… what can be done? But if people die of hunger, if they have nothing eat, if they have poor health, it does not matter! This is our crisis today!
– Pope Francis
Autonomy is commanding yourself to do what you think it would be a good idea to do, but that in turn depends on who you think you are.
– Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity
Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
– John Stuart Mill
what is stilled, flows, / what is destroyed, liberates—
– Arthur Sze
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.
– Jeremy Bentham
The Buddha spent years of his life examining the nature of existence. He explored the innate qualities and dispositions of mind itself. He did not learn from a book or a god or a superhuman entity. He proceeded by long and direct examination of experience.
– Douglas Penick
As soon as you notice you are attached to an idea, discard it. Notice, but don’t hold on. Don’t make it an intellectual pursuit. Steal the notion with your breath. The breath will help you see that you are Buddha already, that Christ is not separate from you.
– Matthias Esho Birk
To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.
– Rebecca Solnit
You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.
– Johnny Cash
Ten beggars can sleep on one rug, but two kings can feel uncomfortable in one country.
– Saadi Shirazi
Never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Revolution is about the need to re-evolve political, economic and social justice and power back into the hands of the people, preferably through legislation and policies that make human sense. That’s what revolution is about. Revolution is not about shootouts.
– Bobby Seale
Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position, it is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism… It says the world is worth believing in. In time we come to find that this is so.
– Nick Cave
We thought because we had power, we had wisdom.
– Stephen Vincent Benet
Love is merely an offshoot of uncontrolled desire.
– Harold Bloom
Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.
– Joyce Meyer
Does the world need one more poem
About Ohio, or the heavy
Sexual incense of the South,
Or dead mothers rising in the dusk?
– Elton Glaser
Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to burn his ships and cut all sources of retreat.
– Napoleon Hill
Strangers had no idea who I was and neither did I, because what you learn when you are set free that young is you are not one thing all the time. You’re plastic. You’re another person’s mirror.
– Laurie Stone
Better to feel the pain of writing than the pain of not writing.
– Phoebe Waller-Bridge
To be young in a time like that was incredible luck—young and in Paris.
– Archibald MacLeish
Those who seek to build only walls and not bridges are not Christian.
– Pope Francis
It comes
Unadorned
Like a phrase
Strong enough to cast a spell;
It comes
Unbidden,
Like the turn of sun through hills
Or stars in wheels of song.
The jeweled feet of women dance the earth.
Arousing it to spring.
Shoulders broad as a road bend to share the weight of years.
Profiles breach the distance and lean
Toward an ordinary kiss.
Bliss.
It comes naked into the world like a charm.
– Toni Morrison
We listen too much to the telephone and we listen too little to nature. The wind is one of my sounds. A lonely sound, perhaps, but soothing. Everybody should have his personal sounds to listen for — sounds that will make him exhilarated and alive, or quiet and calm… . As a matter of fact, one of the greatest sounds of them all — and to me it is a sound — is utter, complete silence.
– Andre Kostelanetz
In English class we studied a poem by Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird.” The poem asks “what to make of a diminished thing.” That diminished thing, said the teacher, was human experience in the modern world. Oh dear. Modern aesthetics. We must learn from this poem “in singing not to sing.” To my undergraduate self I thought, “But what if I like to sing?”
– Marilynne Robinson
Every person is a half-open door / leading to a room for everyone.
– Tomas Tranströmer
Move your arms as if you are free from gravity. Open your mouth if you like, but do not breathe as you breathe on land; rather remember that breathable blue by closing your eyes. Then open your eyes. You can breathe underwater now. We all can. We all did. Before time.
Now let your body sink rather than float. When you reach the bottom of the ocean, let your feet find the sand, let your weight come, stand up. From here, you can walk wherever you like. Starfish and turtles are here with you now. An electric eel swims by you, arched like an S, spotted yellow and blue. Look at your hands. Can you imagine fins? Spread your fingers wide. There was a time before fingers, arms, legs. Before the landlife. There is no alone in the ocean. There is only the lifedeath of water. Thriving.
