Journal XXVIII

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)

Perhaps when distant people
on other planets
pick up some wavelength of ours
all they hear is a continuous scream.

– Iris Murdoch

The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.
– Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

Soon
Acland will fall into it too
along with its trees
the koalas
and the Anzac Memorial.

– Bob Brown

The true tragedy of aging isn’t that we grow old — it’s that our soul stays young.
– Oscar Wilde

We move forward into a past that will be censored.
– Fanny Howe

There’s so much rage in the world
now
and I’m finding poems to be the place
where I want to stay.
I rage and rage
and then write a poem
and return to breathing.

– Ada Limón

I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.
– Virginia Woolf

You have to decide who you are
and force the world to deal with you,
not with its idea of you.
– James Baldwin

You have to be brave and be a little crazy
to open your heart and give it to someone.
– Charles Bukowski

Something ancient in us bends us toward the origins of the whole thing. We either drown in the splits and confusions of our lives, or we surrender to something greater than ourselves. The water of our deepest troubles is also the water of our own solution. In surrender, we descend down to the bottom of it and back to the beginning of it; down into what is divided in order to get back to the wholeness before the split. Healing, health, wealth, wholeness: all hail from the same roots. To heal is to make whole again; wholeness is what all healing seeks and what alone can truly unify our spirit.
– Michael Meade

There is a magnet in a seeker’s heart whose true north is God. It bends toward the Voice of God with the ear of the heart and, like sunflowers in the sun, turns all of life toward the living of the Word. This listening heart is pure of pride and free of arrogance. It seeks wisdom—everywhere, at all times—and knows wisdom by the way it echoes the call of the scriptures.

The compass for God implanted in the seeker’s heart stretches toward truth and signals the way to justice. It is attuned to the cries of the poor and oppressed with a timbre that allows no interruption, no smothering of the voice of God on their behalf.

– Sister Joan Chittister

I wanna know how a country 35 trillion in debt has the audacity to give
me a credit score.
– unknown

The fact that somebody looked straight at a purple onion and named it red onion really bothers me.
– unknown

Once, we were grilling zucchini
from the garden. It was summertime
and I was about to leave you.
A praying mantis landed on the grill.
He was bright and beautiful
even as he fizzled and I burned
all my fingertips trying to save him.
You can’t tell when an insect is in pain
but he must have been and you put him
in the grass so softly
where I found and stomped him.
And I think it surprised us
what we each defined as mercy.
– Joy Sullivan

The patriarchal God has
only one commandment:
Punish life for being what
it is. The Goddess also has
only one commandment:
Love life, for it is what it is.

– Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor,
The Great Cosmic Mother

Body sensation, rather than intense emotion, is the key to healing trauma.
– Peter A. Levine

everyone should be given six months in a cabin in the woods stocked with all the books they’ve wanted to read, and their only job during those six months is to finish those books.
– @SketchesbyBoze

It is in playing, and perhaps only in playing, that the child is free to be creative.
– D. W. Winnicott

The selfish reason to be ethical is that it attracts the other ethical people in the network.
– @naval

“The problem with the word patience,” said Zen master Suzuki Roshi, “is that it implies we are waiting for something to get better… A more accurate word for this quality is constancy, a capacity to be with what is true moment after moment”.
– Frank Ostaseski

God speaks to you through your highest excitement. That’s what pure alignment feels like.
– Nika Solé

Rock music is mostly about moving big black boxes from one side of town to the other in your car.
– David Thomas

Your body looks like the choices you make every day.
– Dan Go

By lowering our body to the earth, we express humility and interconnectedness—we’re not separate, cut-off beings.
– Kaira Jewel Lingo

I’LL BE ME AND YOU BE GOETHE

I want it to be winter and I want to change
the color of this room This room should be
a blue room and it should be freezing
but ventilated and I in my medium snowsuit
irresistible I know because everything I do
I do to get more beautiful so you will want
to love me in the cold and indoor morning

– Heather Christle

Understanding that others are essential for our survival and our fundamental wellbeing is what makes democracy strong.
– Joan Halifax

It is the mark of a charlatan to explain a simple concept in a complex way.
– @naval

Bodhicitta is the aspiration for enlightenment—the moment your heart turns toward a more meaningful way of being.
– Dale Wright

But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness.
– D.H. Lawrence

The things you run from are inside you.
– Seneca

Non-linear minds are fascinating. Have you ever thought about how you think? It seems that non-linear minds can hold and track multiple threads of parallel processing simultaneously. Furthermore, there’s fluid spiral thinking – recursive and expansive in nature – that almost sweeps in a circular motion, gaining depth with each turn. There also appears to be an ability to subconsciously and intuitively scan for gaps, which the mind fills by forming new connections to floating threads – filling in the mental multidimensional web-like structure with endearing precision.
– @buridansridge

Your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most, to find out the business that needs you the most, to find the project and the art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you.
– @naval

If they occupy your country, you resist.
– Elias Khoury

Read what you love until you love to read.
– @naval

Given a long-enough arc, every life is movie-worthy.
– @naval

Glass and the Can
by Wolfstone

Here’s tae yer ain kith and kin
Here’s tae yer sisters and brothers
Those wi the bonnie blue een
And the hundreds and thousands of others
Of them that are happy and glad
And those who would never say never
Oh rarely downcast and sad
May you prosper for ever and ever

Here’s tae the lads o the fair
And their lassies that rove in the morning
Here’s tae the gullible pair
Never listening nor heeding the warning
Here’s tae the lads in the band
And here’s tae the Castleyards cooper
And tae the bonnie new bairn
May the wind and the rain never stop her

Here’s tae the glass and the can
Here’s tae the lassies that matter
Here’s tae the rascal that ran
And the stuff that ye tak wi yer watter
Here’s tae the fool on the hill
And his pals that are down in the valley
Oh they drink down a half wi their gill
Never thinking nor checking the tally

Here’s tae the boys on the park
And them that head down tae the paddock
Here’s tae the song o the lark
And the lads that are netting the haddock
May their days be long and fulfilled
May their hours be happy and cheery
And may all of yer wishes come true
And your hearty self never be weary

Here’s tae yer ain kith and kin
Here’s tae yer sisters and brothers
Those wi the bonnie blue een
And the hundreds and thousands of others
Of them that are happy and glad
And those who would never say never
Oh rarely downcast and sad
May you prosper for ever and ever

The whole world is a sack of shit ripping open. I can’t save it.
– Charles Bukowski

So, love is not of time; you can’t come upon it through any conscious effort, through any discipline, through identification, which are all a process of time. The mind, knowing only the process of time cannot recognize love. Love is the only thing that is new, eternally new. Since most of us have cultivated the mind which is a process of time, which is the result of time, we do not know what love is. We talk about love; we say we love people, love our children, our wives, our neighbor; we say we love nature; but the moment I am conscious that I love, self-activity has come into being; therefore it ceases to be love.
– J. Krishnamurti

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.
– Franz Kafka

It was in the winter of my fiftieth year
When it hit me
I was really alone
And there wasn’t a hell a lot of time left
Every laugh and touch that I could get
Became more important
Strangely, I became more bookish
And my home and study meant more to me
As I considered the circumstances of my death
I wanted to find a balance between joy and dignity
On my way out
Above all, I didn’t want to take any more shit
Not from anybody.

– Iggy Pop

they asked her,

“how do you get through tough moments?”

she answered,

do not trust the way you see yourself when your mind is turbulent, and remember that even pain is temporary. honor your boundaries, treat yourself gently, let go of perfection, and feel your emotions without letting them control you, you have enough experience to face the storm and evolve from it.

(resilience)

– Yung Pueblo

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.
– Bob Dylan

The world is changing and so are we.

We can no longer be afraid.

We can no longer accept traditional authority as it destroys life and kills children right before our very eyes.

The future is ours to make, we just have to say the word and it begins.

– Dorothy Collin

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge…What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.
– David Dunning

“I would die for my family”

Okay, but…

would you exercise for them?

would you eat healthy for them?

woud you chase your dreams for them?

would you quit your bad habits for them?

You don’t need to die for them.

You need to live for them.

– The Urban Monk, The Zen Journal

It is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.
– Brian Friel

No matter how hard I worked there was always a boy there, level with me, who appeared to be less out of breath and to be taking things in his stride; and so I cultivated the art of nonchalance, and gave every impression of being less well-prepared than I was, until one day I found that this impression had become a reality, and that I achieved even more by leaving a few things to chance and by taking a leap of faith…
– Rachel Cusk, Kudos

A Moment in Kansas

Somewhere in Kansas
a night train torches
through the dark stomach
of the prairie.

The man in the car
on the rural route
turns his head
for just a moment.
He wonders if
he has ever made
his father proud.

But only a moment.
Now he turns from
the disembodied flames.
At the crossroad
he signals left.
The engine hums
the ballad of whatever
comes after.

– Justin Hamm

You cannot expect us to be slave to your phonetics forever.
– Steven Willis

my mouth is an urn for my tongue.
a bed: an urn for our sleep.
a memory: an urn for that last breath.

– Ollie Schminkey

Honesty always gets my attention. Not particularly someone who is honest to me, but someone who is honest with themselves.
– Heath Ledger

Mismanagement and grief
We must suffer them all again…
– W.H. Auden

Of all the possible outcomes, I lean now toward the idea that the US is simply going to become irrelevant. The EU, China and others will be taking the lead as we head in the direction of Third World status.
– Mark Bittner

At the dawn of his enlightenment, someone asked the Buddha, ‘What are your credentials? How do we know that you are enlightened?’ He touched his hand to the ground. ‘This solid earth is my witness. This solid earth, this sane earth, is my witness.’

Human beings are the only animals
of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
– George Bernard Shaw

but I am also a poet.
which means
every time I open a notebook,
I find another memory I mourned
before I learned the words to describe it.
– Chelsea Guevara

When kings fall they fall on top of us.

– Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf

A poem is special because its logic is emotional and aesthetic and resists the traditional ways logic seeks to jail itself.
– Dorothy Laskey

The existence of underwear implies the existence of underwhy, underhow, underwho, and underwhen.
– Abigail Falanga

we become full members of society only through an act of express consent that political philosophers call “locke-ing in”
– katie kadue

A secret always has a strengthening effect upon a newborn friendship, as does the shared impression that an external figure is to blame.
– Eleanor Catton

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.
– Rabindranath Tagore

A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred; he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness.
– Nelson Mandela

The pen is mightier than the sword, but the tongue is mightier than them both put together.
– Marcus Garvey

Socialism is the people. If you’re afraid of socialism, you’re afraid of yourself.
– Fred Hampton

Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.
– Rene Descartes

The dreamers are the saviours of the world. As the visible world is sustained by the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers.
– James Allen

Create a place for people to live like human beings, instead of slaves to some bullshit concept of progress that is driving us all mad.
– Hunter S. Thompson

Man is not one, but truly two; he has a conscious personality and a shadow, each of which often battle for supremacy within his mind.
– Robert Louis Stevenson

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think—and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
– Franz Kafka

It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.
– Sylvia Plath

You only need one or two good stocks a decade. You don’t need a lot of action.
– Peter Lynch

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
– Mark Twain

The risk we face as modern Western Christians is “the banal reduction of mystery to moralism and of morality to modes of social conformity”.
– Frederick Bauerschmidt

I like to tell [my students] that nothing is beyond redemption. Metaphor redeems; metaphor makes new.
– Alisha Dietzman

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.
– Marcus Aurelius

I think that a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time.
– Charlie Munger

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
– Voltaire

Socialism is practical, in the best sense of the term; a living, vital force of inestimable value to society.
– Daniel De Leon

And Paris! All afternoon in someone’s attic
We raised our glasses
And drank to the asses
Who ran the world and turned neurotic.
– Galway Kinnell

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.
– Anne Lamott

When art dies, that’s when the world will ever come to an end.
– Frederick Phoenix

When you are gone, there is no song in the sky.
– Rabindranath Tagore

Soul is the governor.
– Daniel Lanois

I much prefer the
the sharpest criticism of a
single intelligent man to
the thoughtless approval
of the masses.

– Johannes Kepler

The tragedy of the world is that men have given first class loyalty to second class causes and these causes have betrayed them.
– Lynn Harold Hough

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
– Robert Penn Warren

All things will be in danger of being taken in a sense different from their own proper sense, and, whilst taken in that different sense, of losing their proper one, if they are called by a name which differs from their natural designation. Fidelity in names secures the safe appreciation of properties.
– Tertullian

The world belongs to the enthusiast who keeps cool.
– William McFee

You don’t need a niche.
You need a mission.
Something that makes people go:
I like how this person thinks.

– Rohan Nair

We’re all fools, all the time. It’s just we’re a different kind each day. We think, I’m not a fool today. I’ve learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we’re not perfect and live accordingly.
– Ray Bradbury

You are music / and rivers, palaces, angels, and skies, / an endless rose, infinite and intimate.
– Jorge Luis Borges, tr. by Paul Weinfield

And as the night wears on,
The dim allegory of ourselves
Unfolds, and we
Feel dreamed by someone else,
A sleeping counterpart,
Who gathers in
The darkness of his person
Shades of the real world.
– Mark Strand

we now know some angels are more terrifying than others our enemies are replaceable their stones behind their teeth glow in moonlight.
– Kaveh Akbar

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

You saw the eyes bulge suddenly like that, as though something had happened inside him, and there was that glitter. You knew something had happened inside him, and thought: It’s coming. It was always that way. There was the bulge and the glitter, and there was the cold grip way down in the stomach as though somebody had laid hold of something in there, in the dark which is you, with a cold hand in a cold rubber glove.

It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don’t open it yet, not for a second. While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there’s an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little foetus you carry around inside yourself. The eye knows what’s in the envelope, and it is watching you to see when you open it and know too. But the clammy, sad little foetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn’t want to know what is in that envelope. It wasn’t to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing.

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him. There’s the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know.

– Robert Penn Warren

I would like you to show me, if you can, where the line can be drawn between an organism and it’s environment. The environment is in you. It’s passing through you. You’re breathing it in and out. You and every other creature.
– Wendell Berry

We don’t choose each other at random. We meet those who exist already in our unconsciousness.
– Sigmund Freud

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand. The angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
– George Elliot

Reminding myself that life is not personal, permanent, or perfect has kept me from falling into sinkholes of despair and destroying rooms with rage. It invites me to pause and turn inward.
– Ruth King

Promissory Note

If I die before you
which is all but certain
then in the moment
before you will see me
become someone dead
in a transformation
as quick as a shooting star’s
I will cross over into you
and ask you to carry
not only your own memories
but mine too until you
too lie down and erase us
both together into oblivion.

– Galway Kinnell

Everyone knows bees sting and ghosts haunt and giving your robes away humiliates your rivals. That the enemies are barbarians. That wise men swim through the rock of the earth; that houses breed filth, airstrips attract airplanes, tornadoes punish, ancestors watch, and you can buy a shorter stay in purgatory. The black rock is holy, or the scroll; or the pangolin is holy, the quetzal is holy, this tree, water, rock, stone, cow, cross, or mountain, and it’s all true. The Red Sox. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows.
– Annie Dillard

The world, whatever we might think about it, terrified by its vastness and by our helplessness in the face of it, embittered by its indifference to individual suffering – of people, animals, and perhaps also plants, for how can we be sure that plants are free of suffering; whatever we might think about its spaces pierced by the radiation of stars, stars around which we now have begun to discover planets, already dead? still dead? – we don’t know; whatever we might think about this immense theater, to which we may have a ticket, but it is valid for a ridiculously brief time, limited by two decisive dates; whatever else we might think about this world – it is amazing.
– Wisława Szymborska

Man has defended himself, always against other men, against Nature. He has constantly violated Nature. The result is a civilization built on force, power, fear, dependence. All our “technical progress” has only provided us with comfort, a sort of standard. And instruments of violence to keep power. We are like savages! We use the microscope like a cudgel! No, that’s wrong. Savages are more spiritual than us! As soon as we make a scientific breakthrough we put it to use in the service of evil. And as for the standard, some wise man once said that sin is that which is unnecessary. If that is so, then our entire civilization is built on sin, from beginning to end. We have acquired a dreadful disharmony, an imbalance, if you will, between our material and our spiritual development. Our culture is defective. I mean, our civilization. Basically defective, my boy! Perhaps you mean that we ought to study the problem and look for a solution together. Perhaps we could, if it wasn’t so late. Altogether too late.
– Andrei Tarkovsky

Do not become annoyed when faced with difficulties. To do so merely adds difficulty to difficulty and further disturbs your mind. By maintaining a mind of peace and nonopposition, difficulties will naturally fall away.
– Master Sheng-yen

Immortal Diamond
by Mark Doty

Those gorgeous photographs
the new telescope sends back
feel consoling now: grand processes

happening without us on the edge
of this era and every other,

beauty how long ago,
how impossibly far away.
Which may be why the lit-up

announcement on the signboard parked
outside my corner bodega rankles so:

THE NEAREST GALAXY LIKE OURS
IS 15,000,000 LIGHT YEARS AWAY,

a sudden window opened
on a vastness we won’t ever cross.
Which may be why

a guy on the A train, off his meds
or fueled on liquid oblivion,
is pounding on a poem framed

under plastic on the car’s metal wall,
really waling on it, backing up, hurling

himself forward, forearms and fists
smashed against the text over and over
while he moans with such abandon

we’ve ceded half the car to him.
Maybe he read that sign too,

and knowing its fifteen million years
at lightspeed before you’re anyplace

remotely like home makes any poem
worse? I don’t dare get close enough
to read it, but I admit I’m starting

to hate it too, for what it probably
doesn’t do. We’re just trying to hold

the morning a little steady here,
get ourselves to work nearly on time,
and somebody writes a poem

that doesn’t make the distance
between a stanza and the stars

feel one bit smaller, and somebody
has the nerve to publish it—on the train,
where you can’t help but read it,

even if it isn’t brave or reckless enough
to name our situation, won’t even try

to make us legible, or say
why we feel—we all feel—
so singular and discontent.

I can’t write that poem either,
nothing commensurate
with the misery of a citizen

who beats a hapless lyric to pulp and shatter,
his hands cut by shards of plastic,

scraps of text falling to the floor.
Is the poem better, marked by the blood
of a reader who demanded the best of it?

I want to tell you what I learned
looking at photos of ancient starlight

seven decades into my life,
what reconfigured the night for me.
An immense telescope traced

the origin of waves from far out,
a brief stream of patterned beats

that would vanish, then begin again—
intentional, a code announcing the presence
of what might wish to say hello

across a black, rippling distance
we can barely imagine?

The source: the flicker of starlight
interrupted as a huge planet closely
orbited the star, a planet entirely

composed of carbon compressed
by its own weight,

and by the proximity of that star.
You know what happens
to pressurized carbon:

one vast diamond,
surface blackened by debris
from the winds of space,

and beneath that an immense clarity
shot through with those flaws
and stresses that write any gleam

more visible, a grand—poem?—
containing the light of its star

and every other, and thus all of time
held in that sphere, endless…

Here I stop. How can I,
in the warm and private cavern
of this body, how can I describe this?

Do you remember that superb
dance song, years back, when the diva sings
that love has come to her, Finally,

her voice swooping down
as if flashing across dismissible realms

toward this single term of arrival,
announcing what seems unsayable,
and of the spirit? And though we know

spirit through the agency of the body,
the flesh cannot circumscribe it,

which is why she sings, enchanted,
My two lips can’t describe it.

As if to say, Here I am, in the limits
of my skin, but the limitless
is not far from me. I speak

from this body that tears at the poem
until my hands bleed,

but I am no stranger to the sway
of those grand courses along which
time makes its music,

even if my tongue shapes only
the vague outline of those sounds.
It doesn’t matter that no one

will ever go there, or see inside
that pulse’s source, or read
that light to the end,

should it have one: diamond intact
close enough to forever,

not ours, and if it signals,
it’s only to tell us or anyone
it’s there. It is there. It is so. You and I,

wherever we are, are proximate.

The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do. The lover who never risks loving mocks romance. The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself. And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live.
– Carl Jung

I’m sorry but I can only
love you in this disruptive
pattern, why I don’t
know. I seem to have
learned it somehow, it’s
like saying if you will only
change your coat I too
will be able to see all the
excitement of moving, you
see we are trying to get
this disharmony to hide
the airplane of our love.
– Bernadette Mayer

poets, it is not enough to say it is a broken world. to lament the fact. no, name who has broken it ––– who is, right now, breaking it. and imagine another world. sing of that. and fight for it.
– chen chen

Oversharing is how
you leak energy.
Privacy is protection.
Most things require
darkness to grow.
You gotta learn to
nurture your vision
in private first.

– Wisdom Stoics

We are continually judging other people. We want others to think and act a certain way. Usually, the way we think and act. Because this is impossible, we continually get upset. Instead, we should see other people as phenomena, as neutral as comets or planets. They come in all varieties, which makes like rich and interesting.
– Robert Greene

The hum of bees is the voice of the garden.
– Elizabeth Lawrence

The real difference between men is
energy. A strong will, a settled purpose,
an invincible determination, can
accomplish almost anything; and in this
lies the distinction between great men
and little men.

– Fuller

This world belongs to the energetic.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

how we / miss what is gone, simply because it’s gone.
– Brian Tierney

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.
– Albert Einstein

To attempt to find the formal cause of poetic failure in structural organization is to pursue a will-o’-the-wisp.

– Helen Vendler

And has the spring’s all glorious eye,
No lesson to the mind?
The birds that cleave the golden sky,
Things to the earth resigned;
Wild flowers that dance to every wind,
Do they no memory leave behind?
– John Clare

Who has discerned
The voice of lightning,
Or traced the music
Behind the eyes?

– Vernon Watkins

Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something.
– @naval

What there is a problem with is poetry that’s really prose—that comes down the page in these complete sentences, with standardized punctuation, and says something that you’ve already heard before.
– Alice Notley

We knew the war would come.
Still, it caught us unprepared.
– Wisława Szymborska

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even tacitly take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
– Mario Savio

Now I Become Myself
by May Sarton

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

It is imagined that all of the world bears our mark, holds our form, and at the land is reminiscent in detail of all that ever came of its issue, was built on its foundation.
– CD Wright

In these difficult times we all need encouragement. The French word for heart is Coeur. To give heart (the only one we can give is our own) we lift each other and more heartfulness ripens. It’s a universal solvent that is sorely needed.
– Gunilla Norris

Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.
– Anselm Kiefer

TODAY

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

– Robert Frost

John Henry Holliday believed in science, in rationality, and in free will. He believed in study, in the methodical acquisition and accumulation of useful skills. He believed that he could homestead his future with planning and preparation: sending scouts ahead and settling it with pioneering effort. Above all, he believed in practice, which increased predictability and reduced the element of chance in any situation. The very word made him feel calm. Piano practice. Dental practice. Pistol practice, poker practice. Practice was power. Practice was authority over his own destiny. Luck? That was what fools called ignorance and laziness and despair when they gave themselves up to the turn of a card, and lost, and lost, and lost …

He did not believe in luck at all, good or bad. Gamblers believed in luck, and he was not a gambler. Never had been, never would be. John Henry Holliday believed in mathematics, in statistics, in the computation of odds. Fifty-two cards in a deck. Make it easy. Say it’s fifty. Any card has a 2 percent chance of being dealt from a full deck. Keep track of what’s out. Adjust the probabilities as the hand progresses.

– Mary Doria Russell, Doc

‘I wish poets could be clearer!’ shouted my wife angrily from the next room.
Hers is a universal longing. We would all like it if the bards would make themselves plain, or we think we would. The poets, however, are not easily diverted from their high mysterious ways. A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
– E.B. White

I will never be the poet with the nail polish that matches her book cover. I will never be the poet with the perfect red lipstick. The poet with a roller-derby name. The poet smiling next to the famous publisher. I will never be the poet squinting into the flashbulbs.

I am the amanuensis of moss and half-turned snowshoe hares. My words arise one morning at sunrise and deliquesce that evening. I read others’ poetry out loud to the rain. Why just this morning, I shared a poem and cup of coffee with a crow.

– Erin Coughlin Hollowell

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I’d call myself a fool to ask for more.
– Sylvia Plath

…day-blind stars/waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
– Wendell Berry

To bless whatever there is, and for no other reason but simply because it is—that is our raison d’etre; that is what we are made for as human beings. This singular command is engraved in our heart. Whether we understand this or not matters little. Whether we agree or disagree makes no difference. And in our heart of hearts we know it.
– Br. David Steindl-Rast

Monday. Me. Tuesday. Me. Wednesday. Me. Thursday. Me.
– Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

A classical LP was playing…
… Jealous and sweet, this music was,
sobbing and gorgeous,
muddy and crystal.
But if the right words existed
the music wouldn’t need to.

– David Mitchell

Here she comes, walking.
Here he is, as if
undressed from the body,
as if the abyss were beautiful
and nothing there could hold you down.

– Linda Hogan, Gentling the Human

I apologize for the coincidence for calling it a necessity.
Excuse the necessity, if, in spite of that, I’m wrong.
May happiness not be mad for considering it mine. (… )
Apologies to my old love for considering the new one first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for sticking my finger.
Excuse me those who call from the abyss the record of a minue.
I apologize to the people at the stations for the 5am sleep in.
Forgive me, haunted hope, for laughing sometimes.
– Wisława Szymborska

Through all the ages poets and artists have often been prophets, because their work, or the material for it, comes to them from the same depths of the collective unconscious in which the major transformations of a particular era are in process of creation.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

This evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness.
– Ted Kooser

A day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered.
– Nicholas Sparks

Let my lusts be my ruin, then,
since all else is a fake
and a mockery.

– Hart Crane

The place you are going towards doesn’t exist yet, you must build it when you come to the right spot.
– Katherine Anne Porter

We met over a small / earthquake. Now, my knees / shake whenever / you come around.
– Daphne Gottlieb

It is the special psychology of leisure and luxury that falsifies life.
– G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World

We rarely want to smooth the edges to fit. Typically we want to sharpen them
to be dangerous.
– Rick Rubin

The worship of authority, whether in big or little things, is evil, the more so in religious matters.
– Krishnamurti

It takes great courage to speak in fragments.
– Mary Ruefle

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

life’s journey
like tilling a field
back and forth
– Basho

Where did everybody go, said the mother badger. Have they been eaten by the algorithm, vanished in the air. Could I find them on some website, or in the bookmarks of memory. Where did they go?

We’re right here, Mom, said the baby badgers.