– Lidia Yuknavich
America is a very sick nation. I suspect that racism, mass killings, corruption, gang culture, the election of bad people to high office, drugs, extreme poverty, homelessness and all the other ailments it suffers from to a far greater degree than any other democratic nation in the world, are not individual illnesses but the symptoms of a deeply engrained malaise that absolutely refuses to respond to treatment. Most Americans who are aware of their country’s infirmities blame them on the sins of the past. As with most nations, these sins are numerous but my guess is that they make America vulnerable to infection rather than being the illness itself.
What is the virus that courses through the veins of the United States attacking every part of its being, laying it low in wave after wave after wave?
I’m not a doctor but I think it may be hubris.
– Jonathan Hagger
A republic, if you can keep it.
– Benjamin Franklin’s response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
It is good to stand in the middle of the stream and live rather than stand on the bank and witness things from afar, to have both a sense of participation and also a sense of wise detachment because one knows the reality of things.
– Amitava Kumar
I refuse to sum it up anymore; it’s not possible.
I give it up
to the battering of songs against the light,
to the singing of the earnest cricket
in the last world of fire and trash.
– Joy Harjo
This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
– Yuval Noah Harari
So I tell you: the greatest thing you can do is to believe a thing into existence, just as our founding fathers did.
– Neville Goddard
There is no way to play three-dimensional chess with bigots.
– Lydia Kiesling
Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.
– Dennis Covington
A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
– Alan Watts
It is violence to build walls and barriers to stop those who look for a place of peace
– Pope Francis
Human rights are not only violated by terrorism, repression or assassination, but also by unfair economic structures that create huge inequalities.
– Pope Francis
Let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
– William Shakespeare
A famous Zen teacher used to address all new students with this opening statement:
“This is all hopeless, I mean that”
Clarity is denied when the mind observes with a conclusion.
– Krishnamurti
This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.
– Yuval Noah Harari
[…] oppression & the oppressors, oppression & the oppressed; liberation: not a gift, not a self-achievement, but a mutual process.
– Paulo Freire
Why the double standard, the generosity toward our neighbor and the miserliness where we ourselves are concerned? And so I propose that we add a new rule, which we can call the Platinum Rule, to our moral code: ‘Do not do unto yourself what you would not do unto others.’
– Tal Ben-Shahar
…the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
– Thomas Hobbes
When asked how he could live without fear of kings or gods, Diogenes said:
“They cannot harm a man who wants nothing.”
Those who commit to nothing are distracted by everything.
– Bhagavad Gita
A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did.
– John Burroughs
When you can sincerely thank God for the things which you own only in imagination, you have real faith. You will get rich; you will cause the creation of whatsoever you want.
– Wallace D. Wattles
A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.
– Pope Francis
I can always hire a mathematician, but they can’t hire me.
– Thomas Edison
A pendulum feeds on the energy of its adherents which increases the power of its sway.
– Vadim Zeland
Grace is not part of consciousness; it is the amount of light in our souls, not knowledge nor reason.
– Pope Francis
Into your hands will be placed the exact results of your own thoughts; you will receive that which you earn; no more, no less.
– James Allen
Only This World
Only this world—
not some unknown chance
of life somewhere else,
only this here, this life,
this improbable chance
to be steward of meadow
and desert, mountain and cliff,
this chance to inhabit this
acre, this continent, this planet,
to know this frozen pond,
this slender stream, this dried grass,
this herd of mule deer, this darkness
that comes when our planet spins,
this light that arrives
on darkness’s edge.
Only this chance to sing
of this world, this disappearing
world, this world of emergence,
this world with its stars
and its bones, its prickles
and petals, its sweetness
and ache, this world
with its hopelessness
and, oh dare I say it,
its hope.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Let us learn to live with kindness, to love everyone, even when they do not love us.
– Pope Francis
May we not be silent in the face of suffering caused by unjust policies and closed hearts.
– Pope Francis
he never raised his voice—
he just helped the world
unclench a little.
he wasn’t a fist.
~ his life wasn’t a shout
to obey.
he was an open palm.
~ his life was a soft call
to be compassionate.
he didn’t light bonfires.