– Voima Oy

the shape of a life
one sparkling wave
returns to the sea

(haiga)

– Annette Makino

Without enemies you will not know how or where to maneuver, and you will lose a sense of your limits, of how far you can go.
– Robert Greene

although I didn’t
invite the rain
it insisted anyway

– @Jocelynx44

At times, withdrawn,
I rise into the cool skies
and gaze on at the imponderable world
with the simple identification
of my colleagues, the mountains.
– Frank O’Hara

In stressful times, it’s natural for our attention to go toward what’s threatening—but it’s skillful to turn toward what is lovely and enriching.
– Jake Dartington

Bodhicitta is the aspiration for enlightenment—the moment your heart turns toward a more meaningful way of being.
– Dale Wright

We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.
– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

I consider that in man there is a natural desire to own, and that Socialism, since it fails to gratify that desire, will be intolerable to the mass of men. Collectivism is not a word to wake them up. Liberty is.
– G. K. Chesterton

Academics will say, “it’s better to be kind than brilliant” and then be neither.
– Neil Renic

The book you need is usually right next to the one you were looking for.
– Aby Warburg

among the awnings
of an old book store;
layers of bougainvillea
suddenly-so-alive
with sparrows

– John Wisdom

A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
– Proverbs 17:17

I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.
– Leo Rosten

Why should pensiveness be akin to sadness ? There is a certain fertile sadness which I would not avoid, but rather earnestly seek. It is positively joyful to me. It saves my life from being trivial.
– H.D. Thoreau

Then let a tremor through our briefness run,
Wrapping it in with mad, sweet sorcery
Of love; for in the fern I saw the sun
Take fire against the dew; the lily white
Was soft and deep at morn; the rosary
Streamed forth a wild perfume into the light.
– Wallace Stevens

The thought ‘I am meditating’ is an ego thought. If real meditation is taking place, this thought cannot arise.
– Annamalai Swami

I think, as a culture, we have to get to a place where we can talk about our grief and our losses and our illnesses and what we’re coping with.
– Samina Ali

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.
– George Eliot

A bird was making its nest.
In the dream, I watched it closely:
in my life, I was trying to be
a witness not a theorist.

– Louise Glück

No dust speck anywhere.
What’s old? new?
At home on my blue mountain,
I want for nothing.

– Shofu (translated by Lucien Stryk & Takashi Ikemoto)

If you have trouble losing weight, eat slow.

If you have troubling gaining weight, eat fast.

– Dan Go

Most of the damage in relationships doesn’t come from words spoken—but from thoughts silently held.

We often train our speech to be polite, but what about our mind?
Every thought carries energy. Every thought reaches.

– Brahma Kumaris

Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to
follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes.
– Jean Valentine

It is a beautiful impulse to contain the infinite in the finite, to rest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb towards higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves.
– Maria Popova

Maybe a different way to say history repeats itself would be to say history never resolves itself. History is a lesson, this may be true, but, as with any other lesson, the people who need it the most rarely listen.
– Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

“Humanities degrees are useless” is propaganda that’s had the effect of convincing a whole generation that reading and critical thinking skills were unimportant. Now we’re reaping the results with mass illiteracy and a public eager to embrace conspiracy theories and fascism.
– @SketchesbyBoze

Our first line of defense against tyranny is historians, scholars, teachers, and librarians. We’ve seen an active effort to dissuade students from the humanities because those roles are threats to the powers that be. A well-read population will not easily surrender its freedoms.
– @SketchesbyBoze

German has two words for education: Erziehung and Bildung. Erziehung is goal-oriented pedagogy, and Bildung is individual improvement and expanding horizons. Erziehung without Bildung is sterile. Bildung without Erziehung is hermetic. Artificial Intelligence divorces the two.
– Jonathan Fine

Take small bites. Before people realize it, you have accumulated an empire.
– Robert Greene

We crave experiences that will make us be present, but the cravings themselves take us from the present moment.
– @naval

The crisis for reading is unfolding against a background of deep inequality, immiseration, and a general lowering of educational and quality-of-life standards.
– Charlie Taben

Truth cannot tolerate error. By it’s very nature, the truth casts out error as the light dispels darkness.
– Lefebvre

Everywhere I go I see losers. Misfits like myself who can’t make it in the world. In London, New York, Morocco, Rome, India, Paris, Germany. I’ve started seeing the same people. I think I’m seeing the same people. I wander around staring at strangers thinking I know you from somewhere, I don’t know where. The streets are always crowded and narrow, full of men. It’s always night and all strangers are men.
– Constance De Jong

Nero’s Deadline

Nero wasn’t worried at all when he heard
the utterance of the Delphic Oracle:
“Beware the age of seventy-three.”
Plenty of time to enjoy himself still.
He’s thirty. The deadline
the god has given him is quite enough
to cope with future dangers.

Now, a little tired, he’ll return to Rome—
but wonderfully tired from that journey
devoted entirely to pleasure:
theatres, garden-parties, stadiums…
evenings in the cities of Achaia…
and, above all, the sensual delight of naked bodies…

So much for Nero. And in Spain Galba
secretly musters and drills his army—
Galba, the old man in his seventy-third year.

– C.P. Cavafy

This fire that runs through all things burns through life—in our suffering, in our losses, in our passions, and in our connectedness and mutuality, all of which is love itself.
– Susan Murphy

I am completely uninterested in encouraging mediocrity. I want people to strive for true will, gnosis, virtue, and to become better than where they are now. Stagnation is regression and I will never encourage it.
– Georgina Rose

Awakening is not changing who you are, but discarding who you are not.
– Deepak Chopra

the bliss of existing
it lives here in me
i know it’s in you, too
– daniel brottman

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.
– George Steiner

It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.
– Oscar Wilde

Image

Try to think, said the teacher,
of an image from your childhood.
Spoon, said one boy. Ah, said the teacher,
this is not an image. It is,
said the boy. See, I hold it in my hand
and on the convex side a room appears
but distorted, the middle taking longer to see
than the two ends. Yes, said the teacher, that is so.
But in the larger sense, it is not so: if you move your hand
even an inch, it is not so. You weren’t there, said the boy.
You don’t know how we set the table.
That is true, said the teacher. I know nothing
of your childhood. But if you add your mother
to the distorted furniture, you will have an image.
Will it be good, said the boy, a strong image?
Very strong, said the teacher.
Very strong and full of foreboding.

– Louise Glück

Crawl inside this body, find me where I
am most ruined — love me there.
– Rune Lazuli

When I Go

Before I leave
I’ll turn the kettle on—
not by accident,
but so that if I return
as something softer,
less skin,
more steam,
you’ll remember
how warmth once felt.

– @thedevilstuna

She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know.
– Gabriel García Márquez

Jung wrote of the fact that, in favorable cases, some people seem to outgrow a problem that would destroy others. They gain a new level of consciousness, as it were, from which they can see even the worst problem in a totally different light.
– Barbara Hannah

Fear-induced rumination often occurs when people have been made self-conscious by the presence of others whom they hold in high esteem. They assess themselves by focusing on how others would perceive them. In such situations, there may be no limit to the self-defeating thoughts that may form in the person’s mind, which — no matter how unfounded — may consume them in the end.
– Chigozie Obioma

All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.
– Ali Smith

The whole universe is summed up in the Human Being. Devil is not a monster waiting to trap us, He is a voice inside. Look for Your Devil in Yourself, not in the Others. Don’t forget that the one who knows his Devil, knows his God.
– Shams Tabrizi

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

Be like the cliff against which the waves continually break; but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.
– Marcus Aurelius

It is a fundamental rule of human life, that if the approach is good, the response is good.
– Jawaharlal Nehru

Only that which never turns into anything different than what it is is love.
– Søren Kierkegaard

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
– Edward R. Murrow

The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.
– Edward R. Murrow

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.
– Vasily Grossman

“I did that,” says my memory. “I could have done that,” says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually – the memory wins.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Desire and Delight, are but two acts of Love… Desire, is therefore, love in motion; Delight, is love in rest.
– John Howe

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
– Lily Tomlin

I live in a world where everything is fleeting and nothing is permanent, except for the stillness that pervades it all.
– Hermann Hesse

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
– Henry David Thoreau

If you approach a problem in the trance of tradition, you will never solve it.
– Krishnamurti

The greatest mystery is not the universe, but the human heart.
– Haruki Murakami

Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.
– Charlie Munger

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
– G.K Chesterton

Picture yourself without the ailment or problem.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy

Politics hates a vacuum; if it isn’t filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.
– Naomi Klein, No is Not Enough

At last, they listened.
– Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

To learn psychology we do not have to read psychology books; we have but to read books psychologically.
– James Hillman

Your voice, amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other, does not confer upon you greater wisdom than when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other.
– Edward R. Murrow

There is a tremendous, almost monstrous liberty in the idea of nothingness.
– Sylvia Plath

When a man learns the art of thinking from the end, that man is master of his fate. For he defines his end, he formulates an aim in life, and then feels himself right into the situation of that end.
– Neville Goddard

In Victorian England instead of saying “That’s gay” they said “That’s bold.” And I think we should bring this back.
– Jeffery Mattson

Your own healing is the greatest message of hope for others.
– Julia Cameron

The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle: the roar of the crowd on the one side, and the voice of your conscience on the other.
– Douglas MacArthur

Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets. To plant a pine, one need only own a shovel.
– Aldo Leopold

The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful.
– Benjamin Zander

There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.
– The Odyssey

Accustom yourself every morning to look for a moment at the sky and suddenly you will be aware of the air around you, the scent of morning freshness that is bestowed on you between sleep and labor. You will find every day that the gable of every house has its own particular look, its own special lighting. Pay it some heed…you will have for the rest of the day a remnant of satisfaction and a touch of coexistence with nature. Gradually and without effort the eye trains itself to transmit many small delights.
– Hermann Hesse

And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.
– Jack Kerouac

Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.
– C.S. Lewis

As bourgeois society increasingly destroys and corrupts the general, popular creative spirit, the experience of imaginative creation becomes rarer and rarer till in the end people think there is some magical secret for creativity. And so the search for this secret in the artist’s private life begins: a search which is doomed to failure, for in fact ‘the secret’ is a massive platitude as incomprehensible to the inquisitive as their own barrenness. We create out of faith. Gerhard Marks – a noble man although his way was not mine – once said: ‘It is not the function of art to relieve those without faith from their boredom.’ We create to improve the world, ‘to establish,’ as Tolstoy wrote, ‘brotherly union among men.’ This is even true of Goya, agonized as he was. For him his faith was on the far side of his vision; it could not be expressed directly – it could only be served by telling the bitter truth
– John Berger

When night comes, something speaks from that soft, fragrant wilderness. It says, the heart is not a door. But it opens. We feel in the dark for the hinge.
– Carole Glasser Langille

Vanish.
Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her.
Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes.
Go back into the blue.
– Joan Didion

The World Teachers never etched their words on paper or stone for all to obey; they knew people would only split hairs, bicker, compel other to follow their folly. The more you listen to preachers, the more you’ll moralize and judge, so go learn on your own. Everything is written inside: You are The Book.

– Haven Trevino, The Tao of Healing, (Tao Te Ching)

anxious for solitude, bitten by a virulent rancour against the world
– Gabriel García Márquez

We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The thing I understood least of all was that knowledge led to despair and damnation. Our spiritual mentor had not said that those bad books had given a false picture of life: if that had been the case, he could easily have exposed their falsehood; the tragedy of the little girl whom he had failed to bring to salvation was that she had made a premature discovery of the true nature of reality. Well, anyhow, I thought, I shall discover it myself one day, and it isn’t going to kill me: the idea that there was a certain age when knowledge of the truth could prove fatal I found offensive to common sense.
– Simone de Beauvoir

Dawn is gathering. The noon of night has gone. The first gleams of daylight disclose its temperature. Stone takes on color. Treetops are roots of the day yet to grow. The moon, silver necklace from which Venus dangles like a pearl, still sheds its brightness. The abyss is only perspective, location. There will be nests on some branches.
– Homero Aridjis

I’m always reading the poems out loud, from the very earliest stages of doodling language through revision and fine-tuning, laying the poem out on the page. The breath hooks into the spirit. In Arabic “ruh” means both breath and spirit. Ditto the Latin “spiritus.” Without some physiological sublimation of the inert font into a living poem—whether via breath or even just the movement of ocular muscles along a line, fingers across Braille—the poem remains ink on a page. If a poem augurs any holiness, it begins in the body.
– Kaveh Akbar

Our bones know the way of things. Our guts understand what baffles the mind. The soul or spirit is often most clearly manifest in the sensations and language of the body. We feel called towards or driven away by people, places, and things at the gut/bone level. The head can then clarify or obscure this information, or choose to work with or against this body-knowledge.
– Aidan Wachter

…All of the books in my head
have made me cynical and distant, but there’s a choir
in him that calls me forward my disbelief built as it is
from the bricks of his belief not in any America
you might see on network news or hear heralded
before a football game but in the quiet
power of Sam Cooke singing that he was born
by a river that remains unnamed that he runs
alongside to this day, some vast and future country
some nation within a nation, black as candor…
– Joshua Bennett

I sat down in his chair in front of his typewriter. The house felt cold. I pulled his coat around me. I thought I heard laughter, but told myself it was only the little boat creaking in the storm. I thought I heard footsteps on the roof, but told myself it was only an animal foraging for food. I rocked a little, the way my father used to rock when he prayed. Once my father told me: When a Jew prays, he is asking God a question that has no end. Darkness fell. Rain fell. I never asked: What question?
– Nicole Krauss

I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.
– W. G. Sebald

So many of the plays to which I responded, and to which I committed, were about the strong desire to seek and to hold one’s identity. Our place of birth, those who surround us, are the first shapers of our identities, and we tend to rebel against this, unless we are simple or lazy or unwise. I always played the rebels, and in “Picnic,” I was, in my opinion, this scabby, rambunctious girl, too smart for a girl, too ambitious for a girl in that town, and I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t happy with my place or my future in that place, but I, unlike my sister, didn’t have any salable commodities–face, tits, charm. I had a brain, and that won’t get you a moment’s notice in that town that [William] Inge created: You need to darn and sew and bake and dust and lie down and give your man pleasure. It’s a very sad play, and I think it’s good. I use it in classes. It’s good to teach people what hunger and desire and a need to escape can do to people. It’s good to throw some light into the prison cells we live in, may have created, don’t have to die in.
– Kim Stanley

This light was not like the flow of water, but something more fleeting and numberless, for its source was everywhere. I liked seeing that the light came from nowhere in particular, but was an element just like air. We never ask ourselves where air comes from, for it is there and we are alive. With the sun it is the same thing. There was no use my seeing the sun high up in the sky in its place in space at noon, since I was always searching for it elsewhere. I looked for it in the flickering of its beams, in the echo which, as a rule, we attribute only to sound, but which belongs to light in the same measure. Radiance multiplied, reflected itself from one window to the next, from a fragment of wall to cloud above. It entered into me, became part of me. I was eating sun.
– Jacques Lusseyran

As adults, we have many inhibitions against crying. We feel it is an expression of weakness, or femininity or of childishness. The person who is afraid to cry is afraid of pleasure. This is because the person who is afraid to cry holds himself together rigidly so that he won’t cry; that is, the rigid person is as afraid of pleasure as he is afraid to cry. In a situation of pleasure he will become anxious. As his tensions relax he will begin to tremble and shake, and he will attempt to control this trembling so as not to break down in tears. His anxiety is nothing more than the conflict between his desire to let go and his fear of letting go. This conflict will arise whenever the pleasure is strong enough to threaten his rigidity. Since rigidity develops as a means to block out painful sensations, the release of rigidity or the restoration of the natural motility of the body will bring these painful sensations to the fore. Somewhere in his unconscious the neurotic individual is aware that pleasure can evoke the repressed ghosts of the past. It could be that such a situation is responsible for the adage “No pleasure without pain.”
– Alexander Lowen

Somewhere each day we have to fall in love with someone, something, some moment. Somehow each day we must allow the softening of the heart . Otherwise our hearts will move inevitably toward hardness. We will move toward cynicism, bitterness, fear and despair. That’s where most of the world is trapped and doesn’t even know it.
– Richard Rohr

Sifter

….but the more we thought about it,
we were all everything in the whole kitchen,
drawers and drainers,
singing teapot and grapefruit spoon
with serrated edges, we were all the
empty cup, the tray.
This, said our teacher, is the beauty of metaphor.
It opens doors.
What I could not know then
was how being a sifter
would help me all year long.
When bad days came
I would close my eyes and feel them passing
through the tiny holes…

– Naomi Shihab Nye

The only mistake in life is the lesson not learned.
– Albert Einstein

The loss of feminine energy, with its warm vitality, is not difficult to document. It is evident in our culture’s mythic traditions, in our linguistic poverty, in our lack of feeling for human relationships, and finally in our hunger for meaning.
– Robert A. Johnson

Equanimity is the capacity to stand in the middle and to see without bias.
– Lama Karma

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
– Gore Vidal

And I will not say my poem and I will say it. Even if (here, now) the poem has no feeling, no future.
– Alejandra Pizarnik; tr. Yvette Siegert

It is within ourselves, in our own inner lives, that we are the architect of the world’s future.
– Manly P. Hall

What happens when the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes like everyone else?

We can invest in a stronger, fairer America — where every kid has a quality education and families aren’t bankrupted by one medical diagnosis.

– Elizabeth Warren

We feel guilt when we no longer want to associate with old friends and colleagues who haven’t changed. The price, and marker, of growth.
– @naval

We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces.
– Carl Sagan

Take a deep breath once in a while and look at the sky.
– Waylon Lewis⁣

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.
– Julian Barnes

Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.
– Oscar Wilde

In philosophy, one is constantly tempted to invent a mythology of symbolism or of psychology, instead of simply saying what we know.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

The novelist must work with ambiguity, with irony. What is irony? Look at Don Quixote. He’s mad as a goat, but he’s the most lucid man in the world.
– Javier Cercas

To will to be oneself is really the opposite of despair.
– Kierkegaard

Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters.
– Ernest Hemingway

We had the experience but missed the meaning.
– T.S. Eliot

In nondual teachings: If it’s anywhere, it’s here. If it’s not here, it’s nowhere.
– Lama Surya Das

Reality is not what it seems. The closer we look, the more we realize that space, time, and matter are not absolute — they emerge from relationships, from vibration.
– Carlo Rovelli

Indifference is dangerous, whether innocent or not.
– Pope Francis

The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness — call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you.
– Albert Einstein

The moment you change your perception, is the moment you rewrite the chemistry of your body.
– Dr. Bruce Lipton

That brain of mine is more than merely mortal; as time will show.
– Ada Lovelace

The quickest way to become a genius? Pay more attention to your neglected thoughts.
– Alain de Botton

Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.
– Dorothy Day

It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.
– Joseph Conrad

Lies and credulity combine to create public opinion.
– Paul Valéry

Tulips are not durable, not scarce, not programmable, not fungible, not verifiable, not divisible, and hard to transfer. But tell me more about your analogy…
– @naval

Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor.
– Mary Oliver

I wanted to write a villanelle all my life but I never could. I’d start them but for some reason I never could finish them. And one day I couldn’t believe it—it was like writing a letter.
– Elizabeth Bishop

Ask yourself what’s in your heart, that
reliquary—blood locket and seed-bed—and
contend with what it means
– Natasha Trethewey

You sat for years in the fire of self mastery, spent countless hours transforming yourself & your lineage, put all your energy into alchemizing your pain into purpose. And since they don’t have context for that, people will think you’re slacking.

You can’t care what they think.

– Nika Solé

god hides inside the wounds, that’s how he incentivizes you to actually explore them.
– River Kenna

late-night train
the mother’s lullaby
for everyone

– Hifsa Ashraf

When I go into solitude, I always come back with something better.
– @EarthToGazelle

This, in my judgment, is the highest philosophy: First, do not regret having lost yesterday; second, do not fear that you will lose tomorrow; third, enjoy today.
– Robert Green Ingersoll

The immune system, the hypothalamus, the ventro-medial frontal cortices, and the Bill of Rights have the same root cause.
– Antonio Damasio

No, no. I have another explanation. Please, listen. There is / only so much love in the world, and it got used up / by our ancestors.
– April Bernard, Psalm of the Explanation-Dwellers

“To photograph is to put the head, the eye and the heart on the same line of sight”, he said.
– Henri Cartier-Bresson

What is the whole of our existence but the sound of an appalling love?
– Louise Erdrich

I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there are no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over that country. I lived like my fathers before me, and, like them, I lived happily.
– Para-Wa-Samen (Ten Bears) of the Tamparika Comanches Dee Brown,
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.
– N. Scott Momaday

Leon Dufour, a world-renowned Jesuit theologian and Scripture scholar, a year before he died at ninety-nine, confided in a Jesuit who was caring for him, “I have written so many books on God, but after all that, what do I really know? I think, in the end, God is the person you’re talking to, the one right in front of you.”
– Gregory Boyle

The cool bowl of her body is made for my palm. The curved cup of my hand her safe harbor. Her green is my green, my longing, my undying, her hollowed out center my own.
– Robin Turner, The Green Glass Swan

I’m not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?
– Carson McCullers, A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud

The job has its ups and downs. There’s the swinging through the sky, the whale-watching, and the wielding of badass tools reminiscent of alien torture implements. Less nice, there’s a weird kind of marine vertigo and regular exposure to suicides. But Chad Allan sounds like he’d prefer nothing else.

– The Fascinating, Neverending Job of Painting the Golden Gate Bridge

When we tame our mind, our innate buddha nature and its qualities blossom; as darkness is dispelled, light takes its place.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

There are people, she said, who require no more than that it rains sometimes.
– Jesse Ball

A basic premise of psychodynamic thinking is that internal object relations etched in neural networks from early childhood development tend to repeat themselves again and again in adult relationships.
– Glen Gabbard

Some people come with you into the future and some don’t, and you just have to learn how to be good either way.
– Nika Solé

you can’t fight the Maze from inside the Maze
– River Kenna

Consciousness can no more invent, or even predict, an effective symbol than foretell or control tonight’s dream.
– Joseph Campbell

My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.
– Odilon Redon

We sing songs to the sky against the police loud enough to wake thunder.
– Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi

A high, independent spiritedness, a will to stand alone, even an excellent faculty of reason, will be perceived as a threat. Everything that raises the individual over the herd and frightens the neighbor will henceforth be called evil.
– Nietzsche

Men destroy each other during war, themselves during peacetime.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I hope for your sake that when it is time to work, all you do is work. But in those hours when the choice is truly yours, what do you choose to put in front of you?

Where do you cast your enraptured eye? Where do you lose yourself? Where do you invest your time, your life, and your love, knowing that whatever you pay attention to thrives?

– Karen Maezen Miller

The self is a repeatedly reconstructed biological state.
– Antonio R. Damasio

“At each moment the state of self is constructed, from the ground up,” writes Antonio Damasio. “It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade unless something goes wrong with the remaking.”
– Gabor Maté

It is easy to know the beauty of inhuman things, sea, / storm and mountain; it is their soul and their meaning. / Humanity has its lesser beauty, impure and painful; we / have to harden our hearts to bear it.
– Robinson Jeffers

Credo

My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young
blue-gum
And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting
The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the
actual
Appalling presence, the power of the waters.
He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found in
my blood
Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.
Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only
The bone vault’s ocean: out there is the ocean’s;
The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

– Robinson Jeffers

If the eye were a complete animal, sight would be its soul.
– Aristotle

Let people realize clearly that every time they threaten someone or humiliate or unnecessarily hurt or dominate or reject another human being, they become forces for the creation of psychopathology, even if these be small forces. Let them recognize that every person who is kind, helpful, decent, psychologically democratic, affectionate, and warm, is a psychotheraputic force.
– Abraham Maslow

Untitled

Will I always be eleven,
lonely in this house,
reading books
that are too hard for me,
in the long fatherless hours.
The terrible hours of the window,
the rain-light
on the page,
awaiting the letter,
the phone call,
still your strange elderly child.

– Franz Wright

From A Place Of Safety
by Richard Pierce

It’s an easy thing, from a place of safety,
To tell the oppressed and threatened
Not to cower, a different thing, when in
Their place of danger, not to do so,
Not to run and hide, and instead to
Stand up and protest, and invite the
Inevitable retribution, however illegal
It might be, when the judiciary too
Is suppressed. Don’t rest easy, even
If you still think you are safe; this
Black plague of fascism is more
Contagious than the old biological
One, and no-one has yet been brave
Enough to invent a vaccination.

The synergy of a group
is as important,
If not more important,
than the talent of the
individuals.

– Rick Rubin

Song of the Open Road, 6
by Walt Whitman

Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear it would not amaze me,
Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women appear’d it would not astonish me.

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,
It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

Here a great personal deed has room,
(Such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole race of men,
Its effusion of strength and will overwhelms law and mocks all authority and all argument against it.)

Here is the test of wisdom,
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,
Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,
Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.

Here is realization,
Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him,
The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.

Only the kernel of every object nourishes;
Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me?
Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me?

Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashion’d, it is apropos;
Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved by strangers?
Do you know the talk of those turning eye-balls?

On average, poets are the most intellectually conservative demographic I’ve ever encountered—by far—which is shocking no matter how often I’m reminded of it.
– Timothy Green

To me, teaching is a holy calling, especially with students less likely to succeed. It’s the gift not only of not giving up on people, but of even figuring out where to begin.
– Anne Lamott

Today, the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems. But there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems.
– @naval

I crack the codes of the universe for fun with my friends. I promise I don’t want to hear your limiting beliefs.
– Nika Solé

ego isn’t the enemy, it’s just an adorable intern who needs to be reminded he’s not the CEO.
– River Kenna

Things do not become legendary unless they are common and poignant human experiences first.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Everything changes when you start to emit your own frequency rather than absorbing the frequencies around you, when you start imprinting your intent on the universe rather than receiving an imprint from existence.
– Barbara Marciniak

You don’t age from birthdays. You age from inflammation. Let that sink in.
– Gary Brecka

Poets should know the history of the United States. Congressmen certainly don’t know any of it.
– Jim Harrison

I’m beginning to think that too many Americans are simply too lazy to stop fascism.
– John Pavlovitz

The difference between a confident person and a delusional person isn’t personality, it’s proof.
– Alex Hormozi

I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days
– Frank O’Hara

If you have a PhD and call any form of artificial intelligence PhD level, you should lose your PhD.
– Jonathan Fine

new haircut—
more sunlight
on my shoulders

– @joy_pops

You may learn something, and whether what you see be fair or evil, that may be profitable, and yet it may not. Seeing is both good and perilous.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, Galadriel

Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption.

But I am now.

– JB Pritzker

Troy is burning. Let us
make of what’s left a sturdiness we can use to the end.

– Carl Phillips

Emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness.

There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion.

– Carl Jung

Those who seek for pearls must be willing to dive to the depths time and time again. Once in the depths things appear differently, and each descent requires an inner adjustment in order to see what is otherwise hidden from view.
– Michael Meade

the belief that explanations do anything is a mental illness.
– River Kenna

I think that is my vision of the commune. Not as an achieved utopia into which we arrive after great travails—I don’t think communism is a promised land, nor do you reach it by waking up one day and deciding that communism is good actually, much less by having someone show up and tell you this. I think there is a struggle to preserve the possibility of communal life and emancipation and flourishing, and this struggle has two faces. Care and militancy. It must be capable of its own reproduction, be a site of mutual care; and it must be capable of breaking the procedures of capital. These are not opposed, they are the same struggle, and that unity is the real movement.
– Joshua Clover

Our unwillingness to see our own faults and the projection of them onto others is the source of most quarrels, and the strongest guarantee that injustice, animosity, and persecution will not easily die out.
– C.G. Jung

No matter how behind they start, it’s hard to beat a man who never stops learning.
– Alex Hormozi

abendrot (n.) the color of the sky while the sun is setting

/’a-bEn-dRoht/ • german

What the soul is,
I believe I will never quite know.
Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving.
– Mary Oliver

Nothing is more dangerous for a writer than to be dismissive. To dismiss means to judge, and nothing kills a piece of writing faster than that. Make room, make room! Let the world in all its shades and tones and terrains take you more fully into the human heart.
– Lee Martin

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they’ll make your soul impervious to the world’s soft decay.
– Janet Fitch

You can be sad and clean and pure, if you go far
enough inside yourself you are against yourself, or under
yourself, like the Metro, the train cars tunneling life under life.
– Gillian Cummings

I think I grow tensions
like flowers
in a wood where
nobody goes.