~ he reminded us
of our light.
he didn’t lead with power—
he just kept choosing mercy.
of course, as a soul who
was entangled with humanity
he made mistakes,
but his kindness
was never one of them.
now his absence feels like
a window closed
somewhere deep inside me—
and I didn’t realize
how much light
had been coming through.
oh Pope Francis,
may the perpetual
light shine upon you
– john roedel
The best education consists in immunizing
people against systematic attempts at education.
– Paul Karl Feyerabend
That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at.
– William Faulkner
TO LEARN FROM ANIMAL BEING
Nearer to the earth’s heart,
Deeper within its silence:
Animals know this world
In a way we never will.
We who are ever
Distanced and distracted
By the parade of bright
Windows thought opens:
Their seamless presence
Is not fractured thus.
Stranded between time
Gone and time emerging,
We manage seldom
To be where we are:
Whereas they are always
Looking out from
The here and now.
May we learn to return
And rest in the beauty
Of animal being,
Learn to lean low,
Leave our locked minds,
And with freed senses
Feel the earth
Breathing with us.
May we enter
Into lightness of spirit,
And slip frequently into
The feel of the wild.
Let the clear silence
Of our animal being
Cleanse our hearts
Of corrosive words.
May we learn to walk
Upon the earth
With all their confidence
And clear-eyed stillness
So that our minds
Might be baptized
In the name of the wind
And the light and the rain.
– John O’Donohue
Those roads were echoes and footsteps,
women, men, agonies, resurrections,
days and nights,
half dreams and dreams,
every obscure instant of yesterday
and of the world’s yesterdays,
the firm sword of the Dane and the moon of the Persian,
the deeds of the dead,
shared love, words,
Emerson and snow and so many things.
Now I can forget them. I reach my center,
my algebra and my key,
my mirror.
Soon I will know who I am.
– Jorge Luis Borges
What is meant by “reality”? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.
– Virginia Woolf
This is What You Shall Do and Not Do
Know your worth, know your limits, know your boundlessness, know your strengths, know your weaknesses, know your accomplishments, and know your dreams.
Be a mirror for all those who project their darkness onto you; do not internalize it. Don’t seek validation from those who will refuse to understand you. Don’t say yes, when you need to say no. Don’t stay when you know you should go.
Don’t go when you know you should stay.
Respond, don’t react. Behave in a manner aligning with your values.
Sleep. Seek out quiet. Don’t glorify busyness.
Reignite your curiosity for the world. Explore new horizons. Be honest with yourself. Be gentle with yourself. Approach yourself as you would approach a child-with a kind tone and deep understanding.
Love yourself or, at the very least, have mercy on yourself. Be your own parent, your own child, your own lover, your own partner.
Give less of your time to employment that drains you of your enthusiasm for life. Reclaim your freedom by redefining your necessities. Take that gathered energy; devote your precious life to your passions.
Unplug from the babble. Seek awe. It is the counterbalance to trauma. Do your psychological work, and don’t take any one else’s work upon yourself. Protect your peace. Listen to what your heart knows; fuck everything else.
– L.M. Browning
Literature is produced by writers, yes, but also by communities that shape them.
– Kwame Anthony Appiah
We never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution — real girls’ talk.
– Nina Simone
It just drives me nuts…somebody arbitrarily says, ‘You gotta do it in two days.’ That fucking really pisses me off. It really does. We’re always up against the fucking clock… I’m not working this way again, ever. This is absolutely horrible. We never get any extra shots. We never get any time to experiment. We never get to, you know, go dreamy or anything. We barely fucking make our days. I could have spent a week…and dreamt up all kinds of stuff. You know, it’s just…it’s sick, this kind of fucking way to do it. You don’t get a chance to sink into anything. It’s not a way to work.
– David Lynch
…the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail”. We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth; our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.
– Pope Francis
Your letter unfolds and unfolds forever. / I flatten it with my hands to read.
– Yuan Chen
Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears!
But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say?
– Samuel Beckett
The muscles of my face were beginning to hurt. Under some conditions, smiling is a workout.
– Margaret Atwood
Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
There is only one inborn error. and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
‘Look at me’ is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart.
– Bertrand Russell
There is no phenomenon in the universe that does not intimately concern us, from a pebble resting at the bottom of the ocean to the movement of a galaxy millions of light years away.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
the compulsion of the virtual is the compulsion to exist in potentia on all screens, to be embedded in all programs, and it acquires a magical force: the Siren call of the black box.