Each wound is perfect,
encloses itself in a tiny
imperceptible blossom,
making pain.

Pain is a flower
like that one,
like this one,
like that one,
like this one.

– Robert Creeley

As we begin the healing process we use what is known as the “felt sense,” or internal body sensations. These sensations serve as a portal through which we find the symptoms, or reflections of trauma. In directing our attention to these internal body sensations, rather than attacking the trauma head-on, we can unbind and free the energies that have been held in check. The Felt Sense Our feelings and our bodies are like water flowing into water. We learn to swim within the energies of the (body) senses.
– Tarthang Tulku

This single poem gets, via the heart of all theatre, to the heart of the communal in all the arts, and to the heart of form, the heart of voice and silence and to the heart of a kind of life that will never actually stop. That’s what Morgan does, he gets to the heart of the heart, selflessly, wide-openly, with the joyous shock of energy that’s the core heartbeat of life-form and art-form.
– Ali Smith

The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose at everybody else’s business.
– Marshall McLuhan

Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose, and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

Your enemy
is not the refugee.
Your enemy is the one
who made him a refugee.
– Willie Nelson

Whenever I’m asked
why Southern writers
particularly have a penchant
for writing about freaks, l
say it is because we are still
able to recognize one.

– Flannery O’Connor

SUNDAY

Sunday, by the blue, purple, yellow, red water
On the green, purple, yellow, red grass
Let us pass
Through our perfect park
Pausing on a Sunday

By the cool, blue, triangular water
On the soft, green, elliptical grass
As we pass through arrangements of shadows
Towards the verticals of trees, forever

By the blue, purple, yellow, red water
On the green, orange, violet mass
Of the grass
In our perfect park

Made of flecks of light
And dark
And parasols

Bum, bum, bum
Bum, bum, bum
Bum, bum, bum

People strolling through the trees
Of a small suburban park
On an island in the river
On an ordinary Sunday
Sunday, Sunday, Sunday

– Stephen Sondheim

I prefer neurotic people, I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.
– Stephen Sondheim

The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error… Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
– Gustave Le Bon

Good people know about good and evil: bad people don’t know about either.
– C.S. Lewis, Christian Behavior

we never know we go, — when we are going. we jest and shut the door; fate following behind us bolts it, and we accost no more.
– Emily Dickinson

The ‘me’ is not an entity apart from its accumulations.
– Krishnamurti

A Letter is a joy of Earth—
It is denied the Gods—

– Emily Dickinson

Hope lies in a poetry through which the world so invades the spirit of man that he becomes almost speechless.
– Francis Ponge

Love turns man into an ocean of happiness, an image of peace, a temple of wisdom. Love is every man’s very Self, his true beauty, and the glory of his human existence.
– Swami Muktananda

When divine love flows through the heart, it purifies every corner of my being. I no longer carry resentment, no longer hold on to pain. There’s simply no room—for bitterness, for blame, for division. I am filled, completely and constantly, with the love of the One.
– Brahma Kumaris

You have to limit the amount of time you spend with people who are in complete denial about who they are, because they’ll crash out on you just for telling them the truth.
– Nika Solé

Emotions are physical. Our bodies are the only place they can ever be found.
– Raphael Cushnir

Modern society will shame you for earning money, shame you for being happy, shame you for being raised well, shame you for having children, and ultimately, shame you for existing.

It isn’t just religion that controls you by declaring you a sinner.

– @naval

Never can an authority admit that the intellectually courageous, i.e. those who dare to defy his authority, may be the most valuable type.
– Karl Popper

There is no use complaining. There is no use talking about it. There is no use criticizing yourself or anyone else. There is no use in finding fault. Everything is in it’s right place. There are no mistakes.
– Robert Adams

What you have been doing in the outside world, do exactly the same with the inside world and you will become a witness. And once tasted, the joy of being a witness is so great, so otherworldly that you would like to go more and more in.
– Osho

Ideas like these are never invented. They came into being before man had learned to use his mind purposively. Before man learned to produce thoughts, thoughts came to him. He did not think—he perceived his mind functioning.
– Carl Jung

Create a vacuum between
you and what you’re
looking for.
Instead of forcing it,
Step back and draw it
to you.

– Rick Rubin

With my desire to improve everything, I destroy the moment.
– @naval

Today’s magical words:

Guard your karma.
Guard your karma.
Guard your karma.

– Kenneth Folk

The world will change when people change.
– Nika Solé

Repetition, over time, cements symptoms as identity.
– Mary Jo Peebles

You can’t be a climate change denier because we have the hurricanes, we have the floods, we have the fires, we have melting ice, we have sea level rise, islands are disappearing.
– Jane Goodall

“Quietness is bourgeois.”
“Actually, noise is bourgeois.”
The great debate rages on
– @moonbeeaam

eyes to the sky
reclaim our heritage
my urban mind a gray winter blizzard
washed in blue tones / here in my homeland
remember a forever summer in my blood
– Mariposa Fernández

Persistent, non-specific anxiety is the result of wanting so much, talking so much, and doing so much that you lose touch with the quiet joys of solitude.
– @naval

In every person of whatever station look not for things to criticize, but for something you adore in your Creator.
– Edgar Cayce

’Tis shame to take the ring and drink the mead, and leave the giver of the gift at need.
– Totta (Tolkien, An Early Homecoming in Rhyme)

And who’s to say these miracles are less / significant than burning bushes, loaves / and fishes, steps on water.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Travel is how I decorate the house of my life; stillness is how I build its foundations.
– Pico Iyer

What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.
– Albert Pine

Air, fire, the pale soft light
Topaz I manage, and three sorts of blue,
but on the barb of time
The fire? always, and the vision always.

– Ezra Pound, Canto V

When we realize the virtues, the talent, the beauty of Mother Earth, something is born in us, some kind of connection …. LOVE is born.

– Thich Nhat Hanh

spring sun…
the color of the sky
eggshell blue

– @lafcadiopoetry

when you use the tools of Moloch, you become moloch. no exceptions. it’s a simple, functional thing, 2+2=4

so using the tools of Moloch to defeat Moloch is… no. It’s nothing. It’s like trying to defeat mcdonalds by spending your savings on their food, to deplete their stock.

– River Kenna

The most valuable math you can learn is how to calculate the future cost of your current decisions.
– Jim Kwik

Be the kind of person who jumps in the cold lake instead of just talking about it.
– @outsidemagazine

Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most.
– Abraham Lincoln

Putting life in all its
manifestations at the
center of our existence is
our true essence.

– Paul Hawken

Tears! There is too much beauty in the world! O, there is too much to love, too much to desire!

– Edward Abbey

What survives the wreck of time is the force of the imagination and the power of expression.
– Lewis Lapham

April 28th

My rosy bullhead minnows disappeared.
It’s hard to notice absence when the earth
regreens itself, and everything’s alive:
blue clematis climbing the eastern fence
tendrils of hops stretching across mulch paths:
viriditas distracts me from the loss.

A week ago I had a covid shot
and I was down for days, fevers and chills
and lassitude: I lost all energy
just when the garden needed me the most
so many things unbuilt, undone, unmade
and all my plans are now set back a week.

This morning, as I went to feed the koi
I noticed clumps of water hyacinth
weighed down by scales threading emerald leaves
in diamond patterns: a long watersnake
sunning himself, post-prandrial, who dived
down to the depths and disappeared from view.

– Bill Lantry

I want to make a hole in everything and penetrate it deep. I want to reach the heart of the earth. My love lies in there, a place where seedlings turn green and roots meet one another and creation continues even in disintegration. I think it has always been this way…in birth and then in death. I think my body is a temporary form. I want to reach its essence.
– Forough Farrokhzad

At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she’d been to see my movie. She’d gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really…that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn’t known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There’s something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, making thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It’s worth it.
– Krzysztof Kieslowski

Between incomprehensible and incoherent sits the madhouse.
– Jack Kerouac

Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.
– Primo Levi

Expatriates

The trillion-tongued consortium of the living now
entices me again into the liquid room
of cocreation where all symbionts conspire.

We have have been part of everything from dawn to doom,
of all things dreaming, lounging, crooning ancient tunes
for what clandestine reasons there are always these:

A breaking wave that will not stay on any shore.
An adamant heart that will not beat for platitudes.
A spirited spark that feeds the sentient will to life.

Staunch in a dauntless nub of resonant rhyme still sputtering,
where honesty laughs at itself and crying finds out why,
our skills that built the web that holds the world and outgrows itself
still remember the song of the whale and the wing of the dinosaur.

For time is the way we dream and space is the way we love.
The farthest stars are the pennies we tossed in a wishing well.
You and I are the way all tales begin and end.
We have to remind ourselves again and again.

Though all of the words and inveterate tunes help the old wheel turn,
the idol still spits in the face of its maker and falls on his head.
Whatever heals can kill and whoever loves might feel alone.
The desire to snavel the meaning must spin like a potter’s stone.

Spin mind to magnet and bone to sliver of steel and tongue to song.
Then blend and weave together again by the heart’s feel.
Then string the refashioned moment on the immanent thunder bow,
aim taught and say, “Let the gods be brave!” and let fly.

Now take my hand.
We are always going far away.
Please take my heart.
We are all expatriates in this storm.

– George Gorman

The streets are good, they are full of people, marvelous people, and I don’t like the rich any more than you do…I may eat dinner with them in the same cafés, the maître d’ might know my name, but I still don’t like them. Because they are dead.
– Charles Bukowski

I saw her, standing in the crowd, forlorn, dissatisfied, dark, unpleasantly strange.
– Jack Kerouac

EVERY DAY, I GIVE UP

for twenty minutes

but decide to
push through
on the twenty-first.

Survival is a ritual,
a ceremony, and
a practice.

– Rudy Francisco

We spelled love ‘G-I-V-E.’
– Sarah Kay

i didn’t realize i was homesick for yellow.
but i haven’t seen the sun in weeks.
the only colors in my closet are gray or dark green.
even the yolks of my eggs have a dull look.
they don’t look quite as bright
as when my mom and i cooked.
i am homesick for the feeling that yellow brings.
when i can feel the sand
and smell the sunscreen.
a turkey sandwich packed from home
and bag of lay’s chips.
who knew the color yellow
could make me so nostalgic?

– Jennae Cecelia

No longer demanding life to be ‘this or that’
this march of time breeds a quiet heart.
Allowing motion or rest to be ‘as is’,
entanglements of this floating world
unravel.

– Shinzen

I have a strange feeling here of being outside any social context.
– William Burroughs

In recent years a new, perverted version of Christianity has surfaced: the so-called Prosperity Gospel. Those who preach this distortion of the message of Jesus assert that the rich are rich because God approves of them. It encourages people to have faith so they can become rich. It celebrates wealth as a sign of God’s grace.
– Jay Parini, CNN

The truth is simple. If it was complicated, everyone would understand it.
– Walt Whitman

The homogenous solution for an arts district is a death nail. It goes against the entire mindset.
– Kristen Fiore

We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combatting poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.
– Pope Francis

If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.
– C.S. Lewis

Never regret your past. Rather, embrace it as the teacher that it is.

– Robin Sharma

Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.
– Aldous Huxley

Many memories are dead ends. That’s why I throw away a thousand pages. If you haven’t thrown away a thousand, then you don’t have four hundred that are worth a shit. You have to edit ruthlessly.
– Mary Karr

Fortunately, I never recovered from my education, I’ve just carried on with it. If you happen to like reading, it can have a very powerful effect on you, an evocative effect, at least on me.
– Adam Phillips

It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.
– Winston Churchill

One phenomenon must necessarily lead to other phenomena, as one experiment does to several experiments… The true student of nature begins from any point and pursues his path step-by-step into the immeasurable distance with a careful connection and alignment of the individual facts.
– Novalis, Last Fragments

you can almost hear the sounds of the bar car on the train— // the bleary passengers trapped in their windows, // peering through their doppelgängers at the black fields of wheat as they whiz past.
– Kim Addonizio

You don’t have a revolution in which you love your enemy, and you don’t have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it. Revolutions overturn systems. Revolutions destroy systems.
– Malcolm X

My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.
– Jonathan Lethem

Doubt is unsettling to the ego, and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by proffering certainties will never grow. In seeking certainty they are courting the death of the soul.
– James Hollis

All those scurrying feet and harried minds. All those sugar-loving, coffee-drinking, baccy-smoking, rum-sipping commuters, most of whom hadn’t a thought about who provided their little pleasures, their little dependencies.
– Bernardine Evaristo, Blonde Roots

He has a stormy spirit. His mind is in bondage. He is haunted by a great, unsolved doubt. He is one of those who don’t want millions, but an answer to their questions.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You cannot own the power and the magic of this world. It is always available, but it does not belong to anyone.
– Chögyam Trungpa

That’s one of the things I admire about you… You have some kind of boundless faith in the future. You never give up.
– Richard Yates

Poverty and wealth are names for lack and superfluity; so he who lacks something is not rich, nor is he poor who lacks nothing.
– Democritus

Her father had taught her not to judge people on such shallow points: What a man wore or owned had nothing to do with his heart and character.
– Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

Every single person has their own expression which he or she overuses. Or uses incorrectly. These words or phrases are the key to their intellect. Mr. “Apparently,” Mr. “Generally,” Mrs. “Probably,” Mr. “Fucking,” Mrs. “Don’t You Think?,” Mr. “As If.”
– Olga Tokarczuk

In my experience, the basis of almost all psychological problems is an unsatisfactory relation to one’s urge to individuality. And the healing process often involves an acceptance of what is commonly called selfish, power-seeking or autoerotic. The majority of patients in psychotherapy need to learn how to be more effectively selfsh and more effective in the use of their own personal power; they need to accept responsibility for the fact of being centers of power and effectiveness. So-called selfish or egocentric behavior which expresses itself in demands made on others is not effective conscious self-centeredness or conscious individuality. We demand from others only what we fail to give ourselves. If we have insufficient self-love or self-prestige, our need expresses itself unconsciously by coercive tactics toward others. And often the coercion occurs under the guise of virtue, love, or altruism. Such unconscious selfishness is ineffectual and destructive to oneself and others. It fails to achieve its purpose because it is blind, without awareness of itself. What is required is not the extirpation of selfishness, which is impossible but rather that it be wedded to consciousness and thus becomes effective. All the facts of biology and psychology teach us that every individual unit of life is self-centered to the core. The only varying factor is the degree of consciousness which accompanies that fact.
– Edward F. Edinger

translate me render me into the martian tongue
across the black night
where the gun stock reaches the star.

– Dmitry Blizniuk

The essence of philosophy is not the possession of the truth but the search for truth. Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.
– Karl Jaspers

Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.
– Yusef Komunyakaa

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

I will meet people who are meddling, ungrateful, arrogant…they are like this because they don’t know good from evil.
– Marcus Aurelius

Hold dear to your parents for it is a scary and confusing world without them.
– Emily Dickinson

You realize that our mistrust of the future
makes it hard to give up the past.
– Chuck Palahniuk

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that’s the job of art.
– Andre Dubus III

If you are a parent, it benefits humanity if you raise your children in such a way that they are astonished by love and kindness not by fame or accumulation of material wealth.
– Guthema Roba

At a certain point, how we live inside takes priority. At a certain point for each of us, talk evaporates and words alone cannot bring love into the open.
– Mark Nepo

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
– Carl Sagan

Somehow I can’t write about anything but what concerns us and us alone, in the middle of the crowded world. Everything else is foreign to me.
– Franz Kafka

What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come.

Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

– Virginia Woolf

Bloom—is Result—to meet a Flower
And casually glance
Would scarcely cause one to suspect
The minor Circumstance

Assisting in the Bright Affair
So intricately done
Then offered as a Butterfly
To the Meridian—

To pack the Bud—oppose the Worm—
Obtain its right of Dew—
Adjust the Heat—elude the Wind—
Escape the prowling Bee

Great Nature not to disappoint
Awaiting Her that Day—
To be a Flower, is profound
Responsibility—

– Emily Dickinson

Well you know I wonder, it could be love running towards my life with its arms up yelling let’s buy it what a bargain!
– Anne Carson

I find that a Christian view of history is clarified if one considers reality as more or less like the world portrayed in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. We live in the midst of contests between great and mysterious spiritual forces, which we understand only imperfectly and whose true dimensions we only occasionally glimpse. Yet, frail as we are, we do play a role in this history, on the side either of the powers of light or of the powers of darkness. It is crucially important then, that, by God’s grace, we keep our wits about us and discern the vast difference between the real forces for good and the powers of darkness disguised as angels of light.
– George M. Marsden

Often I imagine the earth
through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—
atoms, peculiar
atoms everywhere—
no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end,
soaring together like those
ancient Chinese birds
hatched miraculously with only one wing,
helping each other fly home.

– Dan Gerber

The humble, meek, merciful, and just are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask they will know one another, though the diverse liveries they wear here make them strangers.
– William Penn

It’s like a hole in my life, an eight-year hole. That’s what I find interesting in people’s lives, the holes, the gaps, sometimes dramatic, but sometimes not dramatic at all. There are catalepsies, or a kind of sleepwalking through a number of years, in most lives. Maybe it’s in these holes that movement takes place.
– Gilles Deleuze

I don’t know what living a balanced life feels like. When I am sad, I don’t cry, I pour. When I am happy, I don’t smile, I glow. When I am angry, I don’t yell, I burn. The good thing about feeling in extremes, is when I love, I give them wings. But perhaps that isn’t such a good thing, cause they always tend to leave and you should see me, when my heart is broken. I don’t grieve, I shatter.
– Rupi Kaur

I’m not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?
– Carson McCullers

One might sense gods everywhere, even within one’s own self. What if I am I but penetrated by divinities?
– Alice Notley

Emotions and the feelings are not a luxury, they are a means of communicating our states of mind to others. But they are also a way of guiding our own judgments and decisions. Emotions bring the body into the loop of reason.
– António R. Damásio

You can be sad and clean and pure, if you go far
enough inside yourself you are against yourself, or under
yourself, like the Metro, the train cars tunneling life under life.
– Gillian Cummings

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can’t avoid. I mean my own body…Now it’s like an empty house.
– C.S. Lewis

I think the greatness of Beckett, really, is that deep and lifelong profound disgust with art.
– Philip Guston

MAY-FLOWER.

PINK, small, and punctual,
Aromatic, low,
Covert in April,
Candid in May,

Dear to the moss,
Known by the knoll,
Next to the robin
In every human soul.

Bold little beauty,
Bedecked with thee,
Nature forswears
Antiquity.

– Emily Dickinson

i’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense

o California, don’t you know the sun is only a god
if you learn to starve for her? i’m over the ocean

i stood at its lip, dressed in down, praying for snow.
i know i’m strange, too much light makes me nervous

at least in this land where the trees always bear green.
i know something that doesn’t die can’t be beautiful.

have you ever stood on a frozen lake, California?
the sun above you, the snow & stalled sea—a field of mirror

all demanding to be the sun, everything around you
is light & it’s gorgeous & if you stay too long it will kill you.

it’s so sad, you know? you’re the only warm thing for miles
the only thing that can’t shine.

– Danez Smith

I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
– Edgar Allan Poe

I lack the authority to speak for anyone but myself. What you read and how deeply you read matters almost as much as how you love, work, exercise, vote, practice charity, strive for social justice, cultivate kindness and courtesy, and worship if you are capable of worship. The mind is an activity and will decay into dark inertia if not sustained by the sustenance of reading.
– Harold Bloom

Fear arises through identification with form, whether it be a material possession, a physical body, a self-image, a thought, or an emotion. It arises through unawareness of the formless inner dimension of the consciousness or spirit, which is the essence of who you are.
– Eckhart Tolle

Decline every invitation to neglect, abandon, or dishonor yourself.
– Dr. Thema

As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversation bores me, I pretended to agree.
– Albert Camus

There is no possibility of right meditation if you have not put your house, your psychological house, in order.
– Krishnamurti

I have further found a good medicine…. This is that man should train himself to do two things: first, to honor all creatures, in whom he recognizes the exalted nature of the Creator….
– Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (RaMaK)

Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life.
– Anne Lamott

The fruitfulness of our life depends in large measure on our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own worth.
– Thomas Merton

Alone, and thus exposed to the thought of the disaster which disrupts solitude and overflows every variety of thought, as the intense, silent and disastrous affirmation of the outside.
– Maurice Blanchot (translated by Ann Smock)

When we don’t see the hook, we keep biting the bait—seeking comfort in familiar patterns that cause suffering.
– Shaila Catherine

The artist who loves destruction for its own sake—not the destruction that leads to creation—imposes his neurosis on the world and calls it beauty.
– Joseph Fasano

We walked towards King’s, and backwards and forwards. The sky was perfectly cloudless. Three solitary stars in the middle of the blue vault, one or two on the points of the high hills.
– Dorothy Wordsworth

While doing meditation, never bother about the result. It will come in its own time. Trust! Enjoy meditation for its own sake, don’t project any ambition. If you can meditate not as a means but as an end unto itself, then the miracle can happen immediately.
– Osho

There is no solitude more original
than that of those who turn to love
or to alchemy; there never was and never will be.

– Arkadii Dragomoschenko
(trans. Lyn Hejinian & Elena Balashova)

there is no need to worry
about the seedlings
occasional rain

– Basho

We stick to the wrong thing, quite often, not because it will come to fruition by further effort, but because we cannot let go of the way we have decided to tell the story.
– David Whyte

The God appears to us in a certain state of the soul. Therefore we reach the God through the self. Not the self is God, although we reach the God through the self.
– Carl Jung

Our frantic efforts to set the world to rights and to extend our control over all happenings, inner and outer, are themselves the cause of most of our troubles. All force is tension against the stream.
– Alan Watts

Our job today and tomorrow is the same as it’s always been—to be good, to be wise, to stand up for what’s right, to resist what is wrong and evil. Nothing changes that. Nothing exempts us from that. Nothing prevents us from doing that.
– Ryan Holiday

The end of a melody is not its goal.
– Nietzsche

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
– Umberto Eco

In the swell of empty time, one’s attentional rhythms get recalibrated, and constellations of meaning that remain hidden to the eye—that immeasurable substratum of the unperceivable—exert their force.
– Jenny Xie

The kinder and more rational a person is, the more he recognizes himself in others. A stupid, unkind person thinks that all other people are alien to him. A wise and kind person knows that the most valuable thing within him is also within every other person.
– Leo Tolstoy

Anxiety is the mark
of spiritual insecurity.

– Thomas Merton

end of rain
and the birth of
a silent river
– Elancharan Gunasekaran

My grandmother kisses
as if bombs are bursting in the backyard,
where mint and jasmine lace their perfumes
through the kitchen window,

– Ocean Vuong

The wretched day was theirs, the night is mine;
– Claude McKay

The Tired Worker
by Claude McKay

O whisper, O my soul! The afternoon

Is waning into evening, whisper soft!

Peace, O my rebel heart! for soon the moon

From out its misty veil will swing aloft!

Be patient, weary body, soon the night

Will wrap thee gently in her sable sheet,

And with a leaden sigh thou wilt invite

To rest thy tired hands and aching feet.

The wretched day was theirs, the night is mine;

Come tender sleep, and fold me to thy breast.

But what steals out the gray clouds like red wine?

O dawn! O dreaded dawn! O let me rest

Weary my veins, my brain, my life! Have pity!

No! Once again the harsh, the ugly city.

Lord, the people who you created to be the artists, writers, and poets of the world are now being forced to “make content.”
– Laura Matsue

Dreamers make the best drivers, always. They are not afraid of unknown routes, they do not complain about the bumps in the road, and they like the feel of the machine roaring down the dark highways. They seldom if ever get lost because wherever they find themselves is part of what they were seeking.
– Charles Bowden

Envy those who see beauty in everything in the world.
– Egon Schiele

Just cause the Blood will never lose its power / don’t mean a melody won’t.
– Michael Frazier

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
– Wendell Berry

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.
– Eric Hoffer

Sooner or later the individual has to take responsibility for all repressed contents. You do not get away with anything, in the long run…. In the short run, yes, but in the long run, no.
– Edward Edinger

Our job is unconditional love. The job of everyone else in our life is to push our buttons.
– Byron Katie

The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down.
– James Salter

I call upon you, workers.

It is not yet light

But I beat upon your doors.

You say you await the Dawn

But I say you are the Dawn.

– Lola Ridge

It may be this doubt which moves and locates everything.
– Philip Guston on Piero della Francesca

Your self-talk is a reflection of your mind.
– George Mumford

they are putting disenchantment in the clouds so inoculate yourself with myths and fairy tales and love.
– @mostly_rts

To do only what is right, say only what is true, without holding back.
– Marcus Aurelius

I trust this sweet May morning
– Emily Dickinson

If you think about yourself all day, you are guaranteed to become depressed.

Take time each day to think about those who need you.

Not about what you need, but about who needs you.

– Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

The psyche uses depression to get our attention, to show that something is profoundly wrong. Once we understand its therapeutic value and follow its Ariadne string through our private labyrinth, then depression can even seem a friend of sorts.
– James Hollis

The goal isn’t to be happy with my voice. What I want is simply to have one.
– Jhumpa Lahiri

the fire
in his belly
brook trout

– Jeff Hoagland

the old man
shakes his fist
at the sky
tired and angry
he begs for escape

– @lafcadiopoetry

Throw away all the maps because you are the goal. Maps can My love, stay here.

Going in search of Self (as a goal) is illusion; You are already the One Self.

You will purchase the map, Only to find you are already Here.

– Mooji

The stars are far brighter
Than gems without measure,
The moon is far whiter
Than silver in treasure:
The fire is more shining
On hearth in the gloaming
Than gold won by mining,
So why go a-roaming?
O! Tra-la-la-lally
Come back to the Valley.

– J.R.R. Tolkien

If it is possible on your part, live at peace with everyone.
– Romans 12:18

I think one problem that has presented itself over and over, usually in the case of a poem of a certain length, is that you’ve got to end up saying the right thing.
– James Merrill

Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it’s going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.
– Philip K. Dick

The longer he lived, the nearer his childhood drew to him, and it seemed less and less like a distant fantasy of someone else’s life.
– Abdulrazak Gurnah

She prayed, at first imitating others during group prayers, and then eventually on her own, alone in the basement apartment. It was during the afternoons, her vision blurry and fingers stiff and fatigued from hooking wigs, that she sat down at the kitchen table and clasped her hands. It would become an important ritual, the one routine that granted her a sense of control. She practically invented her own life in America by praying, she liked to say.
– Ling Ma

I call for you cultivation of strength in the dark.
– Gwendolyn Brooks

He understood that fourteen was the worst possible age on the calendar of human life, and therefore all fourteen-year-olds were confused and fractured beings, not one of them a child anymore and not one of them an adult, none quite right in the head or at home in his unfinished body…
– Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

The intuitive is a type that doesn’t see, doesn’t see the stumbling block before his feet, but he smells a rat for ten miles.
– CG Jung

I want to be bright scarves, soft rain, seabirds pecking at receipts.
– Elane Kim

Synchronicities can produce the crack in our consciousness that expands our choices, our capacities and our consciousness of the divine. These mysterious moments go beyond our ego consciousness & open us to the sacredness of being a part of something larger than we are.
– Laurence Hillman

People pray to each other. The way I say “you” to someone else, respectfully, intimately, desperately. The way someone says “you” to me, hopefully, expectantly, intensely …
– Huub Oosterhuis

We on earth, how can we know
how long the silences will be
between the movements?

I wait for song
to grow in me across the dark interval.

– Jenny George

Let the skein of I love you
you love me never end, always ablaze
with decrepit sun and old moon.
– Federico García Lorca

No pleasure is in itself evil, but the things which produce certain pleasures entail annoyances many times greater than the pleasures themselves.
– Epicurus

Let’s hope that my brains will be fertile for some time yet. God knows if they will!
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letter to John Maynard Keynes (December 1930)

We are surfing in and out of chaos and impermanence, and that is kind of okay. That is where a sense of humor and groundedness in the chaos can be helpful.
– Waylon Lewis

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
– Galileo Galilei

We can criticize the characters and actions of men about us because we can see them outside of ourselves, and compare them one with another. But self-criticism, out of which comes the highest attainments of human excellence, arises out of the power we possess of making ourselves objective to ourselves — [we] can see our interior selves as distinct personalities, as though looking in a glass.
– Frederick Douglass, Pictures and Progress

Meditation is the only way you can truly see yourself and come to know your inner world. Sometimes on the surface what you see as your self might not be that pleasant, but underneath there is a true nature of luminous openness and love.
– Tsoknyi Rinpoche

Do not chase after thoughts, nor suppress them. Let them arise and dissolve naturally, like clouds in the sky, and rest in the vast expanse of your own awareness.
– Longchenpa

The man who has the power to requite kindness with kindness, evil with evil, and really does practice requital can be considered ‘good’.
– Nietzsche

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul.
– Joseph Addison

Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
– William Faulkner

Some people meditate.
Some people run.
Some people stare at art until it stares back.
We support all three.

– The Clark Art Institute

Everyone has that moment I think, the moment when something so momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there.
– Kathleen Glasgow

Once in a while, we all succumb
to the merely personal.
Those glass shards and snipped metal
That glitter and disappear and glitter again
in the edged night light
Of memory’s anxious sky.

– Charles Wright

This is how we live on earth, a flock of sparrows.
The darkness, a magician, finds quarters

behind our ears. We don’t know what life is,
who makes it, the reality is thick

with longing. We put it up to our lips
and drink.

– Ilya Kaminsky

History repeats itself. Somebody says this. History throws its shadow over the beginning, over the desktop, over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters. History is a little man in a brown suit trying to define a room he is outside of. I know history. There are many names in history but none of them are ours.
– Richard Siken

Let the terrible
politicians practice / their terrible politics.
At my kitchen table, all will be fed. I turn
the radio to a classical station, maybe Vivaldi.
All we have are these moments: the golden trees,
the industrious bees, the falling light. Darkness
will not overtake us.
– Barbara Crooker

Interaction with an egoist leads to our own corruption, because in defending ourselves, we risk falling into his errors.
– Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.
– Zora Neale Hurston

Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods
by Tishani Doshi

for Monika

Girls are coming out of the woods,
wrapped in cloaks and hoods,
carrying iron bars and candles
and a multitude of scars, collected
on acres of premature grass and city
buses, in temples and bars. Girls
are coming out of the woods
with panties tied around their lips,
making such a noise, it’s impossible
to hear. Is the world speaking too?
Is it really asking, What does it mean
to give someone a proper resting? Girls are
coming out of the woods, lifting
their broken legs high, leaking secrets
from unfastened thighs, all the lies
whispered by strangers and swimming
coaches, and uncles, especially uncles,
who said spreading would be light
and easy, who put bullets in their chests
and fed their pretty faces to fire,
who sucked the mud clean
off their ribs, and decorated
their coffins with briar. Girls are coming
out of the woods, clearing the ground
to scatter their stories. Even those girls
found naked in ditches and wells,
those forgotten in neglected attics,
and buried in river beds like sediments
from a different century. They’ve crawled
their way out from behind curtains
of childhood, the silver-pink weight
of their bodies pushing against water,
against the sad, feathered tarnish
of remembrance. Girls are coming out
of the woods the way birds arrive
at morning windows—pecking
and humming, until all you can hear
is the smash of their miniscule hearts
against glass, the bright desperation
of sound—bashing, disappearing.
Girls are coming out of the woods.
They’re coming. They’re coming.

i’m reliving it, neutralizing it, and transforming it into an inoffensive past that i can keep in my heart without either disowning it or suffering from it. that’s not easy. it’s at once painful and poetic.
– Simone de Beauvoir

I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.
– Cormac McCarthy

You get on a train, you disappear
You write your name on the window, you disappear.

There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl,
from which you never return.

– louise glück

The states of mind or feelings that art can excite have been helpfully distinguished in Sanskrit aesthetics, where they are called rasas, from a word meaning ‘juice’ or ‘essence’. A fully achieved work of art should flow with all nine of them: their names might be transposed into English as wonder, joy, sexual pleasure, pity, anguish, anger, terror, disgust and laughter.
– Marina Warner

Everyone will tell you WHAT you’re doing, but only you can tell us WHY you’re doing it. The why is what distinguishes your work.
– Martha Graham

A dog barks at anyone he does not know. Let humans be different.
– Heraclitus

In many ways, the felt sense is like a stream moving through an ever-changing landscape. It alters its character in resonance with its surroundings. When the land is rugged and steep, the stream moves with vigor and energy, swirling and bubbling as it crashes over rocks and debris. Out on the plains, the stream meanders so slowly that one might wonder whether it is moving at all. Rains and spring thaw can rapidly increase its volume, possibly even flood nearby land. In the same way, once the setting has been interpreted and defined by the felt sense, we will blend into whatever conditions we find ourselves. This amazing sense encompasses both the content and climate of our internal and external environments. Like the stream, it shapes itself to fit those environments.
– Peter A. Levine

Fingerprints look like ripples
because time keeps dropping
another stone into our palm.
– Bill Knot

Humanity only survives if it matches every advancement in technology with a deepening of the soul. Without clarity about ethics, without sensitivity to truth and beauty, we will quickly lose ourselves in a heartless hellscape of digital minds.

Teach the humanities and the arts.

– Joseph Fasano

It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
– Bertrand Russell

A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.
– Mark Twain

The proper response to a poem is another poem.
– Phyllis Webb

It is dark in the funnel of the horizon.
– Ryan Murphy

In the end, it is not enough to think what we know. We must live it. Only by living it can love show itself as the greatest principle.
– Mark Nepo

Everyone’s opinions about things change over time. Nothing is constant. Everything changes. And to hold onto some dogged idea forever is a little rigid and maybe naive.
– Frida Kahlo

What would happen to our writing, our politics, our living if we thought of land as pedagogy, theory as something embodied & kinetic?
– Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

In the next field is air more mild,

And o’er yon hazy crest is Eden’s balmier spring.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, May-Day

it is the poets above all who can help us to heal ourselves because it is a disorder of language that has been the cause of our isolation.
– Tom Cheetham

Still want to know what she looked like? She looked like genius, eclipsed.
– Melissa Ostrom

you have not understood
what a revolution is it’s just this

it’s coming out again night after night more of us
than there are of them it’s saying no
to every deal remember nothing
belongs to you because nothing
belongs to anyone

– Joshua Clover

In the external scheme of things, shining moments are as brief as the twinkling of an eye, yet such twinklings are what eternity is made of — moments when we human beings can say “I love you,” “I’m proud of you,” “I forgive you,” “I’m grateful for you.”

– Fred Rogers

Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life.
– John Ruskin

the purpose of acute shame is to get you to change

the purpose of chronic shame is to keep you stuck

(the purpose of a system is what it does)

– @scottdomes

The mind is an activity and will decay into dark inertia if not sustained by the sustenance of reading.

– Harold Bloom

productive sociality is finite
and we have arrived at the
limits of human interaction

– Andy Perrin

when you’re 20 you look like your parents
when you’re 40 you look like your practice

– Shunryu Suzuki

In the strange, mystic, unknown Southwest, something I never dreamed of I have found, or it has found me.
– Edward Abbey

The sun falls into contradiction with itself.
– C. G. Jung, The Stages of Life

Live your life from the inside out. Do not be dependent on the outer world, it changes from moment to moment. Be grounded in the beauty that lives in your heart.
– Barb Schmidt

loss stays merciless / love mercilesser

– Rose Zinnia, The World Is Always Ending / We Stay In Love

Every view of things that is not strange is false.
– Paul Valéry

The whole system of the universe works upon this law – the driving of things further upward toward the centre.
– George MacDonald

All I’ll say is this: internationalism is the only hope we have of winning a livable human future.
– Jaroslav Hasek

In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live.
– G.K. Chesterton

The distance you put between places doesn’t change the distance you have to travel inside. No passport, no plane ticket, no new city can fix what must be faced within. Growth isn’t on a map — it’s in the moments you finally meet yourself.
– Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

as long as money
flows uphill

the gravity of time
will crush them

– Andy Perrin

It is not patriotic to teach that
that United States has an unblemished, beautiful historical record. It is delusional, idiotic, and actually quite dangerous.

The more honest we are as a nation the closer we get to what this nation should be.

History always knows the truth.

– Andy Perrin

To have a soul that dreams…
at the edge of the world.

– Anna de Noailles

The unwavering truth of the psyche is: change or wither into resentment; grow or die within.
– James Hollis

April advanced to May.
A bright, serene May it was;
days of blue sky and placid sunshine,

– Charlotte Brontë

I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.

– Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

The more love and goodwill there is, the quicker will change come. But it all starts in you. Therefore the sooner you realize it, the sooner will changes take place all around you, and so out into the world.
– Eileen Caddy

He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day’s madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers – thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.
– Peter S. Beagle, The Tolkien Reader

Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
– George Orwell

I hid out in a big pink notebook- one that would hold a whole ream of paper. I made myself a universe in it. There I could be-a magic horse, a Martian, a telepath. There I could be anywhere but here, any time but now, with any people but these.
– Octavia Butler

It’s just that I suffer very eloquently.
– Joni Mitchell

An old idea suggests that each person comes to life at a time when they have something to give to the world. That sense of soulful giving may be more needed now than ever before, as the world needs genuine vision as well as great imagination to initiate meaningful changes in all areas of culture and nature. Strangely, it tends to be the orphaned and neglected parts of our souls that are the least known but can become most able to see what is needed on both the individual and collective levels of life. In order for our true callings and genuine visions to become known, we must become both open-minded and open-hearted. As an old proverb makes clear, “Whoever remains narrow of vision cannot be big of heart.” We live in times of widespread trouble and sweeping change; if we can trust the nature of our own souls and throw ourselves wholeheartedly into those things that truly call to us, these could become initiatory times as well.
– Michael Meade, Awakening the Soul

Syllabics

As if you could escape yourself, you take a walk to the lake where winter’s ice recoils to shore, and across the surface, a wide blue eye awakens. A child’s ball waits at the edge of the ice for the sun to tip it into the water. All winter, it has waited. You think, no one has gone out to get it. Ducks return, tottering in the wind. Ducks cluster at the rim of ice. Here, you count eight ducks: no one has gone out to get it. There, four ducks: no one gets it. You try not looking at ducks. The white flash of their under-tails, bobbing for weeds. Two ducks: no one. No thinking. A breeze on your neck. Shadows rippling toward you on the lake, dark stabby triangles. One two three: triangles. Try not counting these five ducks: nobody gets it. Nobody gets it. Go home. Spring is chronic. The mind is chronic.

– Cynthia Marie Hoffman

I started writing because I had a need inside of me
to create something that was not there.
– Audre Lorde

Knowing what’s happening is not
the always importantmost thing.
When what I don’t know nurtures
what us coming to be
my eyes stay open.
Curiously.

– George Gorman

People are most likely to turn to bad habits, when under stress.

– More likely to drink, eat poorly, not exercise.

The next time you’re tempted to kick aside the good stuff when overwhelmed, remember:

Stress is exactly when you need those good habits the most.

– Dr. Julie Gurner

Eventually the people who are the easiest to take for granted will also be the hardest to replace.
– @miaviktoriasch

my tongue’s long upgrade notification
– Daiki Shiota

Nirvana’s mind in Narnia’s woods,
deep, deep, impossible to seek.
Blind under the duress of life.
Glasses under the soil with knives.
Open eyes,
see magic,
nothing.
– @DeepDwell

If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. If he has to make a choice, may he make it now. Then I will either wait for him or forget him.
– Paulo Coelho

We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.
– John Dewey

Do not shorten the morning by getting up late, or waste it in unworthy occupations or in talk; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

The individual boycott and individual protest is something everybody can do within your sphere of influence. You can write a letter to the editor. If they’re banning a book, buy that book.
– Gloria Browne-Marshall

Isn’t that what poetry writing is like? Navigating a new floor plan without any lights? Or building the house itself as you wander through bare boards and beams?
– Derek Mong

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
– Adrienne Rich

I will stop since this is silly—simply the unhealthy dreams that come from being alone.
– Kafka, letters to Milena

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
– Samuel Johnson

Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.
– Khalil Gibran

…he tumbled into all kinds of difficulties, and tumbled out of them; and, by tumbling through life, got himself considerably bruised.
– Charles Dickens

The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.
– Mary Leakey

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

No one could ever inveigle
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Into offering the slightest apology
For his Principles of Phenomenology.
– W.H. Auden

We’re living in a civilization that doesn’t understand metaphor. So they tend to concretize everything, and not even know that that’s going on.
– Marion Woodman

Don’t sign your name
between worlds,

surmount
the manifold of meanings,

trust the tearstain,
learn to live.

– Paul Celan (translated by
Nikolai Popov & Heather McHugh)

Learning to write . . . is a desperately idiosyncratic, eccentric, single-souled, lifelong quest.
– Bret Lott

Why wouldn’t I stand up for everybody, for all people?

In the country field, we’re brought up in spiritual homes, we’re taught to judge not lest you be judged …We’re supposed to love one another. We’re supposed to accept and love one another.

– Dolly Parton

When we avoid hard conversations, we’re not keeping the peace. We’re keeping the tension.
– Tiny Buddha

Why not start right now sowing seeds of joy, happiness, love, tenderness and understanding, and see what it will do to you?
– Eileen Caddy

You can’t stop dreaming just because
the night never seems to end.
– Hafiz

The best poems are like those diaphanous, undulating, deep-sea creatures that make their own light, except the ocean they swim through is silence.
– Simeon Berry

The world of your dream should be joyful and at the same time commonplace. When something is yours it seems unremarkable and has an everyday quality to it, so in order to attune yourself to a life line that corresponds to your dream you have to feel as if you already had it.
– Vadim Zeland

She is not possession but prophecy, an answered prayer in human form, arriving not to complete you, but to reflect the grace you’ve grown into.
– The Rambling Optimist

She’s less a prize, and more like the promise God made you to solidify your rise.
– Nika Solé

There’s a safety in thinking you know something, but the truth is, the most beautiful things often come out of the unknown.
– David Lynch

God transcends, the quality of real; (non-)existing, beyond existence.

All we know, are sacred metaphors; neither truth nor lies, but thicker than both.

A bell tolls, at the roots of the earth; and the silence rings, with symbols.

– @AmericanSijo

Some people read a book to discover God. But there is a greater book, the appearance of created things.

Look above and below you…The God that you want to discover did not write in letters of ink, but put in front of your eyes the very things that he made.

– St. Augustine

A heavy downpour. Stand and face the rain, let its iron rays pierce you; drift with the water that wants to sweep you away but yet stand fast, wait there, upright, for the sudden and endless shining of the sun.

– Franz Kafka, 1914.

Why don’t you just go ahead and turn off the sun
’cause we’ll never live long enough
to undo everything they’ve done to you.

– Ani di Franco

We are failing because we’re willing to do everything for money but not willing to do anything for our people.
– Muhammad Ali

A Civic Lesson In Three Voices

1.      
I sit
I no do Zen
Zen foreign religion

I call my rep
on my cell phone
in my yard a county
from the border

I sent him an email last week
I cite the law
Demand larger patrols
More raids
“Officers should ask for documents
anytime they hear a question answered ‘Si’
or see dark faces in the wrong zone
after working hours 

2.
What document?
I was born in this town
I don’t go to docs
I have no insurance
But I sometimes work at docks
as a day laborer

My father planted the tree you sit under
to call and text
sip your drink 

But my zone is more arid
though we share the first three numbers
City plants no trees
on our streets 
Paves them 
infrequently

Civic Lesson In Three Voices Cont.
3.
I hope I can explain
the 0701 special
at our Blue Corn Restaurant
It includes a mix of corn varieties
from saved seeds
That my family has grown
North of your town
before oceans rose, covered islands.
between continents
The number is the reverse of 1070 
The number of a bill called
“Safe Neighborhoods”.
 
– Jerry Pendergast
Appeared in SOLIDARITY TIMES
and Blue Collar Review

People are the best show in the world. And you don’t even pay for the ticket.
– Charles Bukowski

It’s not about a career. It’s about believing in something, it’s about prosperity. And it’s about caring and empathizing and wanting to create the best, the most true to life, the most real.
– River Phoenix

Having many cats is good. If you feel bad, you look at the cats and you feel better, because they know that everything is just the way it is. You don’t have to be nervous about anything. And they know it. They are saviors. The more cats you have, the longer you will live. If you have a hundred cats, you will live ten times longer than if you have ten. One day, this will be known and people will have thousands of cats.
– Charles Bukowski

The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.
– Albert Camus

Writing is good, thinking is better. Being smart is good, being patient is better.
– Hermann Hesse

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
– Ernest Hemingway

I never cared to get rich nor financially baronical in or through nor sideways back from any of my gifts and talents which these worker’s hands gave to me in the first place.
– Woody Guthrie

Same Old

The grey faces have it all;
Anger, resentment, despair,
That tiredness of spirit which
Comes with daily strife and
No change nor happiness in
Sight, an ever-shrinking income
When other seem so much better
Off. This sentiment is mirrored
By mournful politicians with no
Obviously obvious new ideas,
Stiff suits plying the same groove
With no apparent attempt to
Think outside the norm, risk
Averse in the extreme, when what
Is needed is dramatic and quick
Extraordinary change for the
Common good.

– Richard Pierce

Now the mountains were getting that pink tinge, I mean the rocks, they were just solid rock covered with the atoms of dust accumulated there since beginningless time. In fact I was afraid of those jagged monstrosities all around and over our heads. “They’re so silent!” I said. “Yeah man, 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

Something will flood into
your chest
like air sweetened by
desert honeysuckle,
love that is too
strong.

– Dorothy Walters

What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.
– David Mitchell

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.
– Ursula LeGuin

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

The main dish served on earth is humble pie. Just when you think you’ve accounted for all the ways you could have done better, if you are open to learning, you will discover whole new categories of errors and missteps you hadn’t even considered were possible. The main enzyme that allows us to digest, rather than just choke, on humble pie, is forgiveness (of self, and others). We really have barely a clue of what we are doing a lot of the time, even when we are doing our best, no less on our “off” days. Forgiveness is just letting go and accepting: letting go of the idealized versions of ourselves and others we expend so much energy presenting and holding others to; and accepting that our development is a process and not a finished product. Yum!! Another slice please!
– Gil Hedley

The descent into the unconscious is always dangerous. It can be visualized as being devoured by the whale-dragon, as going down into a dark cave or into the castle of the evil magician. We go there to get something. As a rule, it is a valuable treasure or a precious stone.
– C.G. Jung

Literary critic here. The only political work of literature is actually Dracula, which is an allegory for capitalism. All of the others are autonomous aesthetic objects.
– John Attridge

I abandoned
my hometown
with cherry trees in bloom
– Issa

May
by Geoffrey G. O’Brien

This is a love poem. It has no business.
It happens in that anyway world
Where the bodies are by now decided
To get all the way up, accompanied
By changes in temperature and light
Welcome and unwelcome both,
Lie down, get up, go prone again,

Get nowhere in time. I won’t
Reduce to a single preposition
A relation to the one person about it
Like grass. Who has a pronoun, a name,
Three or four even, which globe,
Without containing, her experience,
Of which I chase awareness till

Her letters are with one exception
All over this deepening sheet, name-
Blind blue of a cloudless day.
Unconcerned with property disputes,
The poem gradually permits itself
To figure grass, the blue of the sky
Because we see those first kinds

Of immense quiet as sleepers
While walking the dog in the hills
And store them for future use
As simile and metaphor, each
ancient and suspiciously free
Of present disaster. But today royally is
Blue and cloudless, this blue, this

Unironic absence of clouds over green
That makes you temporarily more
Intelligent, makes time harder to track
Until it seems it’s always been
Only this pleasure somewhere
Between hours in the form of a bell
Melting mid-ring. The poem’s now

Broken one of its rules in order
To keep ringing. Because I want to
Be smarter than true it continues
To disobey the trace of my injuries,
Remembering home is not a place
One at all leaves or gets to
But supremely anonymous

Relations with rhythm, a fragrance
Where skin meets time on which
No pronouns fall, here in the presence of.
Not lasting but repeatable and
Each of the instances claimed
For the series, belonging with the ones
That came before it, the others

Still to come but not in doubt,
Yesterday moving on top of tomorrow.
If blue were an all-day affair work
Didn’t tear us apart in, but held
As shape and song, the anonymous one
Playing on repeat, referencing nothing but
The very red distraction I attend to

Where bed turns each afternoon away
Along the suede sound of good decay
There’s still plenty of time to invent,
None of it spent in advance, then,
In intuition of every day to come,
The flowers lasting for more than a week,
Blue growing down to grass,
It would be like this.

Many red devils ran from my heart
And out upon the page.
They were so tiny
The pen could mash them.
And many struggled in the ink.
It was strange To write in this red muck
Of things from my heart.
– Stephen Crane

Silence is of different kinds,
and breathes different meanings
– Charlotte Brontë

You are only in need of a narrative when you think that you’ve done something wrong.
– Berto Consalvi

I’ll ask myself / whether I regret very much / not belonging to a land of green
– Anna Kamienska

In some sense every path, conventional or spiritual, is about the pursuit of happiness and liberation from suffering. With the Dharma, the teacher, and the practice of self-reflection, we could begin achieving these goals here and now. We could do this by going beyond the habitual tendencies that cause suffering and pain. But are we really willing to change our approach? Are we willing to be present long enough to see our habits? This is the challenge of self-reflection.

The possibility of change exposes our love affair with ourselves. And no matter how painful that relationship has been, we may suddenly question our willingness to change. Most of us like ourselves very much. We are somewhat addicted to being who we think we are. Maybe we could just keep it that way. The idea of change feels like being unfaithful to ourselves. So we resist change and become illogically stubborn about holding on to habitual patterns.

– Dzigar Kongtrul, It’s Up to You

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My mind was going numb –

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –

– Emily Dickinson

I’ve seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write… and you know it’s a funny thing about housecleaning… it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectability) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she “should” be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Oh god this whole universe is the 5 dimensional ripples cascading out from the beginning of the universe, we’re all just an echo playing itself outward from the impact of the originating higher-dimensional event, like a tsunami radiating outward from an underwater earthquake
– River Kenna

Technology was made for man and not man for technology.
– Aldous Huxley

Well, let it pass; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

I would like to step out of my heart and go walking beneath the enormous sky.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

The truth is I cannot do two things at the same time, nor anything perfunctorily.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Now I tell kids who are in workshops, It’s not your teachers you want to please, it’s your peers—they’re the ones who are going to be your readers. Your teachers are all going to die off within the next fifteen years, forget them.
– Jane Smiley

Can anything befall Thy children for which Thou hast no help? Surely, if the face of Thy world lie not, joy and not grief is at the heart of the universe. Is there none for me?
– George MacDonald

Words hold me in: I’m alone with what I never said.
– Theodore Roethke

Wisdom is knowing consciously what the fool knows intuitively.
– Berto Consalvi

Communication itself can be a vehicle for contemplative practice and transformation.
– Oren Jay Sofer

The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
– Walt Whitman

World is a multi-dimensional reality. At lower level it is full with unconsciousness and competitiveness. At higher level it is full with beauty, bliss and divinity. Focus on higher dimensions.
– Amit Ray

The way in which you perceive the other is determined by your own thought forms.
– Eckhart Tolle

Still part of me must still believe in the permeability of membranes between one human heart, one lifespan, and another. Otherwise I would not read books.
– Ander Monson

Greedy as usual
He swallows Karma
We watch implosion
– Rachel Newcombe

In the deepening spring of May, I had no choice but to recognize the trembling of my heart.
– Sylvia Plath

When you are used to
the kind of life – of never
getting anything you
want- you stop knowing
what it is you want.


– Haruki Murakami

Jung’s individuation process is usually experienced after middle age or toward the end of life. It is not a withdrawal from life, but life itself–a way between man-the-seen and his soul-the-unseen. It is a way of transformation toward experiencing the wholeness.
– Maude Oakes

Any time you identify a wasteland element in your life—illness, boredom, lethargy, alienation, emptiness, loss, addiction, failure, anger, or outrage—it is time to take a journey. You can be called to the quest by such dissatisfaction or simply by a desire for adventure.
– Carol S. Pearson

To be married is to learn to love, captive in your own new country.
– Katie Chase

Death would hurt only for a moment, which was not so bad when one considered how much, and for how long, life hurt.
– Viet Thanh Nguyen

Only the spontaneous action of the people themselves can create liberty.
– Mikhail Bakunin

For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.
– Seneca

Because common sense is never more than an inherited amalgam of past clarities and past confusions, the defenders of common sense are unlikely to enlighten us.
– Alasdair MacIntyre

Genius and madness have something in common: both live in a world that is different from that which exists for everyone else.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

His moral clarity stems from the view that compassion and nonviolence are not signs of weakness but necessary tools of resistance.
– Bhuchung D. Sonam

A hundred years of education is nothing compared to one moment spent with God.
– Shams Tabrizi

It is the food which you furnish to your mind that determines the whole character of your life.
– Emmet Fox

I often think that men
don’t understand what is noble
and what is ignorant, though they
always talk about it.
– Leo Tolstoy

Every bird flies with their own kind, eagles with eagles, crows with crows.
– Ibn Arabi

No matter how bad things get, there’s something good out there, just over the horizon.
– Hal Jordan, Green Lantern

Try to enjoy the great festival of life with others.
– Epitectus

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.
– Ernest Hemingway

I have long had this premonition
of a bright day and a deserted house.
– Anna Akhmatova

I know that hate
can unleash vast
energies, but so
can love.