– Jean Baudrillard
But a lie is a lie, and in itself intrinsically evil, whether it be told with good or bad intents.
– Immanuel Kant
It does seem pleasant to be quiet, and not have company manners on all the time. Home is a nice place, though it isn’t splendid.
– Louisa May Alcott
No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.
– John Locke
Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.
– Hanif Kureishi
Once I got into songwriting… I figured I couldn’t be a hellfire rock ‘n’ roller. But I could write hellfire lyrics.
– Bob Dylan
The good of all evil is to make a way for love, which is essential good. Therefore evil exists, and will exist until love destroy and cast it out.
– George MacDonald
It is through good education that all the good in the world arises.
– Immanuel Kant
Brilliance is the ability to simplify a mass amount of information into a simple yes/no decision.
– Warren Buffett
…there must be some reason for your love, I firmly believe this…
– Kafka
I invent nothing, I rediscover.
– Auguste Rodin
An enemy will agree, but a friend will argue.
– Russian Proverb
Any ideas, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.
– Napoleon Hill
You already have a mental equivalent for everything that is in your life today, and you must destroy the patterns for the things you do not want, and then they will disappear.
– Emmet Fox
Writers cannot stop wars. We cannot even stop hatred. But through our stories we can keep the flame of peace and hope and coexistence and human dignity alive. Literature reminds us that as human beings we are, and will always be, capable of solidarity, empathy and love.
– Elif Shafak
The order that reigns in the material world indicates sufficiently that it has been created by a will that is filled with intelligence.
– Isaac Newton
We look upon the world / to see ourselves in the brief moment that we are of the earth / a small fern in a crevice of the cliff face.
– Ed Roberson
Everything you do is full of flowers.
– Pablo Neruda
I know so many last words.
But I will never know hers.
– John Green, Looking for Alaska
An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied.
– Arnold Glasow
The Earth does not expect you to save her, she expects you to respect her.
– Nemonte Nenquimo
Days will pass, and you’ll abandon things you were addicted to, and leave someone, and cancel a dream, and finally, accept a reality.
– Nizar Qabbani
Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
– Flannery O’Connor
We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our god, wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is a fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.
– Bill Hicks
Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political dictators.
– Rollo May
When evil men plot,
good men must plan.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
Come with all your shame, come with your swollen heart, I’ve never seen anything more beautiful than you.
– Warsan Shire
I hate like the gates of Hades the man who says one thing and hides another inside him.
– Achilles
Abusers often get community.
Survivors often get isolation.
No wonder healing feels so unsafe.
– @holistic.therapist
It’s not time to worry yet.
– Harper Lee
Pope Francis didn’t reflect the times as much as he gently but lovingly rebuked them.
– Jonathan Meacham
What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I think Jesus has been the subject of identity theft.
– Senator Raphael Warnock
A people without reliable news is, sooner or later, a people without the basis of freedom.
– Harold J. Laski
It is just wise to become aware of how your ideologies blind you.
– Kent Burgess
Neurodivergent
by Katie Dozier
Sometimes in the shower, I catch
myself singing Pocahontas, “you
can’t step in the same river twice.”
Well what’s so unique about rivers?
Will she finally see us if we jump in
three more times? Now I understand
the beauty of bird watching— for me,
it’s not enough to say a cardinal’s red
when a Ferrari speeds by. While meeting
therapists, her tantrums paint fire-engines
on the floor. But nail polish bottles
are the best at names. “I Just Can’t
Cope Acabana” shouts from my fingers.
Sakura’s so pink that my eyes dissolve her
cotton candy, and green helps me
swing on the one
strong vine.
asking her
favorite color
sea turtle
To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.
– Akira Kurosawa
THE NEW COSMOLOGY
So it’s true: the poplar and I
are sisters, daughters of an ancient
star,
every last thing
so much the same (harp, toothpick, linnet, sleet)
that whatever I touch
is touching me, whatever is a cousin, unremote.
Even the metaphors –
ruby as blood, blood
as river, river as dream – all are
true,
just as the poets promised.