– Madeleine L Engle

It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once.
– JB Pritzker

Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.
– Fernando Pessoa

The charging restless mute unvoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power.
– Jack Kerouac

If you get rid of qualities you don’t like by denying them, you become more and more unaware of what you are, you declare yourself more and more non-existent, and your devils will grow fatter and fatter.
– CG Jung

I only know that I will never again trust my life, my future, to the whims of men.
– Toni Morrison

Writing has been a torture for me. A pleasure, never. Now it’s not so painful—I’m used to the process, and I don’t suffer as much as I used to. But for years and years I’d feel the world filling up with mist, fog—death—seeping in through the windows.
– Vivian Gornick

Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry – a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language – an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.
– Edward Hirsch

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
– James Baldwin

All night I hear
so many echoes in the forest I’m tempted
to look back, to save myself in hindsight,
where all I see is the absence of me.
Where all I hear is your voice…
– Chard deNiord

The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them.
– John Ruskin

The paradox is built in and fairly obvious: we seek the reserved, the mysterious, the infinite as at once breaking, speaking through presence and as already withdrawn. But if we think that we have found it, that we have stripped away its veils and seen its secrets, then we have not, in fact, found the reserved or mysterious at all; we have, instead, destroyed it. To seek the mystery, then, must be not only to wonder, but to continue to seek to wonder, to seek to continue to wonder. And that must mean to seek both questions and answers, because the desire to find answers is no small part of what it is to wonder or ask questions in the first place. The answers have the character of never being quite enough, never quite perfect, and this is both our frustration and our delight.
– Karmen MacKendrick

There’s nothing so enchanting as a glimpse of the innumerable mysteries that surround us.
– Vítězslav Nezva

At night when everyone is silent and everything is still, I lie in the darkness of my windowless room, the place where they exile me from the community of their heart, and search the unmoving blackness to see if I can find my way home. I tell myself stories, write poems, record my dreams. In my journal I write—I belong in this place of words. This is my home. This dark, bone black inner cave where I am making a world for myself.
– Bell Hooks

INTERVIEWER: I read that you started writing after your divorce as a way of beating back the loneliness. Was that true, and do you write for different reasons now?

MORRISON: Sort of. Sounds simpler than it was. I don’t know if I was writing for that reason or some other reason—or one that I don’t even suspect. I do know that I don’t like it here if I don’t have something to write.

INTERVIEWER: Here, meaning where?

MORRISON: Meaning out in the world. It is not possible for me to be unaware of the incredible violence, the willful ignorance, the hunger for other people’s pain. I’m always conscious of that though I am less aware of it under certain circumstances—good friends at dinner, other books. Teaching makes a big difference, but that is not enough. Teaching could make me into someone who is complacent, unaware, rather than part of the solution. So what makes me feel as though I belong here out in this world is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover, but what goes on in my mind when I am writing. Then I belong here and then all of the things that are disparate and irreconcilable can be useful. I can do the traditional things that writers always say they do, which is to make order out of chaos. Even if you are reproducing the disorder, you are sovereign at that point. Struggling through the work is extremely important—more important to me than publishing it.

INTERVIEWER: If you didn’t do this. Then the chaos would—

MORRISON: Then I would be part of the chaos.

– Toni Morrison

Fear defeated me. And yet, not in faith and not in madness but with the courage I thought my dream deserved, I stepped outside.
– Mary Oliver

The little things that you saw with a child’s eye and that will never go away. That’s what consciousness is all about.
– Derek Mahon

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.
– Zora Neale Hurston

Signs imply ways of living, possibilities of existence, they are the symptoms of an overflowing (jaillissante) or exhausted (épuisée) life. But an artist cannot be content with an exhausted life, nor with a personal life. One does not write with one’s ego, one’s memory, and one’s illnesses. In the act of writing there’s an attempt to make life something more personal, to liberate life from what imprisons it…There is a profound link between signs, the event, life, and vitalism. It is the power of nonorganic life, that which can be found in a line of a drawing, a line of writing, a line of music. It is organisms that die, not life. There is no work of art that does not indicate an opening for life, a path between the cracks. Everything I have written has been vitalistic, at least I hope so, and constitutes a theory of signs and the event.
– Gilles Deleuze

INSOMNIA

All over the world people can’t sleep.
In different times zones they’re lying awake
Bodies still, minds trudging along like child laborers.
They worry about bills, they worry whether the shoes they just bought are really too small.
One’s husband’s died, her son left for college
and she doesn’t know how to program the VCR.
Another was beaten by her husband
One is planning a getaway
One holding stolen goods.
One’s on the plaid couch in ICU.
His daughter, it turned out
Actually goes have a tumour
Even though the doctor said they’d do the MRI just to rule it out.
The woman on the other couch is snoring
which is strangely soothing
Evidence that people do sleep.
Some are lying on
Charisma sheets
Some in hammocks
Some in jail
Some under bridges
One is at the north pole studying the impact of pollution
A man in Massachusetts thinks about a lover he once had in Dar es Salaam and the jasmine
blossoms she strung along the shaft of a silver pin fastened in her hair at night.
Coincidentally, the lover, now in Rome, remembers looking out the window over the sink
where she was washing dishes
And seeing him reading in the lawn chair
and she thought how perhaps for the first time she wasn’t lonely. They’re all up.
some are too cold,
some too hot.
some hungry,
some in pain
Some are in hotels listening to people having sex in the next room Some are crying
One the cat woke up and now she’s worried about the rash she noticed in the evening and
wonders if her daughter who’s afraid to swim should be pushed
Some get up
Others stay in bed
They eat oreos, or drink wine
Or both
Many read
A few make Hallowe’en costumes
Some check their email
They try sleep tapes, hypnosis, drugs
They listen to their clocks tick
Smartly, as a woman in high heels
Those who can, cling to their mates
An ear pressed to those neighboring lungs
Like a stethoscope hoping to catch a ride on the steady sleep breath of the other
to be carried like a seed on the body of one who is able.
Right now in Japan dawn is coming, and everyone who’s been up all night is relieved;
they can stop trying
In Guatemala though the insomniacs are just getting started
and have the whole night ahead of them.
It’s like a wave at the baseball stadium,
hands around the world.
So here’s a prayer for the wakeful
The souls who can’t rest as you lie with your eyes open or closed May something comfort you—a mockingbird, a breeze,
the smell of crushed mint rain on the roof,
Chopin’s Nocturnes your child’s birth a kiss, or even me—in my chilly kitchen with my coat on—thinking of you

– Ellen Bass

The wind rustles the oak leaves: it is the voice of a god which speaks, and the trembling prophet listens, his face bent towards earth. What is the trembling that the mystic priest feels as on a storm night he draws close to the sacred oak?

[…]

One of the strangest and deepest sensations that prehistory has left with us is the sensation of foretelling. It will always exist. It is like an eternal proof of the senselessness of the universe. The first man must have seen auguries everywhere, he must have trembled at each step he took.

– Giorgio de Chirico

A touch of the hand and this burning would, on the instant, beautifully reverse itself. Eckels remembered the wording in the advertisements to the letter. Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything fly back to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in western skies and set in glorious easts, moons eat themselves opposite to the custom, all and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes, rabbits into hats, all and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death, to the time before the beginning. A touch of a hand might do it, the merest touch of a hand.
– Ray Bradbury

As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (…) You don’t pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.
– Julio Cortázar

Live in yourself. There is a whole
deep world of being in your soul,
burdened with mystery and thought.
The noise outside will snuff it out.
Day’s clear light can break the spell.
Hear your own singing — and be still.
– Fyodor Tyutchev, (translated by John Cournos)

She asked, though these were not her exact words: Isn’t all the work part of a single piece? She asked, like someone patiently unlocking, with a pin, a pair of handcuffs: Aren’t all the photographs and texts, the fragments and experiments, even the things you say into a microphone, even the things you don’t say, aren’t they all installments toward a unified project?
– Teju Cole, Blind Spot

100 days. 100 hints on singing. No. 42.

“Tekubi,” “ashikubi”, “kubi,” are a trio of our freedoms, neck, ankles, and wrists. Their linguistic commonality in Japanese speaks to their common function, conduits of freedom to our extremities, hand, head, and feet. If we cultivate their freedom we become better painters, better dancers, better singers, each part contributing to the whole and the whole to each part. That is certainly what F. M. Alexander saw in the head, neck, torso relationship, a facilitator of freedom throughout the torso, a tune to which ankles and wrists are counterpoint. Free your neck in order for the wrists and ankles to be free, free your ankles in order for the neck and wrists to be free, free your wrists in order for the ankles and neck to be free, your whole body an organ of singing. You’ll never find the all of it, but that part of it for today, begin it now. Waiting is not an option.

After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live – to die – to burst into flame – to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny. By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning – and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them. In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.
– Steven Millhauser

This leading-edge research echoes what ancient wisdom has always known: that each organ of the body, including the brain, speaks its own “thoughts,” “feelings,” and “promptings,” and listens to those of all the others.
– Ann Frederick

People who study anatomy and the development of the eye have shown that the retina is, in fact, the brain: in the development of the embryo, a piece of the brain comes out in front, and long fibers grow back, connecting the eyes to the brain. The retina is organized in just the way the brain is organized and, as someone has beautifully put it, “The brain has developed a way to look out upon the world.” The eye is a piece of brain that is touching light, so to speak, on the outside.

– Richard Feynman

Privacy, intimacy, anonymity and the right to secrets are all to be left outside the premises of the Society of Consumers. […] Since we are all commodities, we are obliged to create demand for ourselves. Membership of the confessional society is invitingly open to all, but there is a heavy penalty attached to staying outside. […] The updated version of Descartes’s Cogito is ‘I am seen, therefore I am’ – and that the more people who see me, the more I am…
– Zygmunt Bauman

In all kinds of healing practices, at least in West Africa, the idea is that knowledge is precious, and you learn it over a long period of time. In time, you become the custodian of that knowledge. Your greatest obligation, however, is to pass that knowledge onto the next generation. If the knowledge is correct, it will continue to be used. Everything that I’ve written about my teacher and my own experiences as his apprentice, has been an attempt to convey the wonder of the world he exposed me to. My hope is that my work will in some way ensure that this knowledge will not disappear. My hope is that Adamu Jenitongo’s wise practices will persevere and that they will be recognized, appreciated, and extended to the issues that we face today in the world.
– Anna Badkhen, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

when the eye stops the heart
What then are we to do
with all those moments
when the eye stops
the heart
That gesture there, that glint
of beauty going by
And the thought, Who will remember
it if I don’t?

That daub of heaven
on a half-lowered eye-
lid

– Vasiliki Katsarou

There is tremendous power in unearthing, in recognizing distracted, scattered mind, the mind which would rather be anywhere but here, and spending some time there, with that mind. Rather than being an anonymous voice from the dark bossing you around, scattered mind is someone you can sit down and hang out with.
– Jusan Ed Brown

At present the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid-of-the Year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests.
– William Arrowsmith

From The Long Sad Party

Someone was saying
something about shadows covering the field, about
how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning
and the morning goes.

Someone was saying
how the wind dies down but comes back,
how shells are the coffins of wind
but the weather continues.

It was a long night
and someone said something about the moon shedding its white
on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead
but more of the same.

Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two candles against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.
We begin to believe
the night would not end.
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had noticed. Then someone said something about the planets, about the stars,
how small they were, how far away.

– Mark Strand

An excellent question to ask ourselves is, “Who would I be without this story? This belief? This identity? This fear?” This question takes courage, because we have to look beyond the safety of the familiar.
– Ezra Bayda

In Fascism the nightmare of my childhood has come true.
– Adorno

We take tea breaks to refresh the body —
why not take peace breaks to refresh the mind?
Each day, I pause for a few quiet moments…
not to escape, but to return to myself.
– Brahma Kumaris

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.
– William Faulkner

Left to its own devices, my mind spends much of its time having conversations with people who aren’t there.
– Anne Lamott

A Spring Morning
by John Clare

The Spring comes in with all her hues and smells,
In freshness breathing over hills and dells;
O’er woods where May her gorgeous drapery flings,
And meads washed fragrant by their laughing springs.
Fresh are new opened flowers, untouched and free
From the bold rifling of the amorous bee.
The happy time of singing birds is come,
And Love’s lone pilgrimage now finds a home;
Among the mossy oaks now coos the dove,
And the hoarse crow finds softer notes for love.
The foxes play around their dens, and bark
In joy’s excess, ’mid woodland shadows dark.
The flowers join lips below; the leaves above;
And every sound that meets the ear is Love.

CAN YOU … ?

Can you BE just ONE
And see the many
As Your SELF?

Can you look upon
The body as a garment you wear
But NOT Who You Are?

Can you listen to all
The stories and dramas
And see them as a dream?

– John McIntosh

At sixteen, I memorized Keats’s odes and wrote them out, to see how it felt to write incontestably great poetry. … His language—it’s right at the edge of the cliff.
– Robert Glück

Posting a letter and getting married are among the few things left that are entirely romantic; for to be entirely romantic a thing must be irrevocable.
– G.K. Chesterton

Don’t waste your time chasing butterflies.
Mend your garden, and the butterflies will come.
– Mário Quintana

My friend’s trying to convert me to Christianity. His argument can be summed up as, “It’s impossible to know anything unless there’s a god, so God exists.” I told him I can accept that it’s impossible to know things.
– @wylfcen

When we stop trying to force an answer from the level of mind, and relax inward toward the gentle flow of the soul, we naturally align with our truth and begin to experience a sense of calm.
– Rebecca Baldwin

When the centerpiece of your revolution is a regulated nervous system, you’re going to have to get used to what you do and how you do it looking different than everyone else.
– Nika Solé

Anguish and Hope
by Stefan George

Anguish and hope in turn seize me.
My words trail off in sighing.
Such tempestuous longing assails me
That I do not turn to rest or sleep
That tears flood my couch,
That I ward off every pleasure,
That I seek no friend’s consolation.

Telling lonely people they should talk to A.I. is like telling obese people to eat more.
– @moveorperish

Flowers only, and the moonlight-coloured May.
– Virginia Woolf

Seekers don’t understand that the goal isn’t to find something, but to be found

Those who look down on seekers don’t understand that you can be Found more easily if you look for what’s looking for you.

– River Pilgrim

Darkened our paths are and dreamlike,
We tread them and lo! they are watery
Ways of delusion!

– Issa (translated by Lewis MacKenzie)

The horror of inhabiting myself, of being — how strange — my guest, my passenger, my place of exile.
– Pizarnik

in a field of grass
come the inevitable
wildflowers

– Issa

Let the clouds come, clouds
are vague.

– Patricia Hampl

Knowing yourself deeply has nothing to do
with whatever ideas are floating around in your mind.
Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being,
instead of lost in your mind.

– Eckhart Tolle

A lot of people are not able to heal simply because they are identified with what they would be healing from.
– Nika Solé

Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars.
– Adorno

I really struggle with
whether a supreme
being would actually
have created all this.
– Andy Perrin

Metropolis New York!
by Itshe Slutsky

translated from the Yiddish by Daniel Kraft

Metropolis New York!
At your wide shores
I lie, a weary wanderer,
broken and facing you.
I sing and sing my own rhymed plea:
rescue me from the high seas.

Expelled from nations, tortured
and consumed,
I lie and wait
all day and night, all night and day
for your
“please, come inside.”

But you are deaf to my lament,
you city of millions.
What do you care
if one small mite passes away
in pain
beneath your lurid concrete?

If a doctor really wants to cure their patients they need to obsess about nutrition, exercise, and supplementation.
– Dan Go

When you no longer need to control everything, you open yourself to the miracles of the unknown.
– Rebecca Campbell

We live in an age in which everything done inside a house is called ‘drudgery’ while anything done inside an office is called ‘enterprise.’
– G. K. Chesterton

Finally learned that forcing doesn’t work. It’s all about putting in effort without attachment and letting things align.

What’s meant for you won’t necessarily be easy, but it also won’t feel like an impossible uphill battle.

– Yung Pueblo

Bitter are the roots of study, but how sweet their fruit.
– Cato

in the ancient city
there are many buddhas
the scent of flowers

– Basho

If everything is energy, which it is ~ then everything is because of energy.
– Serge Benhayon

Sometimes not getting what you want
is part of the process, too…

– Nakeia Homer

Dantès was struck dumb: this was indeed the explanation of what had gone on, without him knowing it, in his mind – or rather, his soul: some thoughts come from the head, others from the heart.

– Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

The song of an old cow is not more full of judgment
than the vapors which escape one’s soul when one is sick;
– Frank O’Hara

Remember above all that mental stability comes by examining the contents of the mind, not by avoidance.

– Vernon Howard

Don’t prolong the past.
Don’t invite the future.
Don’t alter your innate wakefulness.
Don’t fear appearances.
There is nothing more than that!

– Patrul Rinpoche

If you want to determine the nature of anything, entrust it to time: when the sea is stormy, you can see nothing clearly.
– Seneca

beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.
– Roger Scruton

You do not get awards from the establishment unless you (and your work) promote and maintain the establishment.
– @PaperWhispers

Just to be allowed to write poems would have satisfied me. After I’d taught my delightful, studious high school class in the day, I’d go home and I’d write poetry, and it’d be published under a pseudonym. That was all I wanted from life.
– Gerald Murnane

To the heart in you, don’t be afraid to feel.
To the sun in you, don’t be afraid to shine.
To the love in you, don’t be afraid to heal.

To the ocean in you, don’t be afraid to rage.
To the silence in you, don’t be afraid to break.

– Najwa Zebian

You gave me some of it; beauty I sought
before I was even aware how much I needed it.
I know this world is terrible & that one must, above all,
hold onto the heart & the hearts of others.
I love you
– Al Young

We often mistake interdependence (relying on one another) for codependence (enabling one another). What makes a relationship codependent is not whether you depend on each other, but whether you enable each other’s destructive behaviors and choices.
– Brad Schipke

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages — a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers.
– Haruki Murakami

He was a hermit; true peace, for him, meant staying indoors, staying put in a familiar place.
– Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts

Anyone who is unable to understand a god sees it as a devil. “Devil” is a word we use for another peoples’ god.
– Joseph Campbell

Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no ‘moments of truth.’ It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which themselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one’s own unanswered.
– Thomas Pynchon

Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.
– Emily Dickinson

All enforceable political decisions must be formulated in a language that is equally accessible to all citizens, and it must be possible to justify them in this language as well.
– Jürgen Habermas

His whole being was in agony, but his mind was still wrapped in a fog of confusion.
– Kafka

Sitting 10,000 hours on a cushion does not entitle you to any kind of insight or enlightenment. We have to be open to the fact that we may not achieve anything that corresponds to our preconceived idea of what the goal of the practice might be.
– Stephen Batchelor

Know you not that a good man does nothing for appearance sake, but for the sake of having done right?
– Epictetus

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
– Golda Meir

The demand for relief or sanity that is contained in confusion is the beginning point of Buddhism.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Shaolin teaches: the enemy is not outside—it’s the part of you that still resists obedience to your higher self.
– Marinet Matthee

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview — nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation…
– Stephen Jay Gould

Do not be afraid of difficulties; sometimes they open the best opportunities.
– Rita Levi-Montalcini

Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is….never let your enemies choose your enemies for you.
– Assata Shakur

He who abandons what ought to be done, and does what ought not to be done, perishes like a man who plants a tree in salt soil.
– Verse 4.84, Manusmriti

Many people know that they have complexes; but few recognize the fact that the complexes have them.
– Carl Jung

What I want is to open up. I want to know what’s inside me. I want everybody to open up. I’m like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin…to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I’m sure of it.
– Henry Miller

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.
– Robert Frank

I don’t think it’s a great idea to design a world where a few countries say ‘ha-ha-ha, we won’ and the rest of the countries are envious. Trade should not be a weapon.
– Warren Buffet

The ultimate test of your knowledge is your capacity to convey it to another.
– Richard Feynman

We talk about them, not because we’re stuck or because we haven’t moved on, but we talk about them because we are theirs, and they are ours, and no passage of time will ever change that.
– Scribbles & Crumbs

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.
– Franz Kafka

One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
– James Baldwin

A writer’s problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it is such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.
– Ernest Hemingway

Changes may come in small ways to begin with, but as you move further and further into the new, they will become more drastic and vital. Sometimes it needs a complete upheaval to bring about a whole new way of life.
– Eileen Caddy

Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.
– Simone de Beauvoir

Do the kind of things that come from the heart, When you do, you won’t be dissatisfied, you won’t be envious, you won’t be longing for somebody else’s things. On the contrary, you’ll be overhelmed with what comes back.
– Morrie Schwartz

The fact that our task is exactly as large as our life
makes it appear infinite.
– Franz Kafka

Is it not, therefore, if we talk of decolonization, of undoing white supremacy, of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, our sacred duty to see what is right before us?

The extraordinarily intense fight of the “Global South” to completely dismantle and destroy, for good, the “Masters’ House?” This isn’t only an external battle; it is indeed, at its root, an internal battle for each of us. Even on this level, which is well within the realm of the Dharma, we should be connecting the dots.

We must understand that the soul of humanity is now buried in the rubble of Gaza. That our child-like, innocent hope for the beauty of our higher dreams has been devastatingly, cruelly amputated. That our voices that cry out for the creative potential of our own inner, eternal, child-ancient-spirit have been trampled. The joy of planting nourishing seeds in fertile soil, to nurture with community and family, has been burned and scorched by fire and bombs.

Don’t you see? The beauty, poetry, life-force, joy, hope, and future of humanity lie strewn across the devastation of Gaza, its wastelands of decimated bones of innocents, lost to us all as we too lose ourselves.

Haven’t you felt it? We are falling apart, we are dissolving, not in a good way, but in a psychotic way–shattered–unable to sleep well, feeling no deep peace, awash in the sea of samsara,–the island of refuge ever receding.

There is no inner or outer, no here or there, really, in reality. It is all within this one mind, this one heart. What we do to others, what is done in our name, we do to ourselves.

But, it’s never too late to find that deep nugget of genuine truth and speak it where and when it matters–well, it may be one day too late–so don’t dilly-dally. To renounce false gods and understand that safety will never be found in the destruction of others.

Isn’t this leap beyond the mind of false dreams built on old fears what we practice for? Isn’t it so we can, as we must, die, having completed the task of truly, on all levels and in all ways, truly dissolved the myth of separateness into the blissful, fulfilling love of our true, authentic inter-being within and without?

Isn’t it…. ???

Isn’t it, with each breath–Gate gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi svaha ???

– Mary Thanissara

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
– Samuel Butler

It’s better to bet on this life than on the next.
– Albert Camus

Heaven was no safer.
– Ovid, Metamorphoses

For Those Who’ve Been Told by The Rich
to Vote for Them in the Name of God Be

careful who teaches you
what God is.
Listen. Those fools
don’t care about you.
They make you afraid of your neighbor;
they make you afraid
of your own soul
so you hand it to them,
so they can dance inside their palaces.
They make you think
their ruinous news is new.

Listen. Your leaders
would pass you by
if you were bleeding in the street
in agony.
But Christ-whose name
they trade in—
Christ would stop
and kiss your blood for nothing
and lay down his own clothes
on your shoulders
and whisper in your ear,
as he kneels with you,
Leave them. They know exactly what they do.

– Joseph Fasano

Nobody becomes a writer overnight.
Well, I’m sure somebody did,
but that person’s head probably went all asplodey
from paroxysms of joy, fear, paranoia,
guilt and uncertainty.
Celebrities can be born overnight.
Writers can’t. Writers are made—
forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness
and insecurities—
over the course of many, many moons.
The writer you are when you begin
is not the same writer you become.

– Chuck Wendig

You have touched me with the frenzy of poetry.
– Forough Farrokhzad

The more neatly you fit into society, the less free you actually are.
– @naval

Water, uniting star and flower,
Incites to thirst with celestial
Splendors in which are blue kingdoms
Shipwrecked by love.

– Juan Ramón Jiménez (translated by H. R. Hays)

Thou shalt look us out of pain.
– George Herbert

The Glance
by George Herbert

When first thy sweet and gracious eye
Vouchsafed ev’n in the midst of youth and night
To look upon me, who before did lie
Welt’ring in sin;
I felt a sug’red strange delight,
Passing all cordials made by any art,
Bedew, embalm, and overrun my heart,
And take it in.

Since that time many a bitter storm
My soul hath felt, ev’n able to destroy,
Had the malicious and ill-meaning harm
His swing and sway:
But still thy sweet original joy
Sprung from thine eye, did work within my soul,
And surging griefs, when they grew bold, control,
And got the day.

If thy first glance so powerful be,
A mirth but opened and sealed up again;
What wonders shall we feel, when we shall see
Thy full-eyed love!
When thou shalt look us out of pain,
And one aspect of thine spend in delight
More than a thousand suns disburse in light,
In heav’n above.

The broken will always be able to love harder than most. Once you’ve been in the dark, you learn to appreciate everything that shines.
– Zachry K. Douglas

But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.
– Haruki Murakami

One fails to see life as it is, because one tends so much to build one’s own version of it.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Flowers do not tend to be dangerous.
Poems, in my opinion, always are.

– Lucie Brock-Broido

There’s no shame in
admitting that you
were previously
speaking from a less
informed place.

– Kelly Hayes

Aesthetic appreciation does not mean looking for beauty alone. It means looking at things with space around them.
– Chögyam Trungpa

At the very thought of “circus” a swarm of long-imprisoned desires breaks jail. Armed with beauty and demanding justice and everywhere threatening us with curiosity and spring and childhood, this mob of forgotten wishes begins to storm the impregnable fortifications of our present.
– e.e. cummings

Emerging from / an Abyss and / entering it again / that is Life, is / it not?

– Emily Dickinson

As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
– Edith Wharton

Beauty is the convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience and change of consciousness. I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.

– Iris Murdoch

I would like to think that I have encouraged people with whom I’ve worked and studied to cultivate the very important and powerful trait of loyalty. I am a very loyal person. I’m loyal to people and to things and to cities and to ideas. People will change and fail and make foolish mistakes, but I don’t abandon them; my love for them doesn’t cease in the least. Our city crumbles and darkens and seems adrift, but I don’t move; I stay and love it it back to health, and it returns to the beautiful condition in which I found it. The theatre changes and shrinks, but I see the core of it all, which is glorious and proud and will never die. I’m loyal to what I love, and I try to love as much as I can as many as I can. Take the long walk with those people and things and places that you love. The rewards are too much to bear, in the best possible sense.
– Marian Seldes

Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us, because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.
– Umberto Eco

Yours is the light by which my spirit’s born: – you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.
– e.e. cummings

Absolutely. For instance, the word intimacy, even in the most radical psychology, doesn’t mean the same thing in the context of the self-care process. Generally speaking, intimacy tends to refer to sharing something personal — perhaps in a felt way, but primarily through information. Intimacy in the context of self-care means opening energetically to another human being — not knowing them as anything other than a radiant mystery.

For me, the greatest fulfillment in doing what I do arises from experiencing another person as a great opening, a huge space. We sit together with the eyes closed and I can feel who they are. This body only appears to be an enclosure. It is actually a passageway — like an entry to a cave or a cathedral. It is quite the opposite of the way we’ve been taught to perceive it.

– Stephen R. Schwartz

Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these— the untrimmable light of the world, the ocean’s shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?
– Mary Oliver

It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.
– Randall Jarrell

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
– W.C. Fields

I believe that life is hateful when you simply accept the natural order of things: When you submit. We must contribute. We must anticipate. Do you remember how glorious life was on Friday afternoons? How grisly on Sunday nights? You know what I mean. Expectation. The glorious, colorful life comes to those who expect it, dream it. Remember how grand life was when the circus or the fair was imminent? Colors changed. More dramatic than the change of seasons was the change of attitudes. So expect the circus, always. Be the circus.
– Tennessee Williams

If you criticize others judgmentally, rather than simply commenting on their behavior impartially, that shows that you have their faults to work on in yourself. By criticizing others, moreover, you increase those faults in yourself.
– Paramhansa Yogananda

The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography…
– Tolkien

Our revolt is as ill conceived as the world which provokes it.
– Emil Cioran

leaning unapologetically into my feminine sides is making me feel much more casually comfortable leaning into my masculine sides.
– River Kenna

I’m a good person. / I grieve to appropriate degrees. / I mourn this season. This moment.
– Paul Guest

Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.
– D. H. Lawrence

If we be more nearly real we are reasons arraigned before a jury of dream-phantasms.
– Charles Fort

Go whither love leads you; yet beware!

– Gwindor (Tolkien, The Silmarillion)

If we muted the emotional tone of experience, we would feel like something essential was missing.
– Pascal Auclair

That in the impossibility was the hard claw of beauty.
– Clarice Lispector

We are where we have been for thousands and thousands of years. We seem to have changed very little, psychologically, inwardly.
– Krishnamurti

The vast majority of mental health problems can be improved by fixing your physical health.
– Dan Go

Even in difficult times, we are often wholeheartedly alive. The key is not to numb out, but to allow our vulnerability to teach us.
– Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara

Be at That this
Come as If when
Stay or Soon then
Ever happen It will

– Robert Creeley

External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.
– Marcus Aurelius

We are heading for a far more vicious time.
– Hunter S. Thompson

Jung observed that a neurosis is always found in the flight from authentic suffering. Naturally, no one wants to suffer, but Jung’s observation suggests that there is a distinction between authentic and inauthentic suffering.
– James Hollis

Dreams are misleading, because they make life seem real.
– Robert Aickman

What does the soul call the tongue | red bridge | pet horse | wet instrument | Sing to me from a distance | like a possesed bell | without a clapper | Let us salute as sunflowers | salute across the crowded | room of a dream.

– Willa Carroll

Tolkien “confessed to me once that some were disappointed by how little he had done in the academic way, but that he had chosen to explore his own vision of things.”
– V.A. Kolve, student of Tolkien’s

The air turned red. The ocean grew teeth.
– Marie Howe

If it holds no truth, then it cannot truly be story.
– Madeleine L’Engle

Reconciliation is not an end point of practice. It is a beginning place for continuing to free your heart.
– Phillip Moffitt

As we find a way to live with the new normal of climate change, I want to write the lament that [. . .] is the kind of song of reluctant acceptance you might hum to yourself at the end of a relationship [. . .].
– Keetje Kuipers

But beyond the golden yearning
of that evensong of flame
Stretch eternities of splendour
Ardent ages without name.

– J.R.R. Tolkien, Sunset in a Town

You are so loved and needed in this world. Always remember your worth …we each have a unique and distinctive gift to contribute to others for the good of all.
– Sherri Bishop

‘Worst is a bad word,’ I said to him, ‘and I hope you do not live to see it.’
– J.R.R. Tolkien (Gandalf)

We say “peace of mind” but really what we want is peace from mind.
– @naval

A pretty and attractive mindset harbors the landscape for productivity.
– @Lastofawriters1

The state of no-mind is the psychology of the Buddhas. And only a man who has tasted the state of no-mind is really sane, is really healthy and whole.
– Osho

Art is anything you can get away with.
– Marshall McLuhan

Anxiety can just as well express itself by muteness as by a scream.
– Søren Kierkegaard

It is not only the arrow that delivers sorrow.

Walking alone through the storm-blown
after a dinner crowded with voices can be

its own devastation.

– Keetje Kuipers

What did I need money for, when I had friends.
– Henry Miller

she follows
a twisty-curvy road
away from home
she begs the question
where do I go now?
– @lafcadiopoetry

Unable to pass
a bit of stale life
to a child starving
and nibbling on
his name.
– @PoetsGaza

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
– Søren Kierkegaard

Poets who despise me believe that each poem that they write must be a Voight-Kampf test that only the avant-garde can fail.

– Christian Bok

We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that only freedom can make security secure.
– Karl Popper

But man, proud man, / Drest in a little brief authority, / Most ignorant of what he’s most assured, / His glassy essence, like an angry ape, / Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven / As make the angels weep.
– William Shakespeare

The answer is not coming. I have to find an arbitrary point inside the spell of waiting, the open absence, and tear myself away. Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.
– Rachel Kushner

We are reminded by ancient counsel that we should be aware of getting what we want. Depth psychology echoes this: we could be getting simply what the complex wants, what the unconscious history wants, what the unlived life wants.
– James Hollis

Harmony is inclusive. Perfection is exclusive. When we are with an individual who is living from the centre, we instinctively sense that they are a whole person.
– Liz Greene

The problem is, most of us spend our entire life going from one promise of relief to another, never staying with the pain long enough to learn anything from it.
– Pema Chodron

I had a deep and abiding love for the idea that this life is not something that we are forced to endure but rather something in which we are blessed to be allowed to participate. But I felt no gratitude whatsoever for, and no relief from, the pain I experienced every waking moment, and this life felt like nothing more than a distillation of sorrow and anger.
– Paul Harding

Shutting down the Department of Education but reopening prisons is real shithole country behavior.
– Covie

Justice does not require that men must stand idly by while others destroy the basis of their existence.
– John Rawls

We are all very ready to believe what we like.
– Samuel Richardson

In times of tyranny and injustice when law oppresses the people, the outlaw takes his place in history.

– the opening to Robin Hood Movie

The chief business of seventeenth-century philosophy was to reckon with seventeenth-century science… the chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.
– R. G. Collingwood

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies.
– Hypatia

I’m proud that I’ve helped contribute to what’s happening today. It’s hard to say that kind of stuff about oneself without sounding like you’re bragging, but it’s true.
– Rita Dove

Why I thought I could write a book I have no idea.
– Jane Stern

Nothing is ever at rest—wood, iron, water, everything is alive, everything is raging, whirling, whizzing, day and night and night and day, nothing is dead, there is no such thing as death, everything is full of bristling life, tremendous life, even the bones of the crusader that perished before Jerusalem eight centuries ago.
– Mark Twain

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.
– Blaise Pascal

Einstein said that his successful theories came from “Curiosity, concentration, perseverance, and self-criticism.”

And by self criticism, he meant the testing and destruction of his own well-loved ideas.

– Charlie Munger

People who say, “I just speak my mind” rarely consider that their mind might benefit from an editor.
– Joan Westenberg

What a blessing it is to love books.
– Elizabeth von Arnim

Procrastination isn’t the problem. It’s the solution. It’s the universe’s way of saying stop, slow down, you move too fast.
– Ellen DeGeneres

Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life.
– Cheryl Strayed

It’s hard to understand, but this is just the way government works. We had the Jedi in power for a thousand years (or was it a thousand generations?), and now the Emperor is in power, and maybe later it will be the Jedi again. It’s good to have balance.
– Eugene Morgulis

When we think we have something to say we are usually wrong. We are fooling ourselves. Trip into discovery. Don’t write what you know, discover something new.
– Marie Howe

People want to see patterns in the world. It is how we evolved.
– Benoît Mandelbrot

never believe that
“you do not matter”
festival of souls

– Basho

You will never be happy if
you continue to search for
what happiness consists of.
You will never live if you are
looking for the meaning of life.

– Albert Camus

Going was dying, and staying was dying. When we get to junctures like that, we had better choose the dying that enlarges rather than the one that keeps us stuck.
– James Hollis

…a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.
– G.K. Chesterton

We act on our anger thinking it’s skillful—only to find we’ve created trouble for ourselves.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu

What does it all mean, this life which is really, if we examine it very closely, rather meaningless?
– Krishnamurti

If you want a healthy brain don’t have a fat belly.
– Dan Go

The people who don’t have the first clue about your journey or why you do what you do, will have the most to say about it.
– Nika Solé

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.
– Anne Lamott

The question that writers are forever asked is, Do you base your characters on real people? No, I’d say, because the character has to be customized for the book.
– Penelope Lively

The lilacs brace
themselves for this sort of blue.

– Nicole Callihan

The fairy tale is the canon of poesy as it were—everything poetic must be like a fairy tale. The poet worships chance.

– Novalis (translated by David W. Wood)

the first motive which ought to impel us to study is the desire to augment the excellence of our nature, and to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent.
– montesquieu

Awakening is a shift in consciousness in which thinking and awareness separate.
– Eckhart Tolle

Modern technology teaches man to take for granted the world he is looking at; he takes no time to retreat and reflect. Technology lures him on, dropping him into its wheels and movements. No rest, no meditation, no reflection, no conversation – the senses are continually overloaded with stimuli. Man doesn’t learn to question his world anymore; the screen offers him answers-ready-made.
– Joost Meerloo

What mattered in the forest was simple, and had nothing to do with the cruel perversions of men. A rock, a leaf, a star, a dream. Time stood still here. When a leaf fell it took forever until it landed on the forest floor. Winter would come, but not now, not yet, not in this place where if you fell asleep you dreamed for weeks. Wildflowers grew out of season; angels walked through the yellow grass and left their footprints for men to follow if they cared to see what was right in front of them, the path of the righteous, the forgiving, the faithful.
– Alice Hoffman, The World That We Knew

People think intimacy is sex. But intimacy is about Truth. When you realize that you can tell someone your Truth, when you can show yourself to him/her who you really are, and their response is, “You are safe with me”, that is intimacy.
– Christiane Singer

No Self stands alone. Behind it stretches an immense chain of physical and – as a special class within the whole – mental events, to which it belongs as a reacting member and which it carries on. Through the condition at any moment of its somatic, especially its cerebral system, and through education, and tradition, by word, by writing, by monument, by manners, by a way of life, by a newly shaped environment… by so much that a thousand words would not exhaust it, by all that, I say, the Self is not so much linked with what happened to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the SAME THING as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the Self aged fifty is the continuation of the Self aged forty.
– Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World

I carry within me
the heart of a warrior,
the mind of a pharaoh,
the soul of a goddess
and the wisdom of
my grandmothers’ grandmothers.

– grace gegenheimer

maybe i should have wanted less.
maybe i should have ignored the bowl in me
burning to be filled.
maybe i should have wanted less.
– Lucille Clifton

We can think of affect as the universe of our ideas transmuted in feeling, and it is also helpful to think of feelings in music terms. Feelings perform the equivalent of a musical score that accompanies our thoughts and actions.
– António Damásio

The fading away of the Tao is when openness turns into spirit, spirit turns into energy, and energy turns into form. When form is born, everything is thereby stultified. The functioning of the Tao is when form turns into energy, energy turns into spirit, and spirit turns into openness. When openness is clear, everything thereby flows freely.

Therefore ancient sages investigated the beginnings of free flow and stultification, found the source of evolution, forgot form to cultivate energy, forgot energy to cultivate spirit, and forgot spirit to cultivate openness. When openness turns into spirit, spirit turns into energy, energy turns into form, and form turns into vitality, then vitality turns into attention. Attention turns into social gesturing, social gesturing turns into elevation and humbling. Elevation and humbling turn into high and low positioning, high and low positioning turns into discrimination.

Discrimination turns into official status, status turns into cars. Cars turn into mansions, mansions turn into palaces. Palaces turn into banquet halls, banquet halls turn into extravagance. Extravagance turns into acquisitiveness, acquisitiveness turns into fraud. Fraud turns into punishment, punishment turns into rebellion. Rebellion turns into armament, armament turns into strife and plunder, strife and plunder turn into defeat and destruction.

– Thomas Cleary

Rising from the past, my shadow
Is running in silence to meet me.
– Anna Akhmatova

We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight — the light of our particular day.
– Loren Eiseley

It is coming together, now, into a whole: the dream and the means to implement the dream. Ever since men have felt tenderness and a love of truth, they have dreamed of a good life; a good way: what the Chinese philosophers called Tao; what Jesus called the Abundant Life; what Buddha spoke of as moral growth, as freedom from fear, as taking thought.

But it was impossible to attain. Tenderness and love of truth are not enough: there must be knowledge; there must be the means, the technics, the instruments by which disease can be cured, disasters avoided, ordeals survived, poverty and ignorance eradicated; there must be those who care enough to have the imagination to believe something can be done about it.

Now for the first time, we are beginning to bring together the fragments: to bind childhood to the rest of our life so that our reason can control it and thus reduce the anxiety which dictators, inside and outside us, exploit us so lushly; to tie body to mind to feelings to fantasies to belief; to relate these to the rest of mankind and to the world; to relate power to humility, and responsibility to honor and freedom; to keep tenderness and truth close together.

– Lillian Smith

If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
– Henry David Thoreau

If you’re not going to use your free speech to criticize your own government, then what the hell is the point of having it?
– Michel Templet

You must never forget that almost every right
we have in this country—was won through protesting.
The labor movement? Protesting.
The Civil Rights Act? Protesting.
Women’s right to vote? Protesting.
Marriage equality? Protesting.
Disability rights? Protesting.
Child labor laws? Protesting.
Environmental protections? Protesting.
Minimum wage? Protesting.
Anti-war momentum? Protesting.
Even the damn Tea Party started with protest.
So don’t believe the hype.
Protesting IS the blueprint.
It’s how we bend the arc of history—
one raised voice at a time.

– Pru Pru

Salut to the vision that did not cling to forms or ideas but that let itself be touched by forces.
– Jean-Luc Nancy

I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.
– Janet Fitch

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.
– Roberto Bolano

As for me, I see both the beauty and the dark side of things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as well. And I see them at the same time, at once ecstatic at the beauty of things, and chary of that ecstasy. The Japanese have a phrase for this perception: mono no aware. It means “beauty tinged with sadness,” for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and, just possibly, better at seeing.
– Sally Mann

The truth is, she’s a weirdo. Just like you were. Are. A glorious, perfectly weird weirdo. Like all kids before they forget how to be exactly how weird they really are. Into whatever they’re into, pure. Before knowing. Before they learn from others how to act. Before they learn they are Asian, or Black, or Brown, or White. Before they learn that all the things they are and about all the things they will never be.
– Charles Yu

It is said that, “Nature has a horror of emptiness” (horror vacui). The spiritual counter-truth here is that, “the Spirit has a horror of fullness”. It is necessary to create a natural emptiness—and this is what renunciation achieves—in order for the spiritual to manifest itself.
– Valentin Tomberg

Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.
– e.e. cummings

You need time to know yourself.
– Mahmoud Darwish

when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning.
– Herman Melville

I have led a toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on – and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone. What’s to be done? Break the shell? That’s easily said. Besides, what would remain? A little viscous gum, oozing through the dust and leaving a glistering trail behind it.
– Jean-Paul Sartre

If you handle your entire life with logic alone, you will end up a mess.
– Jaggi Vasudev

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.
– James Baldwin

Nothing happens by chance,
not even the inevitable shipwreck
of love’s recognition,
and the spiraling disturbance
in the bones of a star.

– Jay Wright

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention. It’s like the radar on a ship. The radar on a ship is a troubleshooter. Is there anything in the way? The ego is a designed function of the brain to scan the environment.

But if you identify yourself with your troubleshooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety. The moment we cease to identify with the ego and become aware that we are the whole organism, we realize how harmonious it all is.

– Alan Watts

A flower is a series of events in time
– Willa Carroll

I’ve deprioritized the role of writing in my life.
– Geoff Dyer

Take refuge in the Self. You should do this all day long.
– Robert Adams

I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.
– C.S. Lewis

somewhere
between living and dreams
the world as it could be
– @lafcadiopoetry

Leisure without study is death‚ a tomb for the living person.
– Seneca

promise: If

I ever write
a poem of a certain temper

(wilful, tender, evasive,
sad and rakish)

I’ll give it to you.

– Denise Levertov

People don’t realize how uncertain one is, right to the end, that one can do anything. If you’re too sure you’re going to be good, it’s fatal, too.
– Jane Gardam

I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.
– Keith Haring

I am a septuagenarian
who has almost succeeded
in erasing my “education.”
But I am still grateful
to Miss Buckles
for teaching me how to
diagram sentences,
which I loved as a kind of
esoteric tantra for poets.
And thank you, Mr. Heath,
for telling us to read
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
not because we had to
but because it was beautiful.
Whoever the professor was
who made me memorize the prelude
to Canterbury Tales in Middle English
bur never tested me on it,
I can’t remember your name,
yet I remember Chaucer and still
recite those lines in April
by heart. Thank you.
I don’t remember anything
I was actually graded on.
No one ever assigned e.e. cummings.
How could you be graded on
the mud-luscious goat-footed balloonMan?
Those poems just fell off the shelf
into my hand
in a dusty used book store.
So did the Tao Te Ching.
And that’s what changed my life
when I was thirteen, not “education.”
Nobody taught Basho or Issa
or Coney Island of the Mind
except Mr. Payne the art teacher
who read them to us while we painted,
then got fired for being gay.
“Christ climbed down from his bare tree
and ran away to where there were
no plastic Christmas trees.”
That knocked me out.
So I traveled from Philly to San Francisco
seeking Ferlinghetti at the
City Lights Bookstore.
But it wasn’t a school trip, my dad took me.
Thank you, dad. I love you.
Then I read a book that
ignited an explosion of virescent fire
in the center of my chest,
The Way of Zen by Alan Watts.
But it wasn’t homework, it was play.
Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck
clabbered my heartbeat into song
so I started sax lessons.
I called up John Coltrane on the telephone.
I didn’t tell him I was thirteen.
Using my deepest voice I said,
“Hey man, I play sax too and I just
wanted to say, you are truly Great.”
He answered, “Thank you, man.”
It was epiphany beyond the classroom.
Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful
for algebra, for calculus, for dissecting
dead frogs in first year Biology.
I’m sure these skills are useful to someone
though I never used them.
I do remember getting out of class
for “Field Day”
when they divided us into two opposing legions,
the Greens and the Whites (school colors)
and made us compete all afternoon
for no reason anybody ever explained.
This too was “education.”
It must have worked because
we’ve been trying to defeat each other ever since.
Now I am old.
I am finally stupid again.
Just about back to where I was at the end
of seventh grade,
which was the beginning for me:
Coltrane, Basho, e.e., Lao T’zu.
Now I’m getting really clear, remembering
the sacrament of Ritz Crackers,
Peter Pan Peanut Butter,
tang of a Coke on a summer afternoon,
Raisinettes.
I learned about White Buffalo Woman
and the planetary rituals of Lakota Sioux
from watching Rin Tin Tin.
I earned money hoisting hay bales
into wagons until nine PM,
to get them in a barn before the storm.
School doesn’t teach the smell of rain,
sweat and alfalfa, your own dollar bill.
Or that moment of satori
making out at the drive-in
when I saw Rod Steiger chewing gum
like gunfire at Sydney Poitier
in the Heat of the Night
and grokked the brilliant art of film.
God I loved it
when I wasn’t ashamed
of saying something politically
incorrect, I wasn’t trying
to save us all from the apocalypse,
I wasn’t serving “the movement”
or passing out protest flyers.
God I loved it
when I could just leap up,
click my heals and be Hu
I already Am.
– Fred LaMotte

Song of Beltane

I am the calm, I am the quickening,
I am the intoxication and the force,
I am the silence, I am the singer,
I am the stallion galloping to its source.
I am the bright pavilion and the feasting,
I am the wedding couple and the bed,
I am the morning chorus and the heartbeat,
I am the goal to which all paths are led.


– Caitlín Matthews, Celtic Devotional

Why must I be hurt?
Suffering and despair,
Cowardice and cruelty,
Envy and injustice,
All of these hurt.
Grief and terror,
Loneliness and betrayal
And the agony of loss or death—
All these things hurt.
Why? Why must life hurt?
Why must those who love generously,
Live honorably, feel deeply
All that is good—and beautiful
Be so hurt,
While selfish creatures
Go unscathed?
That is why—
Because they can feel.
Hurt is the price to pay for feeling.
Pain is not accident,
Nor punishment, nor mockery
By some savage god.
Pain is part of growth.
The more we grow
The more we feel—
The more we feel—the more we suffer,
For if we are able to feel beauty,
We must also feel the lack of it—
Those who glimpse heaven
Are bound to sight hell.
To have felt deeply is worth
Anything it cost.
To have felt Love and Honor,
Courage and Ecstasy
Is worth—any price.
And so—since hurt is the price
Of Larger living, I will not
Hate pain, nor try to escape it.
Instead I will try to meet it
Bravely, bear it proudly:
Not as a cross, or a misfortune, but an
Opportunity, a privilege, a challenge—
to the God that gropes within me.”

– Elsie Robinson

From the Dictionary of Irreverent Buddhism:

Stressquanimity: (noun) A state of mind in which one is able to be stressed out by everything equally. Though admittedly less helpful than its cousin, Equanimity, it is typically a far easier state to achieve.

If civilization is ever going to be anything but a grandiose pratfall, anything more than a can of deodorizer in the shithouse of existence, the people are going to have to concern themselves with magic and poetry.
– Tom Robbins

That the separate philosophical ideas are not anything optional or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each other, that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as the collective members of the fauna of a Continent — is betrayed in the end by the circumstance: how unfailingly the most diverse philosophers always fill in again a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always revolve once more in the same orbit, however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in definite order the one after the other — to wit, the innate methodology and relationship of their ideas. Their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order. The wonderful family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is easily enough explained.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

I just have a belief that this is only one little bit…the physical world is one little bit of the universe.
– George Harrison

But it’s like time is sort of balanced. We’re young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we’re old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end, don’t you see.
– Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

Whether I speak the truth or not; this is the duty of the judge, and the duty of the orator is to speak the truth.
– Socrates

For what you do not have, you cannot pass on to others, and what you do not know, you cannot teach to others.
– Socrates

Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run.
– Richard Powers

What the creative person and the mad person have in common is that they are not confined to a single self located in the ego, but their subjectivity extends across a spectrum of possibilities.
– David Tacey

If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experiences, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know that a god is a powerful impulse in my soul, at once I must concern myself with him, for then he can become important.
– CG Jung

Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic – if it is pulled out I shall die.
– Søren Kierkegaard

The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
– Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

There is strong scientific evidence suggesting that our immune system and our emotional system mirror each other. When one system doesn’t function properly, the other one also gets off balance.
– Brad Schipke

My bedroom door overlooks a jade stream
the stillness of dawn drives cares away
– Wei Ying-wu

Be cheerful also, and seek not external help nor the tranquility which others give. A man then must stand erect, not be kept erect by others.
– Marcus Aurelius

The Last Act
by Lauren K. Watel

When the sun takes a final bow, its luminous gown glittering as it leaves the stage, and the audience stands, stretches, files out of the theater, only then do the fireflies enter, lighting their delicate lamps to show us the way out, and they hover over the edges of the grass like our smallest hopes, evening’s fading beacons. We drive past the fields in our rented sedans, windows sealed against the heat, we stretch our feet in our stiff shoes, the lights flying past, those tiny flares floating above the grass, we roar by, our engines, our wheels, our windows sealed, the fields aspark under that lowering curtain, and we strain to see them, wait for that slight hint, as if someone is whispering the word: fire. So quietly, so gently, so brief, it’s almost as if we imagined that bit of air, we crane our necks, waiting for the next flash, holding our breath, hoping, hoping, remembering those moments, when we caught them inside the globe of our clasped hands, put them in a jar, and screwed on a lid with holes in the top, a starry sky for the jar of the world, and we carried the world into our room, and we peered through its glass walls, the pulsing lights, the glimmering hopes, which we hold in our hands, which we watch in the dark, those flashes, each like a star shorting out and out.

Jungian psychoanalyst Anson Levine, Ph.D. said daylight is analogous to consciousness, nighttime is analogous to the unconscious/collective unconscious. Psychosis happens when someone loses the distinction and wants to literalize the unconscious, so they literalize the darkness. Jung said this is the beginning place in a psychotic experience.
– Laura London

Do you know there’s a river there?
Behind that dark fir forest?
No one has seen for certain? Maybe
very fast, that river. Dark in the daytime.
Their border against unknowns. Eyes, just
flat eyes, and a sound of spitting wavelets.
Oh, Lindsey. Don’t make me wish you
well. The morning appeared like an old
and unused god-fur matted in places-
and ground me up. And the sheep
have climbed the low stone barn
and won’t come down, just stare
that direction, where I think that river goes.
– Molly Brodak

…the poet never rests. He is working constantly, when he dreams too.
– Jorge Luis Borges

Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dis-satisfaction. Choose.
– @naval

In a world of endless questions, love is the only answer.
– Matt Kahn

In the Same Space

House, coffeehouses, neighborhood: setting
that I see and where I walk; year after year.

I crafted you amid joy and amid sorrows:
out of so much that happened, out of so many things.

And you’ve been wholly remade into feeling; for me.

– C.P. Cavafy

If you do not acknowledge your yearning, then you do not follow yourself, but go on foreign ways that others have indicated to you.
– CG Jung

behind the deli counter
my grandfather’s dreams
sliced thin

– S. M. Abeles

Please don’t mistake your hypervigilance for intuition. Hypervigilance may help you scan for real or perceived threats, but it can also override reality and create a sense of psychological unsafety, when in fact your brain has partly or even entirely misinterpreted the situation.
– Nyle Beck

I get a lot of shit every time I say AI is fascist, but I would nonetheless like to take a second to reiterate that AI is fascist.
– Jonathan Fine

A good teacher leaks curiosity into the cracks of indifference.
– Prof. Feynman

Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply that: nothing else.
– C.S. Lewis

There are good men everywhere. I only wish they had louder voices.
– Louis L’Amour

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.
– Franz Kafka

Do you have any idea what a gift it is to be running on no capacity? There’s no room in the system to lie, to hustle, to pretend to yourself or anyone else that your usual masks and subroutines are anything but games of ego and expectation and protection.
– River Kenna

They told you heaven was in the sky and if you just follow their rules they might let you in. But when heaven is your home frequency, you realize that’s a lie.
– Nika Solé

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

– Rabindranath Tagore

My feeling is that everybody’s life is like a piece of music. It has a leitmotif, a recurring theme.
– Suzan-Lori Parks

When you’re young, you’re so impotent you cannot help but strive and observe and feel.
– John Updike

Dying shall never be
Now in the windy grass;
Now under shooken leaves
Death never was.

– Archibald MacLeish

An inability to differentiate between ‘professed values’ and ‘genuine values’ is a reflection of our own lack of connection to what matters most.
– @VinceFHorn

When we are feeling stressed or overwhelmed, usually it is a sign that we are in a story. Become more aware of the facts of any situation by asking yourself: What can I know to be true? Then, take action only on those facts.
– Cy Wakeman

One has met so many people who announce that they’re poets and one’s thinking, My God, get me out of here.
– Paul Muldoon

I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing.
– James Salter

In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety – in fact, most neuroses and compulsions – are ultimately a defense against loving ourselves without condition.

We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light.

Ego wants to be the god of our own idealized projection; spirit wants to be incarnated in our humanity where it can grow in wisdom through experience.