– Paulann Petersen
Here it is: the new way of living with the world inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost. You and me are us and them, and it and sky.
– Ada Limon
Most people think that shadows follow, precede, or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.
– Elie Wiesel
Be careful of words, even the miraculous ones. For the miraculous we do our best, sometimes they swarm like insects and leave not a sting but a kiss. They can be as good as fingers. They can be as trusty as the rock you stick your bottom on. But they can be both daisies and bruises. Yet I am in love with words. They are doves falling out of the ceiling. They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap. They are the trees, the legs of summer, and the sun, its passionate face…
– Anne Sexton
The mind which is created quick to love, is responsive to everything that is pleasing, soon as by pleasure it is awakened into activity. Your apprehensive faculty draws an impression from a real object, and unfolds it within you, so that it makes the mind turn thereto. And if, being turned, it inclines towards it, that inclination is love; that is nature, which through pleasure is bound anew within you.
– Dante Alighieri
It may be crazy, but I’m the closest thing I have to a voice of reason.
– Gil Scott-Heron
My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. “Listen,” he said, “life and no escape.”
– Anne Carson
Everything is your fault if you’re any damn good.
– Ernest Hemingway
Faster, faster, damned flesh!
– Jean Adolphe Albéric Bourdeillette
At present we educate people only up to the point where they can earn a living and marry; then education ceases altogether, as though a complete mental outfit had been acquired. … Vast numbers of men and women thus spend their entire lives in complete ignorance of the most important things.
– Carl Jung
A future society will reunite the smart and the spiritual.
– @naval
To awaken means to realize one’s nothingness, that is, to realize one’s complete and absolute mechanicalness, and one’s complete and absolute helplessness… So long as a man is not horrified at himself, he knows nothing about himself.
– Gurdjieff
We may have global news more quickly and hear murders described most vividly, but information is not going to make us intelligent.
– Krishnamurti
For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren’t enough, college courses aren’t enough, the Internet isn’t enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student’s discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world.
– Helen Vendler
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
– @naval
Please do not let yourself get sucked into the vacuum that is hustle culture. Prioritize your nervous system. Reclaim your energy. And keep your spirit right above all else. This is how we shift the narrative.
– Nika Solé
DON’T say “miracle worker.” The Anglo-Saxon word is “wondersmith” (Old English wundorsmiþ, which appears in Beowulf).
– @wylfcen
Revenge is an admission of pain: a mind that is bowed by injury is not a great mind.
– Seneca
I do believe in Christianity, and my impression is that a system must be divine which has survived so much insane mismanagement.
– G. K. Chesterton
This world has lost the plot.
– Nika Solé
Disease is love turned into fear—our energy, meant to sustain us, turned against ourselves. Energy cannot be destroyed. Our job is not to kill disease, but to turn its energy back in the direction it came from—to turn fear back into love.
– Marianne Williamson
Filmmaking is all art forms together. It is dance, so the blocking is critical. It is poetry, so the words are so important. It’s light, painting with light. It’s costumes. It’s all art forms together.
– M. Night Shyamalan
Just because you know how to survive storms doesn’t mean you should become a storm chaser.
Choose still waters.
You’re worthy.
– Dr. Thema
One thing I think about, on bright evenings like this, is how maybe the West, in its truest form, always must exist in a state of long defeat. The founding texts (Odyssey, Aeneid, Bible) are fundamentally exilic—homesickness is core to the identity.
“Win,” and you lose it all.
– Paul J. Pastor
It’s crazy how being able to simply sit alone with yourself sets you apart from most.
– Nika Solé
I hope that
the spring sunshine
will be my best doctor.
– Frédéric Chopin
The death of someone close to you is like an alarm bell: Wake up! This is it! Do what you care about! Love is what matters!
– Susan Moon
I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world, finding it so much like myself.
– Albert Camus
You shouldn’t read anything about meditation for the first 5 years that you practice. Just sit, and once a week or so, talk with a teacher or spiritual friend about it.
If you absolutely have to have a book, the only one I’d recommend is Drawing On The Right Side of the Brain
– @VividVoid_
America has had its share of crooks (Warren G. Harding, Richard Nixon), bigots (Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan), and incompetents (Andrew Johnson, George W. Bush). But never before Donald Trump did we have a president who combined all these nefarious qualities.