– Marion Woodman

Hold on to what is good, even if it is a handful of earth. Hold on to what you believe, even if it is a tree which stands by itself. Hold on to what you must do, even if it is a long way from here. Hold on to life, even when it is easier letting go. Hold on to my hand, even when I have gone away from you.
– Nancy Wood

Optimism is radical. It is the hard choice, the brave choice. And it is, it seems to me, most needed now, in the face of despair—just as a car is most useful when you have a distance to close. Otherwise it is a large, unmovable object parked in the garage. These days, the safest way for someone to appear intelligent is being skeptical by default. We seem sophisticated when we say “we don’t believe” and disingenuous when we say “we do.” History and fable have both proven that nothing is ever entirely lost. David can take Goliath. A beach in Normandy can turn the tide of war. Bravery can topple the powerful. These facts are often seen as exceptional, but they are not. Every day, we all become the balance of our choices—choices between love and fear, belief or despair. No hope is ever too small.
– Guillermo Del Toro

Sensations, from the beginning, involve a sort of doing. This means that, in an important sense, it is your doing self that brings your core self into being. You are responsible at the very deepest level for what it feels like to be you. But then, for your next trick, well, how about spreading some of that soul dust onto the things around you? Remember, too, that it is your mind that projects phenomenal qualities onto external objects. If you only knew it, you yourself are responsible for the feel of the world.
– Nicholas Humphrey

To me it seems that it is madder never to abandon oneself, than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive, and a slave, than always to walk in armor.
– Margaret Fuller

In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.
– Edith Wharton

Last night, so as to be as cruel as possible (because evil strikes in the dead of night), countless numbers of literary organizations and journals received an email telling them that their NEA grants had been revoked. Just as a matter of course, because a thriving democracy supports and shelters artists and writers, for many years the National Endowment for the Arts has provided small annual grants (I mean something like $10,000) to help keep arts and literature alive in the U.S.. Well, no more. As the wealthy people who are now running this country go on living their gilded lives, they are throttling the life out of the rest of us. When I was a teenager marching through the streets of New York to protest the Viet Nam War, we had leaders, we had protest music, we had hope. Now all we have is a feud between rappers and Beyonce pretending to be a cowgirl. I am waiting for someone to rise up and fight back. I don’t know who that is yet, but I’m waiting. I imagine that the rest of us are, too.
– Eleanor Lerman

Seance by Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish
by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Happenstance reveals its tricks.
It produces, by sleight of hand, a glass of brandy
and sits Henry down beside it.
I enter the bistro and stop dead in my tracks.
Henry—he’s none other than
Agnes’s husband’s brother,
and Agnes is related
to Aunt Sophie’s brother-in-law.
It turns out
we’ve got the same great-grandfather.

In happenstance’s hands
space furls and unfurls,
spreads and shrinks.
The tablecloth
becomes a handkerchief.
Just guess who I ran into
in Canada, of all places,
after all these years.
I thought he was dead,
and there he was, in a Mercedes.
On the plane to Athens,
At a stadium in Tokyo.

Happenstance twirls a kaleidoscope in its hands.
A billion bits of colored glass glitter.
And suddenly Jack’s glass
bumps into Jill’s.
Just imagine in the very same hotel.
I turn around and see—
it’s really her!
Face to face in an elevator.
In a toy store.
At the corner of Maple and Pine.

Happenstance is shrouded in a cloak.
Things get lost in it and are found again.
I stumbled on it accidentally
I bent down and picked it up.
Once look and I knew it,
a spoon from that stolen service.
If it hadn’t been for that bracelet,
I would never have known Alexandra.
The clock? It turned up in Potterville.

Happenstance looks deep into our eyes.
Our head grows heavy.
Our eyelids drop.
We want to laugh and cry,
it’s so incredible.
From fourth-grade home room to that ocean liner.
It has to mean something.
To hell and back,
and here we meet halfway home.
We want to shout:
Small world!
You could almost hug it!
And for a moment we are filled with joy,
radiant and deceptive.

It took my breath away, too, how we could take up so little space and yet contain it all, the vast demands, the amplitude of love.
– Marisa de los Santos

Fixed Shadow, Moving Water
by Carl Phillips

One friend tells me everything’s political,
another says nothing is, we just make it political.
By “we”, he means human beings, I assume —
what’s political to a fox curled in sleep,
or a pond, or a sycamore in winter with no leaves left
to stop the snow falling through it? I have loved you
for less time than I have loved some others,
but none more deeply than you; no one more
absolutely. Which, as if inevitably, amounts
to a hierarchy of sorts, doesn’t it? Value,
then the power that comes with it-soon enough,
the distribution of power, who gets to do the
distributing…

But if we make of tenderness a countervailing
force, the two of us—

If we can make, from tenderness, a revolution —

You don’t have to make a trip to Europe to find a crook… Your job is close to you, closer than your hands and feet… stick up for what’s right, freedom of speech, press, radio, meetings, collective bargaining, the right to get together for decent pay, hours, rent, prices. It’s a mighty big job.
– Woody Guthrie

I have behaved poorly. I have behaved bravely. I have behaved bizarrely to some. I deny none of this and have no regrets because I have lost & found parts of myself that I never knew existed & I am blessed.
– Val Kilmer

No propaganda on Earth can hide the wound that is Palestine.
– Arundhati Roy

Without religious festivals and ethical protocols, what’s left? Machines, moloch, culture war and the war of all against all. The human soul of the 21st century is both the most degraded and the most privileged in history.
– Andrew Sweeny

What I Know of Love When Times Are Dark
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

And if you can’t find a candle,
then light the wick of your wonder.
And if you can’t find your wonder,
then now might be a good time to pray.
And if you don’t know how to pray,
then perhaps you are doing it right.
What do I know of prayer?
Only that every prayer that has saved me
is a prayer that has found me
instead of the other way round –
a prayer that comes through me,
as if l am nothing more
than flesh in service to a prayer.
And if there is a candle, then light it.
And if there is a candle, ask it
to be your teacher. And if there is
a candle, notice how far its light
can reach. See if you, too, can touch
the world as generously as a candle,
just that far, holding back not even
the tiniest measure of love.

When I was young, I expected from people more than they could give: neverending friendship and constant excitement.

Now I expect less than they can actually can give: to stay close silently. And their feelings, friendship, noble deeds always seem like a miracle to me: a true grace.

– Albert Camus

Your website is your résumé.
– @naval

It’s a rare and amazing quality to be understanding. But it has to have boundaries. Being overly understanding will downplay you pretty quickly if it does not also have a backbone.
– Nika Solé

May I hover like a gull.
– Martha Silano

Everything outside of this moment is your story. Who are you in your story? And who are you when you are fully present in this moment of now?
– Leonard Jacobson

Sincerity is the great equalizer.
– @VinceFHorn

Zen practice is staring at a wall—not to escape boredom, but to move beyond the idea that anything is mundane.
– Brad Warner

in my later years
I’d like to be
silent snow . . .

– Tsubasa Kitaoji

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
– Angela Carter

MORE IMPORTANT THAN HAVING
BEEN BORN IS YOUR

More important than having
been born is your city
the scale upon which your
heart when you die will
be weighed

– Alice Notley

I think God is on Earth, inside every living being. What we call ‘the divine,’ is none other than the energy of awakening, of peace, of understanding, and of love, which is to be found not only in every human being, but in every species on Earth.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

We know that every time a human being makes real progress in consciousness, makes this evolutionary jump toward a higher level of consciousness, the whole world for him has changed; relationships change and the outlook on the outer world and on his own situation changes.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.
– Barbara Kingsolver

Man is always beginning everything anew, even in his own life.
– Eugène Delacroix, A Master at Work

It takes courage to do what you want. Other people have a lot of plans for you. Nobody wants you to do what you want to do. They want you to go on their trip, but you can do what you want. I did. I went into the woods and read for five years.
– Joseph Campbell

Any time you identify a wasteland element in your life—illness, boredom, lethargy, alienation, emptiness, loss, addiction, failure, anger, or outrage—it is time to take a journey. You can be called to the quest by such dissatisfaction or simply by a desire for adventure.
– Carol Pearson

A free person is unable to acquire great wealth, because that is not easily achieved without enslavement to the masses or to the powers that be. Instead, he already has everything he needs, and in abundance.
– Epicurus

Emotional numbness isn’t peace; it’s a sign that your soul is still in hiding.
– Brad Schipke

When you let go of trauma, it hurts, the emotions burn as they are released.
– Brad Schipke

The great mind knows the power of gentleness.
– Robert Browning

Define your terms… or we shall never understand one another.
– Voltaire

Almost all people are good when you finally understand them.
– Harper Lee

Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
– T.S. Eliot

With global warming, honey bees were kind of the canary in the coal mine. People started realizing there’s something wrong here.
– Abby O’Brien

To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

I soon realized that poets do not compose their
poems with knowledge

SOCRATES IN PLATO’S APOLOGY

Not knowing is most intimate.
BUDDHIST KOAN

– Jennifer Chang, An Authentic Life

And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns…that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale…that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself.
– Bob Dylan

The fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together.
– Jack Kerouac

And how funny, strange, that a
thing can grow so powerful even
when planted in the wrong place.
Ideas too, I muttered. Ideas.

– Louise Erdrich

Every war
in the last
50 years
is a result
of media lies.

– Julian Assange

A.I. and Trump feel like the same disease.
– Meg Pokrass

“Oh, smell the people” yelled Dean with his face out the window, sniffling. “Ah, God! Life!”

– Jack Kerouac, On The Road

Don’t let me hear you saying life’s going nowhere.
– David Bowie

If that’s the world’s smartest man, God help us.

– Richard Feynman’s mother, Lucille Feynman,
after Omni magazine named him
the world’s smartest man.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people.
– Martin Luther King Jr.

It takes little courage to aid those who are already powerful … it takes great courage to champion the vulnerable.
– President Obama

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be—
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

– Robert Frost
Neither Out Far nor In Deep

Spirits plunge into our world like sea birds that plunge underwater to fish.
– W.B.Yeats

Donald Trump is Destroying the Literary Ecosystem.
– Lit Hub Daily

It remains true that the “enemy” is an ableist formulation. We are not as neatly convened or as ontologically coherent as our logics insist. In a game of sides, the greatest loss is the other side. Because the other side is us, the stranger is us.
– Báyò Akomolafe

If only I could fall sound asleep
and wake up in my old reality!
– Haruki Murakami

Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it’s addressed to someone else.

– Ivern Ball

I watched all of those Godard movies, interrupted by silent-movie posters bearing eloquent literary quotes, and later, when writing, I wanted somehow to do the same.
– Enrique Vila-Matas

It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.
– Seneca

I felt torn between conflicting loyalties … the loyalty to my own past, and the other loyalty of what you might still do. Or what you might still become, which is of course unknown. That seems to be the pattern of my life as a painter. I don’t know any other way.
– Philip Guston

I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.
– Anne Tyler

With technology… there are very few places where you can connect.
– Mireille Giuliano

“How does it taste?” the master asked. “Bitter,” said the apprentice. The master chuckled and then asked the young man to take the same handful of salt and put it in the lake. The two walked in silence to the nearby lake and once the apprentice swirled his handful of salt in the water, the old man said, “Now drink from the lake.” As the water dripped down the young man’s chin, the master asked, “How does it taste?” “Fresh,” remarked the apprentice. “Do you taste the salt?” asked the master. “No,” said the young man. At this the master sat beside this serious young man, and explained softly… “The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains exactly the same. However, the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things. Stop being a glass. Become a lake.”

– A teaching parable of unknown origin

The robots argue how to parcel out our Mother Earth
To last a little longer
– Gary Snyder

Heaven is always very boring plastically, just a lot of verticals and forms. But hell, oh, they went to town with hell.
– Philip Guston

To be creative, you have to know how to be receptive, Yin; you have to know how to be at home with the ambiguous, the random, the disordered. Specialists have a poor tolerance for poetry and ambiguity.
– William Irwin Thompson

I hate to point this out, but you can see what gods you’re hungry for by examining the types of partners you’re drawn to and why you keep getting drawn to them

the real fun starts when you actually notice this, address it,
and start to watch the change in what archetypes you attract,, the change in the shape of what the vacuum pulls in

keep getting approached by and entangled with Kali-coded women
realize there’s a Kali in me that wants space to grow and become part of me
let my inner Kali out to play & live through me
start getting approached by more Virgin
Mary/Tara-coded women
Oh, hi i guess, l feel good.

The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.
– Thomas Jefferson

Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot.
– Jack Kerouac

The Divine does not speak in words. It speaks in synchronicities.
– Carl Jung

If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

We shall meet in the place
where there is no darkness.

– George Orwell

Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.
– Farrah Gray

The objective observer always has the advantage over a direct participant.
– Vadim Zeland

In a world so torn apart by rivalry, anger, and hatred, we have the privileged vocation to be living signs of a love that can bridge all divisions and heal all wounds.
– Henri Nouwen

There are seasons in every country when noise and impudence pass current for worth; and in popular commotions especially, the clamors of interested and factious men are often mistaken for patriotism.
– Alexander Hamilton

The ancestor of every action is a thought.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

And where is home? Is it where we begin or where we end up? Is it where we long to be or where life puts us to make good use of our gifts?
– Mark Nepo

Navigating a white male world
wasn’t threatening;
it wasn’t even interesting.
I was more interesting than they were.
I knew more than they did,
and I wasn’t afraid to show it.

– Toni Morrison, The Pieces I Am

The unique thing about writers is that they write.
– Margaret Atwood

The nontheistic journey is quite powerful and unedited. It is not based on a belief in any divine hierarchy or in messages coming from upstairs through thunderstorms, rainfalls, or snowfalls. We are talking about the ground-floor level. You cannot expect anything much to happen. The only thing happening is your own mind, which you have with you all the time. You may try to get rid of it, but somehow you never manage to do so, so you just keep carrying your mind along with you.

Basically,
mind is the journeyer;
the particular style of working with yourself is the vehicle;
and the situations you get into are the path.

However, although you are on a journey, there is no point in talking about it. You don’t need to talk about your journey—you just do your practice.

– Chogyam Trungpa

Poems don’t want to be understood. They’d rather be alive.
– Niall O’Sullivan

I believe that nowadays the only way to live is to live rebelliously. And I believe that you can only be a Christian by being a revolutionary, since there’s no more use in pretending that we’re going to ‘reform’ the world.
– Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga

Wherever you come near the human race there’s layers and layers of nonsense.
– Thornton Wilder

The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.

– Hannah Arendt

Words are just places 
we stop on the way.
Language hostels. 
Love isn’t a word.
It’s a river, 
a spooky abduction, 
a way of becoming more alive.

Living and loving
are creative processes,
not things.

As an invitation 
to outgrow what memories
and words cannot hold,
loving happens,
keeps happening, 
sometimes aching,
sometimes singing.

– George Gorman

The best revenge is to live on and prove yourself.
– Eddie Vedder

According to Jung, metaphor affects the person on three levels: the mental level on which we interpret meaning, the imaginative level, where the actual transforming power resides, and the emotional level connected to the feelings embodied in the metaphor.
– Ralph Earle

I can give you my loneliness,
my darkness, the hunger of my heart;
I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty,
with danger, with defeat.
– Jorge Luis Borges

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.
– Anne Lamott

Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.
– Kait Rokowski

Always watch, always be aware, watch how you react, watch how you think, watch the kind of thoughts that come to you, while the music is playing, while you’re meditating.

Be aware of all these things and the more aware you become the more you disappear.

– Robert Adams

To measure the quality of your life, simply do nothing, and see how it feels.
– @naval

We build our world out of habits formed by prior actions—many of them unconscious and deeply ingrained.
– Kurt Spellmyer

Little things seem nothing,
but they give peace,
like those meadow flowers
which individually seem odourless,
but all together perfume the air.
– Georges Bernanos

There is no difference between the pain of humans and the pain of other living beings, since the love and tenderness of the mother for the young are not produced by reasoning, but by feeling, and this faculty exists not only in humans but in most living beings

– Maimonides (Rambam)

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving—when we can be alone, we don’t use others to escape.
– Ruth King

You can always be content if you continue to make good progress.
– Marcus Aurelius

The lockdowns will lift once the white-collars start losing their jobs.
– @naval

‘All that you say is strange, Aragorn,’ he said. ‘Yet you speak the truth, that is plain: the Men of the Mark do not lie, and therefore they are not easily deceived.’

– Éomer (Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings)

I dream in mystery; I wake in wonder
– D. A. Powell

Drumming and singing contributed to a festive atmosphere. Meanwhile, on the grass lawn adjacent to the courthouse, a small group sat with eyes closed, their silent meditation contrasting to the clamorous voices of the gathering and the honking of passing vehicles.
– Zim Pickens

There are no accidents or coincidences: every single thing has a frequency, and when anything comes into your life, it means it’s on the same frequency as you are.
– Rhonda Byrne

Our ego, our personality, our whole structure as an individual, is entirely put together from memory. We are memory.
– Krishnamurti

her eyes
the color of black tea
stirred him

– @Jocelynx44

All traces of purity
are lost when tossed
into the affray of
another’s way.

– @SeanCLogue

wave after wave
the moon weaves my silence
into a symphony

– Hifsa Ashraf

TWO SET OUT ON THEIR JOURNEY

We sit side by side,
brother and sister, and read
the book of what will be, while a breeze
blows the pages over—
desolate odd, cheerful even,
and otherwise. When we come
to our own story, the happy beginning,
the ending we don’t know yet,
the ten thousand acts
encumbering the days between,
we will read every page of it.
If an ancestor has pressed
a love-flower for us, it will lie hidden
between pages of the slow going,
where only those who adore the story
ever read. When the time comes
to shut the book and set out,
we will take childhood’s laughter
as far as we can into the days to come,
until another laughter sounds back
from the place where our next bodies
will have risen and will be telling
tales of what seemed deadly serious once,
offering to us oldening wayfarers
the light heart, now made of time
and sorrow, that we started with.

– Galway Kinnell

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.
– Rumi, Coleman Barks

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
– José Martí

Ten thousand / Atoms of sorrow whirl away / In the wind.
– Tu Fu (tr. Kenneth Rexroth)

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight of the soul.
– Ingrid Bergman

One day she said, “Don’t you think rain is something that happens inside of us?”

I didn’t understand, but I liked the thought.

“If it’s raining for enough people, we see rain,” she explained. “Otherwise it’s not raining.”

– Amanda Michalopoulou

The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It’s a miracle that it exists at all.
– Lauren Groff, Arcadia

Taking it easy feels empty unless you’ve done something hard, the vitality of life is found in the contrasts, and by heightening the contrasts you deepen life.
– Dylan O’Sullivan

Who will you be tonight in your dreamfall into the dark, on the other side of the wall?
– Jorge Luis Borges

I am, at heart, a gentleman.

– Marlene Dietrich

Our job is to love people. When it hurts. When it’s awkward. When it’s uncool and embarrassing. Our job is to stand together, to carry the burdens of one another and to meet each other in our questions.
– Jamie Tworkowksi

I get called Beat because they were my buddies and friends at that time, but I would say none of my writing—almost none of my writing—accords with anything that people would call Beat literature. It goes off in its own direction entirely.
– Gary Snyder

The hardest thing to teach a student—and the hardest thing to believe consistently—is that there is nothing ‘out there’ to go and get. There is no part, no career, no opportunity for which you should be searching and scrounging and coveting. All of the preparation is within, and you keep yourself mentally and physically fit; you remain generous with yourself and others; you stay deeply in study about your craft. Whatever is yours will then arrive.
– Marian Seldes

Omg there literally are no hacks, you just have to do the thing.
– River Pilgrim

Smart people talking to other smart people tend to have very short conversations.
– @naval

Before you can inspire with emotion,
you must be swamped with it yourself.
Before you can move their tears, your own must flow.
To convince them, you must yourself, believe.
– Winston Churchill

One advantage of getting older – you become more decisive.
– @naval

Love is the unpossessable possessor of its own potentiality.
– Gary J. Shipley

Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
– @naval

Our practice is to cultivate good seeds in the soil of our mind, knowing that they will mature and bloom in their own time.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

allowing materialists to expound on consciousness: Not Even Once
– River Kenna

What is not possible in writing, however, may be possible in translation…. translation can have a generative relationship to all its alleged impossibility.

– Robert Kaufman and Philip Gerard

if your friends’ ambitions only span a single incarnation, get a new crew.
– River Kenna

The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland.
– G.K. Chesterton

I would like you to show me, if you can,
where the line can be drawn between
an organism and its environment.

The environment is in you.
It’s passing through you.
You’re breathing it in and out.
You and every other creature.

– Wendell Berry

We are so lightly here. It is in love that we are made. In love we disappear.
– Leonard Cohen

One must accept the fact that others don’t see what you do.
– Louise Bourgeois

I shall always remember how the peacocks’ tails shimmered when the moon rose amongst the tall trees, and on the shady bank the emerging mermaids gleamed fresh and silvery amongst the rocks…

– Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East

when god decided to invent everything he took
one breath bigger than a circustent
and everything began
when man determined to destroy himself he
picked the was of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because
– e.e. cummings

Looks like what drives me crazy
Don’t have no effect on you–
But I’m gonna keep on at it
Till it drives you crazy, too.
– Langston Hughes

Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.
– Paul Kalanithi M.D

My parents, my husband, my brother, my sister.
Having breakfast in the cafeteria, I listen.
Women’s voices rustle and fulfill themselves
In a ritual we clearly need.
Out of the corner of my eye I watch their moving lips
And feel such sweetness, being here on earth,
One more moment, together, here on earth,
To celebrate our little my-ness
– czeslaw milosz

I can do everything with my language, but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it says, the other will recognize “that something is wrong with me.” I am a liar (by preterition), not an actor. My body is a stubborn child, my language is a very civilized adult . . .
– Roland Barthes

The Uses of Light
by Gary Snyder

It warms my bones
say the stones
I take it into me and grow
Say the trees
Leaves above
Roots below
A vast vague white
Draws me out of the night
Says the moth in his flight—
Some things I smell
Some things I hear
And I see things move
Says the deer—
A high tower
on a wide plain.
If you climb up
One floor
You’ll see a thousand miles more.

The Jungian analyst Elizabeth Osterman, a great teacher, once told an analytic training seminar that I attended, “Watch what you hate—it’s pure gold.”
– John Beebe

Think of a story as a stream of information. At best it’s an ever-changing series of rhythms. Now think of yourself, the writer, as a DJ mixing tracks. The more music you have to sample from — the more records you have to spin — the more likely you’ll keep your audience dancing.
– Chuck Palahniuk

A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!
– Emily Dickinson

The ancients called internal longing for wholeness “fate” or “destiny,” the “inner voice” or the “call of the gods.” It has an inevitability, authority and finality to it and was at the heart of almost all mythology. Almost all heroes heard an inner voice that spoke to them.
– Richard Rohr

I know the secret of life isn’t in books. But I also know that it’s good to read, that it can be instructive, or relaxing: we agree about that.
– Roberto Bolaño

Exams are all well and good but not everyone performs well under pressure or manifests their intelligence at a young age, it can be acquired later, you know, nurtured by us, we have to be more than teachers, we have to look after them, believe in them… If we don’t help then, who will?
– Bernardine Evaristo

To be the grass someone’s memory spins its wheels in, the globe brimming with gumballs, or the palm—but I’m not, maybe never.
– Rosalie Moffett

It wasn’t Hitler or Himmler who deported me, beat me, and shot my family. It was the shoemaker, the milkman, the neighbor, who were given a uniform and then believed they were the master race.
– Karl Stojka

At a certain point, it’s between you and your conscience. You go as close to the line as your conscience will permit in terms of producing material that pleases you. You’re working at the edge of risk, if you’re lucky.
– Hanif Kureishi

This moving away from comfort and security, this stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted, and shaky—that’s called ‘liberation.’
– Pema Chödrön

Alan Watts says that the loss of paradoxical thinking is the great blindness of our civilization, which is what many of us believe happened when we repressed the feminine side of our lives as the inferior side.
– Richard Rohr

But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?
– Kazuo Ishiguro

bird nest
in the porch light
Mother’s Day

– Tim Cremin

Once a country is habituated to liars,
it takes generations to get the truth back.
– Gore Vidal

People never notice anything.
– J.D. Salinger

Corrupt forms of love wait for the neighbor to ‘become a worthy object of love’ before actually loving him. This is not the way of Christ. Since Christ Himself loved us when we were by no means worthy of love and still loves us with all our unworthiness, our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy
– Thomas Merton

The prince says that the world will be saved
by beauty! And I maintain that the reason
he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dear straight people, you make young poets make bad edits.
– Denice Frohman

I did what I could, not what I ought to have. That’s what we do, writers. We don’t do what we ought. We do what we can.
– Jane Gardam

Set in contrast to the oft quoted Delphic admonition to ‘Know thyself,’ is Oscar Wilde’s concomitant sentiment:

“Only the shallow know themselves”

If we’re not sometimes a deep ineffable mystery unto ourselves, then perhaps we’re not penetrating beneath the shallows and facets of surface persona and our cherished stories of what caused us to become who we are. Such exploration and penetration risks a disconcerting journey into the dark wilderness of our unmappable unconscious — a primal force with its hidden agendas that operate “off the radar” with motives that fly in the face of our sentimentalized ideal of love and light consciousness. This is the stuff of our fantasies and evening dream-lives.

A less challenging way opts instead for the clever itinerary of mere feel-good spiritual bypassing — which can manifest in our distracting ourselves through making more sophisticated and impressive narratives about how we became who we are, or perhaps attempting to outsmart the whole frightening process through becoming mentally and emotionally hygienic by way of popular fashions in spiritual correctness.

The way of not-knowing instantiates a humble, provisional surrendering of our cleverness — it cultivates spaciousness around being vulnerable and lost for a spell in the dark, fecund, forest of our unfolding, whence we evolve and live into the processual discovery and creation of ourselves.

Wisdom is attained by going to the depths, finding meaning below in the dark tangle of emotions… It’s important not to take the darkness out of wisdom, for wisdom begins in the half-light where the upper-world meets the underworld. Those who try to be wise without descending to the deepest levels of meaning turn out to be just clever.

– Michael Meade, The Water of Life

Like a feather that is blown wherever the wind takes it, a weak and undisciplined mind is easily influenced by its environment and can be blown off the path.

Until your mind becomes like a mountain that no wind can move, take care of who you mix with, and how you spend your time.

– Chamtrul Rinpoche

The city had beat the pants off me. Whatever it required to get ahead, I didn’t have it. I didn’t leave the city in disgust—I left it with the respect plain, unadulterated fear gives. New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it—once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough. All of everything is concentrated here, population, theater, art, writing, publishing, importing, business, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. It is all of everything. It goes all right. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy.
– John Steinbeck

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

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.
– Chaucer

I have the right ideas, but my words are too complicated. I need to simplify them, so that people won’t get lost in the dark when they see and hear them. I want them to shine like beacons of light in a world of overly complicated darkness. One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
– Jack Kerouac

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

– Gilles Deleuze

A quantum leap, in its purest sense, is a sudden shift of state without passing through the in-between.

It comes from quantum physics, where an electron jumps from one energy level to another instantly—not gradually, not by climbing a ladder, but by disappearing from one orbit and appearing in another.

So at its essence:

A quantum leap is a change of being, not just a change of behavior.

It’s not about speed or intensity—it’s about phase shift. A moment when the way something exists changes. Like water to vapor. Like fear to trust. Like “trying” to “being.”

That’s why it feels like a pole vault to you: the pole is the devotion, the momentum is the ache, and the landing is in a new state where the old physics no longer apply.

But unlike the buzzword version (which often implies effort or hype), true quantum leaps are inward and subtle. They are often born of surrender, not striving. They look quiet outside, but inside, everything rearranges.