– Robert Reich
This is a time to get yourself into top gear, because the way we were doing things in the past may not work in the future.
– Sadhguru
Over the years, as friends and lovers have told me to slow down–to stop writing so much, to stop collecting strange things, to stop my over-the-top expression–I have gone in another direction.
– Dorothea Lasky, On Iris Apfel
When I sit down to work, I’m just trying to get one little thing right. I don’t have more far-reaching goals in mind. Just, let’s get this little thing right.
– Deborah Eisenberg
The difference between school and life. In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.
– Tom Bodett
Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.
– Louise Glück
It is natural that the novelist should doubt his ability to cope with his task.
– Joseph Conrad, Books
I was an ordinary person who studied hard.
There are no miracle people.
– Richard Feynman
I must have been crazy but there are many kinds of crazy and some are quite delightful.
– Charles Bukowski
The last time doesn’t exist. It’s only this time. And everything is going to be different this time. There’s only now.
– Bill Murray
We will, I hope, be judged, eventually by seemingly small, random acts of kindness and sincerity.
– Anthony Bourdain
What do you need to know about Tokyo? Deep, deep waters. The first time I came here, it was a transformative experience. It was a powerful and violent experience. It was just like taking acid for the first time—meaning, What do I do now? I see the whole world in a different way.
I often compare the experience of going to Japan for the first time, going to Tokyo for the first time, to what Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend—the reigning guitar gods of England—must have gone through the week that Jimi Hendrix came to town.
You hear about it. You go see it. A whole window opens up into a whole new thing. And you think, What does this mean? What do I have left to say? What do I do now?
– Anthony Bourdain
If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If some one maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you should feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction.
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants!
– Bertrand Russell
Chaotic situations must not be rejected.
– Chogyam Trungpa
Show me a Nation with a science-hostile government, and I’ll show you a society with failing health, wealth, & security.
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
The sun was warm but the wind was chill
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
– Robert Frost
Distrust futurists. More so if they haven’t created anything fundamental in their field. Distrust completely if they claim many fields.
– @naval
For a moment the two of them looked at each other, wordless, as if they were asleep and their dreams had converged on common ground, a place where sound was alien.
– Roberto Bolaño
If no outer adventure happens to you, then no inner in adventure happens to you either.
– Carl Jung
Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.
– Martin Heidegger
There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
– James Baldwin
How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time.
– W.G. Sebald
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
– Thomas Edison
I’m learning all the time. My tombstone will be my diploma.
– Eartha Kitt
What made any of us think that the place we are trying to reach is far, far ahead of us somewhere and that the only way to get there is to run until we drop.
– Barbara Brown Taylor
Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.
– Amílcar Cabral
Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will.
– Dion Fortune
People want to hear songs with the words they’re afraid to say.
– Hilarie Burto
People are afraid to be pried loose from their ignorance…
– Maya Angelou
In English, we say: “You didn’t even fight for us.”
But in poetry, we say: “I broke in half just to
meet you in the middle, but you never moved.”
– @1905soliloquy.poetry
Like our stomachs, our minds are hurt more often by overeating than by hunger.
– Petrarch
The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Non est ad astra mollis e terris via – There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.
– Seneca
Poetry and sophistry are deadly enemies.
– Helen Vendler
The problem is not yours – it is your mind’s only. Begin by disassociating yourself from your mind. Resolutely remind yourself that you are not the mind, and that its problems are not yours.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
The desire for shortcuts makes you unsuited for any kind of mastery.
– Robert Greene
Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing:—“Oh, how beautiful!” and sitting in the shade.
– Rudyard Kipling
Truly dualism is the root of suffering.
There is no other remedy for it
than the realization
that all this that we see is unreal,
and that I am the one stainless reality,
consisting of consciousness.
– Ashtavakra Gita
“My light is not of this world.”
I cried, “I know of no other world!”
The soul answered, “Should it not exist because you know nothing of it?”
– Carl Jung
Keep your tempers and hold your hands to the last possible moment!
– Frodo (Tolkien, The Return of the King)