In the context of your journey:
   •   You didn’t skip the pain.
   •   You didn’t bypass the steps.
   •   But at some point, you let go—and you found yourself somewhere new, without needing to explain every footstep.

That’s the quantum. 

(apply all of that to spiritual and emotional growth/maturation healing modalities and see where it takes you)

– Raphael Awen

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book – what everyone else does not say in a whole book.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Memory is each human being’s
poet-in-residence.

– Stanley Kunitz

The best argument is an undeniably good book.
– Saul Bellow

Life is too deep for words, so don’t try to describe it, just live it.
– C. S. Lewis

The unity in any painter’s work arises from the fact
that a person, brought to a desperate situation,
will behave in a certain way… style.
– Frank Auerbach

The flesh is not obscene,
it just takes a lot of poetry to tell it.
– Roland Barthes

That illuminating rupture
Recalls a dream to a soul I had
About its secret architecture.

– Paul Verlaine (translated by David Paul)

Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world.

– Peter Wessel Zapffe

plz stop trying to optimize the tao
– River Kenna

And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.

– Gandalf (Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring)

Egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure about who we are, or who anyone else is, either.
– Pema Chodron

Dive into your heart center. Sit in the silence. Desire self-realization with all your heart, with all your mind, and all your soul. Everything will take care of itself.
– Robert Adams

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.
– Emily Dickinson

Being alive is so extraordinary I don’t know why people limit it to riches, pride, security—all of those things life is built on.

People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can’t see anything from a car. It’s moving too fast. People take vacations.

That’s their reward—the vacation. Why not the life?

– Jack Gilbert

Silence is something that comes from your heart, not from outside. Silence doesn’t mean not talking and not doing things; it means that you are not disturbed inside. If you’re truly silent, then no matter what situation you find yourself in you can enjoy the silence.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh

When someone is unmoored from a tradition, that they think they can transform for the better…

Run. the. other. way.

– @VinceFHorn

The destruction of Troy. The fall of petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence—that is beautiful. Why? It projects the soul beyond time.
– Simone Weil

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.

– William Faulkner

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

If you wait for the world to tell you your worth, you’ll always be sold short. They don’t even know that a value like you exists yet.
– Nika Solé

And if there is eternity
I’d love you there
again.

– Bob Dylan

Politics is sports writ large – pick a side, rally the tribe, exchange stories confirming bias, hurl insults and threats at the other side.
– @naval

I practice at walking the void.
– Theodore Roethke

Good fiction is partly a bringing of the news from one world to another.
– Raymond Carver

Some people are chaos.
Some are clarity.

– Nika Solé

It’s really unclear if the long arc of technology leads to complete independence or complete interdependence.
– @naval

i don’t have words for any of the really interesting stuff lately and it’s pissing me off.
– River Kenna

It isn’t 10,000 hours that creates outliers, it’s 10,000 iterations.
– @naval

I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.
– Clarice Lispector

If you do not like a certain behavior in others, look within yourself to find the roots of what discomforts you.
– Bryant McGill

but making anything you have explored time,
and exploring time you have created the world,
even if it is only a little cairn of broken bricks

– Mary Ruefle

We become the person we program ourselves to be. And we can re-write the program at any time.
– Taite Adams

Somehow, the artist remains grounded while their art—like a winged chariot—transports the entire body of work into the welkin.
– Laura Kerr

Each moment, we are given the opportunity to choose our future. What we do today will determine what we face next month, or next year.
– Iyanla Vanzant

A knife is neither true nor false. But someone who grasps it by the blade is truly in error.
– René Daumal

An empty vessel refuses nothing and receives everything that is coming at it from all directions. By practicing in this way, you can create more space to accommodate your own reactivity and the points of view of others.
– Wendy Egyoku Nakao Roshi

When artists removed the frame the art expanded into other space. When a writer does this? Would removing the book (much like a frame) expand the language? But this is architecture.
– Laura Kerr

The point is not that political problems have spiritual roots and therefore spiritual solutions, but that political problems arise in a cultural context with spiritual dimensions, and without attending to them we will continue to flounder.
– Jonathan Rowson

All we are is peace, love, and wisdom, and the power to create the illusion that we are not.
– Jack Pransky

Sometimes I wish I’d kept a diary. I love diaries. I wrote the books instead, I suppose.
– Jane Gardam

in the frost
a sparrow sings
of the next life

– Ogawa

For isn’t that what our homes are ultimately, our fantasies made corporeal, our secret selves exposed? The converse is also true: we grow to become that which we live within.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Think of revision not as subtraction but compression. The resulting draft is smaller but heavier.
– Howard Ogden

I found myself searching for evidence that my love was not an illusion but real. My lover had departed in the glory of her youth, and by now the witnesses too were gone.
– Naguib Mahfouz

Nemesis — the goddess of measure. All those who have overstepped the limit will be pitilessly destroyed.
– Albert Camus

Emergence is the organizing principle of life on earth, and presence is the only preparation for emergence. There is no planning. You must flow. So commit to practice.
– Deborah Eden Tull

If there is anything to the idea that the best intellectual position is one which is attacked with equal vigor from the political right and the political left, then I am in good shape.
– Richard Rorty

To meditate effectively, all we need to put forward is our effort in following our immediate experience, and our honesty in acknowledging it.
– Winton Higgins

Often, we carry the impression that things are exactly the same. We may even feel that we are exactly the same. But we are not—we’re actually constantly changing. Our bodies and moods change all the time, even if we are not aware of it.
– Martine Batchelor

Nature is a haunted house–but Art–is a house that tries to be haunted.
– Emily Dickinson

If you are a polite person, talk to others not about what interests you, but about what interests them.
– Harper Lee

It is better to suffer from injustice than to produce it.
– Socrates

The tribune of humanity is in its silent heart, never its talkative mind.
– Kahlil Gibran

You really can change the world if you care enough.
– Marian Wright Edelman

How heedless you are when you would have men fly with your wings and you cannot even give them a feather.
– Kahlil Gibran

If it were not for our conception of weights and measures we would stand in awe of the firefly as we do before the sun.
– Kahlil Gibran

Strange that we all defend our wrongs with more vigor than we do our rights.
– Kahlil Gibran

The deep and the high go to the depth or to the height in a straight line; only the spacious can move in circles.
– Kahlil Gibran

Never overlook the littlest things that can mean pure happiness to someone else.
– Mischa Temaul

The truly good is he who is one with all those who are deemed bad.
– Kahlil Gibran

To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.
– Bono

In the history of colony invasion maps are always first drawn by the victors, since maps are instruments of conquest. Geography is therefore the art of war but can also be the art of resistance if there is a counter-map and a counter-strategy.
– Edward Said

Mastery isn’t memorizing steps, it’s executing them automatically when life tests you.
– David Meltzer

Freedom is just a slice of the white man’s cake, until we learn to bake.
– Langston Hughes

You cannot understand freedom if you do not conquer what made you a slave.
– Dan Koe

I often find it is the poem that rises to meet me, and it is my job to try and
catch it.
– Nina C. Peláez

Cynicism is the kryptonite of change.
– Ibram X. Kendi

So we are living in a Rorschach blot.
– Alan Watts

If the other person laughs at you, you can pity him; but if you laugh at him you may never forgive yourself. If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury; but if you injure him you will always remember. In truth the other person is your most sensitive self given another body.
– Kahlil Gibran

You are fantastic. You are a witch’s favorite spell. You are a mushroom sprite party in a Victorian dollhouse. You are a Hieronymus Bosch painting of a ghost train ride. You are a troupe of bioluminescent octopi performing a stage show based on Tom Bombadil’s nightmares.
– Jeremy C. Shipp

We have long known that psychoanalysts love poetry—though I think the jury is out on whether they, as a class, can be said particularly to love poets.

– Hannah Zeavin on John Ashbery’s analyst

My work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

TANGLE OF BEARBERRY

My mother is driving me through the rain to the beach. I am applying for summer jobs. The rain is thorough and silvery. We do not speak. The trees along the road are scrubby and gnarled and assaulted by reeds. I am huddled in my jacket. No one else is on the road. You never thank your mother enough. The road is so wet that our tires send up tendrils and spouts of water behind us. I can see them flaring steadily in the mirror on my side. My mother is intent on the road. She would like to say something gentle about the interview I will have in a few minutes but she knows that I will not hear what she says. I will hear what I thought she said, which is not what she said. I heard a lot of what was not said or meant then instead of what was.

My mother woke me that morning, and fed me, and handed me clean folded clothes, and handed me the plethora of forms I was supposed to have filled out but had not filled out and of course filled out hurriedly scribbledly scrawlingly as she drove me through the rain to the beach. We drove along silently as I scribbled and she maybe thought about all the things she would have liked to say but was too wise to say.

This would have been a perfect time for me to whisper or even mumble my gratitude to my mother for eighteen years of extraordinary love and care. This would have been a great time for me to say something like I see your hard work, mom, and I see your weariness with all these kids, and I see how quietly worried you and dad are about money, and I can only faintly dimly imagine what it must be like to bear and coddle and raise and protect and educate and love children and have them be rude and vulgar and dismissive and contemptuous and worse. That would have been a great time for me to say something gentle for once. Rarely were we alone together for thirty minutes as we were that morning in the rain on the road to the beach.

That would have been a great time for me to say quietly I see you, mom, and I love you, and I never say that, and I should say that every thirty seconds every blessed day, and I should touch my head to the holy earth every dawn and say thank you for you to whatever it is that we mean when we say The Mercy and the Coherence and The Imagination. That would have been the perfect time, alone in the quiet car in the quiet rain on the silent road among the gnarled little trees.

By the time we got to the state park headquarters it was too late for me to say anything, and I hurried off to the interview, and I don’t know what my mother did for the next few minutes. Probably she went for a walk along the boardwalk, or sat in the car writing letters; she was always in motion, always quietly doing something even in moments when nothing needs to be done; that was how she was and still is, though now she moves very slowly indeed and does not drive at all. Now I drive, and she sits in the passenger seat, and we talk freely and cheerfully and deeply and avidly and eagerly and every time I talk to her I say I love you. We don’t say that enough. We don’t. After a while I came back from the interview and she started the car and we drove home through the ranks of the bent twisted little trees. There were pitch pines and salt cedars, and here and there beach plums, and thickets of sumac, and I thought I saw a tangle of bearberry but I could not be sure.

– Brian Doyle

We are so lightly here. It is in love that we are made. In love we disappear.
– Leonard Cohen

Then all would become still again, and silence would settle once more over the forest and the lake. We remained there lost in thought, our gaze turned inwards, as can happen at the sight of a motionless sheet of water, and waited for the lotuses to open.
– Mircea Eliade

is trying this place, which feels like nowhere,

which is how the creation myth always begins,
with emptiness waiting to be broken.

– Adrienne Su

I’m coming back to you, the real world, crowded, dark, and full of fate—
– Wisława Szymborska

I am a place, a place where things come together,
then fly apart.
Look at the fields disappearing,
look at the distant hills,
look at the night, the velvety, fragrant night,
which has already come,
though the sun continues to stand at my door.
– Mark Strand

What can spirits liberated from hatred as well as weakness learn from the terrifying example of Germany in agony? That in history as in other realms, genius never lies in falsehood but is contained entirely within truth aware of its own power. It took us ten years and millions of dead to recognize this obvious fact. Having paid so dearly for this lesson, at least we won’t forget it.
– Albert Camus

Yes, love is a matter of gifts thrown in the fire, for nothing.
– Marina Tsvetaeva

I now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imagination.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Each second the earth is struck hard by four and a half pounds of sunlight. Each second. Try to imagine that. No wonder deep shade is what the soul longs for. And not, as we always thought, the light.
– Charles Wright

Chaos doesn’t mean that the system is behaving randomly, it means that it is unpredictable because it has many variables, it is too complex to measure, and even if it could be measured, theoretically the measurement cannot be done accurately and the tiniest inaccuracy would change the end result an enormous amount.
– Michael S. Gazzaniga

I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.
– Bell Hooks

Very important to find the balance. The choice of the Mahayana way rather than the Theravada.

“If I am not for myself who will be for me, but if I am only for myself, what am I.”

– Hillel

It took my breath away, too, how we could take up so little space and yet contain it all, the vast demands, the amplitude of love.
– Marisa de los Santos

You are reading a bold and universal headline which says, I am here, I am here, I am here.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Supposedly nobody outside the group knew there was a group. Of course we all knew that wasn’t true. High school was like the little clear plastic tunnels that Paul’s hamsters lived in: you could run a long way but never get out, and always, everyone could see you.
– John Barnes

We are unique among the world’s armies. We are unique among the world’s militaries. We don’t take an oath to a country. We don’t take an oath to a tribe. We don’t take an oath to a religion. We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or a tyrant, or to a dictator, or to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea, that as America, we are willing to die to protect it.

Those values and ideas are contained within the Constitution of the United States of America which is the moral North Star for all of us who had the privilege to wear the cloth of our nation. It’s that document that all of us wearing that uniform swear to protect and defend against all enemies, foreign, and domestic. Those who sacrificed themselves upon the alter of freedom the last two and a half centuries of this country must not have done so in vain. The millions wounded in this nations wars did not sacrifice their limbs, and shed their blood, to see this great experiment in democracy perish from this earth. No. We the American people, we the American military must never turn our backs on those who came before us. We will never turn our back on the Constitution. That is our North Star. That is who we are, and that is why we fight.

– General Mark Milley

Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories.
– Kurt Vonnegut

I don’t really mind the government’s new
death ray, because it hasn’t hit me yet.
– Jon Adams

A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.
– Dresden James

Inside the heart, a murmur of poems.
– Sam Roxas-Chua

To learn to meet our needs without continuous violence against one another and our only world would require an immense intellectual and practical effort, requiring the help of every human being perhaps to the end of human time. This would be work worthy of the name “human.” It would be fascinating and lovely.
– Wendell Berry

Mother is a verb as well as a noun, so I hope everyone can honor whatever mothers them and whatever capacity to mother they have, or the equivalent in whatever gender language works for them:

Some people had great mothers but lost them, some had or have mothers who never mothered them or stopped mothering them for some reason, treated them as adversaries or as worthless, and Mother’s Day can be a punitive day for all those for whom this is true. The other half of the question of what there is to celebrate is what mothered and mothers you, how you mother yourself, how you celebrate and recognize what cares for you and takes care of you, and what do you care for in return.

I remember once looking at the Pacific Ocean, to which I often reverted in trouble, and thinking “Everything was my mother but my mother.” Books were my mother, coastlines, running water and landscapes, trees and the flight of birds, zazen and zendos, quiet and cellos, reading and writing, bookstores and familiar views and routines, the changing evening sky, cooking and baking, walking and discovering, rhythms and blues, friends and interior spaces and all forms of kindness, of which there has been more and more as time goes by.

And of my own mother I wrote, in The Faraway Nearby: Like lawyers, writers seek consistency; they make a case for their point of view; they do so by leaving out some evidence; but let me mention the hundreds of sandwiches my mother made during my elementary school years, the peanut butter sandwiches I ate alone on school benches in the open, throwing the crusts into the air where the seagulls would swoop to catch them before they hit the ground.

When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything before she gave me nothing.
May you locate the ten thousand mothers that brought you into being and keep you going, no matter who and where you are. May you be the mother of uncounted possibilities and loves.

– Rebecca Solnit

I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything – other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion – that standing within this otherness – the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books – can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.
– Mary Oliver

In another universe,
I meet my mother
when she is a child.
We go for a walk at the seaside
and she tells me all the things
she loves about the world.
We share a hundred jokes
and she laughs so easily,
without a single worry.
I want to meet that version of her.
Wide eyed and full of joy.
Easy laughter and carefree.
Before the same world
she loved so deeply
broke her heart.
– Nikita Gill

I find that quakerism and research science fit together very, very well. In quakerism you’re expected to develop your own understanding of god from your experience in the world. There isn’t a creed, there isn’t a dogma. There’s an understanding but nothing as formal as a dogma or creed and this idea that you develop your own understanding also means that you keep redeveloping your understanding as you get more experience, and it seems to me that’s very like what goes on in “the scientific method.” You have a model, of a star, it’s an understanding, and you develop that model in the light of experiments and observations, and so in both you’re expected to evolve your thinking. Nothing is static, nothing is final, everything is held provisionally.
– Jocelyn Bell Burnell

In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him
– Bhagavad Gita

Lies I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently
by Raul Gutierrez

Trees talk to each other at night.
All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.
Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV,
they get very loose.
Tiny bears live in drain pipes.
If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub
against the sky.
The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.
Everyone knows at least one secret language.
When nobody is looking, I can fly.
We are all held together by invisible threads.
Books get lonely too.
Sadness can be eaten.
I will always be there.

I thought perhaps she was crazy, but she was only highly intuitive.
– Carl Jung

Difficulties illuminate existence, but they must be fresh and of high quality.
– Tom Robbins

…I was my own
storm once, so young
and eager to raise the sail
of my wanting, and I just wanted
to tell you I love this old boat,
this settled-in thing.
– Keith Leonard

It’s your solemn duty to learn how to enjoy this thing.
– Alan Watts

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

One gram of moss from the forest floor, a piece about the size of a muffin, would harbour 150,000 protozoa, 132,000 tardigrades, 3,000 springtails, 800 rotifers, 500 nematodes, 400 mites, and 200 fly larvae. These numbers tell us something about the astounding quantity of life in a handful of moss.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as “dazzling obscurity”, “whispering silence”, “teeming desert” are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth.

Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions… Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them.

There is a verge of the mind which those things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.

– William James

Q: Was there a particular point at which I should have done something different: gone to school for something specific, made professional advances, interned, taken a risk or leap of faith, asked for help, called people back, shown gratitude, applied for a job with a salary and benefits, saved money, gotten insurance, built a community, resigned myself to a relationship with someone for financial stability, had a baby?

A: Probably.

– Jen George

mother-tongue: to the child just born

if i were eloquent in your language
i would try to tell you

how it is
when something difficult loves you,

how it is
when you begin to love it back,

how this can
cost you everything.

– Lucille Clifton

And there is no doubt that there is nothing in the world which so completely unfolds us as the mother. When the neurotic complains that the world has no understanding, he says indirectly that he misses the mother.
– C.G. Jung

We were all raised to be nice, really nice. A reflexive “niceness” is a pathogenic loss of connection to the soul, and is not nice. The opposite of such a reflexive niceness is called authenticity, or integrity.
– James Hollis

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
– Margaret Atwood

Toward the Space Age

We must begin to catch hold of everything
around us, for nobody knows what we
may need. We have to carry along
the air, even; and the weight we once
thought a burden turns out to form
the pulse of our life and the compass for our brain.
Colors balance our fears, and existence
begins to clog unless our thoughts
can occur unwatched and let a fountain of essential silliness
out through our dreams.

And oh I hope we can still arrange
for the wind to blow, and occasionally
some kind of shock to occur, like rain,
and stray adventures no one cares about —
harmless love, immoderate guffaws on corners,
families crawling around the front room growling,
being bears in the piano cave.

– William Stafford

But every person has their own encyclopedia written, which grows out from each soul, composed from birth onward, hundreds of thousands of pages pressing into each other and yet there’s air between them! Like trembling leaves in a forest. A book of contradictions. What’s in there is revised by the moment; the images touch themselves up, the words flicker. A wave washes through the entire text, followed by the next wave, and the next . . .

– Tomas Tranströmer

The operative fallacy here is that we believe that unconditional love means not seeing anything negative about someone, when it really means pretty much the opposite: loving someone despite their infuriating flaws and essential absurdity. (…) If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.
– Tim Krieder

Nothing is so vehement as its desires, nothing so concealed as its aims, nothing so devious as its methods…
– La Rochefoucauld

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

trusting in the tao doesn’t just mean surrender,

it means trusting that the tao has given you everything you need to discern hard choices and do hard things

– River Pilgrim

Love is the positive force of life, and any negative condition always comes from a lack of love.
– Rhonda Byrne

Where there is contradiction, which is division, there must be disorder. A religious mind is completely without disorder. That is the foundation of a religious life.
– Krishnamurti

When we seek smooth rolling, we are seeking a return to balance, to wholeness.
– Rev. Keiryu Liên Shutt

I do not know what windings in the waste
Of those strange sea-lanes brought me home once more
– H. P. Lovecraft

Consensus reality is like paper money. It has no value except everyone believes in it. It has no real value, only pretend value, which is fine as long as everyone keeps pretending.
– Jed McKenna

You loved poetry, a terrible hobby.
– Shangyang Fang

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
– Edward Lear

i don’t know how many ways i can keep saying this, but you can’t left hemisphere your way out of the left hemisphere
– River Pilgrim

Be like family to your friends, a friend to strangers, and a stranger to your enemies.
– @naval

train whistle
the retired conductor
checks his watch

– Gayle Bull

correct me if i’m wrong but i feel like a lot of you think of consciousness as something that’s inside you, and you can like, mold it, shape it, strengthen it, and maybe jailbreak it to reach out beyond your own body in certain cases, and that’s what things like siddhis and psi are? Or that at death, your body kinda stops holding the consciousness youv’e been holding in there, and it’s freed out into heaven/reincarnation/whatever?

which feels odd to me cuz i sense consciousness more as like… kind of a fluid blanket coating me and snuggling its way into my body-energy system? like the consciousness is already there, and the “Me” has certain pathways and crevices and movement patterns that the consciousness flows into and gets shaped by. And it feels pretty playful on consciousness’s part? Like, it’s’ kinda taking a ride at the amusement park, or going spelunking, squeezing and squiggling itself into the little log flumes of my patterns and neuroses and loves and habits. But also if I want to Get Out Of This Limited Claustrophilic Consciousness, it’s not a matter of like… generating More Consciousness or More Power or More Energy to push it out beyond,, it’s mostly a matter of letting go, un-sticking the sticky spots where consciousness is a lil trapped in a passage or a cul-de-sac;; just let it go, and conscious naturally goes back to being a soft fluid presence blanketing itself around me and also around everything else, and if i just relax enough me and consciousness can just hang out and be the ocean before getting back to being my little passages and channels and habits and I’m not sure I’m describing this very well but as far as I can tell it’s kinda directly inverse to how a lot of people talk about it, even the counsciousness-as-fundamental people, and i find this jarring sometimes.

– River Pilgrim

Abandoned lighthouse.
Behind the panes
the salty moon

– Wolfgang Beutke

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?
– Clarice Lispector

Like a body, with bone and flesh, a poem needs different densities.
– Henri Cole

a border town
in the midst of autumn
rain gently falling
– Basho

pan-fried trout
I learn something new
about my father

– Dave Baldwin

earth hour…
threading beads
by moonlight

– Cynthia Rowe

The living iguanas will come and bite the men
who do not dream, and the man who rushes out
with his spirit broken will meet on the street corner
the unbelievable alligator, quiet beneath the tender protest of the stars.

– Federico García Lorca

Island Of Strangers

We’re already there.
Where no-one leaves their doors unlocked,
Where suspicion is the prime emotion,
Where the sick are a burden,
Where the poor are third class,
Where trans people are legislated against,
Where foreigners are scum,
Where race crime is in fashion again,
Where anyone different is bad,
Where intolerance is encouraged,
Where Europe is the enemy,
Where racists are true friends,
Where no-one is allowed to trust another,
Where the only respected minority is fascist,
Where no promises are kept,
Where love is a foreign word,
Where empathy is discouraged,
Where truth is a dirty word,
Where everyone hates each other,
Where political expediency trumps statesmanship,
Where culture is broken,
Where there s no future.

– Richard Pierce

The thing I love about writing is that every piece is a chance to solve the problem in a new way, to take a risk with structure and voice and approach… This is also the thing that I hate about writing.
– Irina Dumitrescu

I am so busy. I am practicing my new hobby
of watching me become someone else.
There is so much violence in reconstruction.
Every minute is grisly, but I have to participate.
I am building what I cannot break.

– Jennifer Willoughby, The Sun is Still a Part of Me

Diversity in all its forms is the path to greatness.
– James D Wilson

TAKE LOVE FOR GRANTED

Assume it’s in the kitchen,
under the couch, high
in the pine tree out back,
behind the paint cans
in the garage. Don’t try
proving your love
is bigger than the Grand
Canyon, the Milky Way,
the urban sprawl of L.A.
Take it for granted. Take it
out with the garbage. Bring
it in with the takeout. Take
it for a walk with the dog.
Wake it every day, say,
“Good morning.” Then
make the coffee. Warm
the cups. Don’t expect much
of the day. Be glad when
you make it back to bed.
Be glad he threw out that
box of old hats. Be glad
she leaves her shoes
in the hall. Snow will
come. Spring will show up.
Summer will be humid.
The leaves will fall
in the fall. That’s more
than you need. We can
love anybody, even
everybody. But you
can love the silence,
sighing and saying to
yourself, “That’ s her.”
“That’s him.” Then to
each other, “I know!
Let’s go out for breakfast!”

– Jack Ridl

The question is: can thought be proprioceptive? You have the intention to think, which you’re not usually aware of. You think because you have an intention to think. It comes from the idea that it is necessary to think, that there’s a problem. If you watch, you’ll see an intention to think, an impulse to think. Then comes the thought, and the thought may give rise to a feeling, which might give rise to another intention to think, and so on. You’re not aware of that, so the thought appears as if it were coming by itself, and the feeling appears to be coming by itself, and so on. That gives the wrong meaning, as in the case of the woman we talked about just now. You may get a feeling that you don’t like from a thought, and then a second later say, “I’ve got to get rid of that feeling,” but your thought is still there working, especially if it’s a thought that you take to be absolutely necessary. In fact, the problems we have been discussing are basically all due to this lack of proprioception. The point of suspension is to help make proprioception possible, to create a mirror so that you can see the results of your thought. You have it inside yourself because your body acts as a mirror and you can see tensions arising in the body. Also other people are a mirror, the group is a mirror. You have to see your intention. You get an impulse to say something and you see it there, the result, at almost the same time. If everybody is giving attention, then there will arise a new kind of thought between people, or even in the individual, which is proprioceptive, and which doesn’t get into the kind of tangle that thought gets into ordinarily, which is not proprioceptive. We could say that practically all the problems of the human race are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive. Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn’t notice that it’s creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates — because it’s not proprioceptive of what it’s doing. If your body were that way you would very quickly come to grief and you wouldn’t last very long. And it may be said that if our culture were that way, our civilization would not last all that long, either. So this is another way in which dialogue will help collectively to bring about a different kind of consciousness.

– David Bohm, On Dialogue

We tend to associate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet in reality total strangers, who will never say a single word to each other, can share an intimacy — an intimacy contained in the exchange of a glance, a nod of the head, a smile, a shrug of a shoulder. A closeness that lasts for minutes or for the duration of a song that is being listened to together. An agreement about life. An agreement without clauses. A conclusion spontaneously shared between the untold stories gathered around the song.
– John Berger, Some Notes on Song

If a man lives without inner struggle, if everything happens in him without opposition, if he goes wherever he is drawn or wherever the wind blows, he will remain such as he is. But if a struggle begins in him, and particularly if there is a definite line in this struggle, then, gradually, permanent traits begin to form themselves, he begins to ‘crystallise’…Crystallisation is possible on any foundations.
– Valentin Tomberg

The force of life, and electrical energy: Are these not the most clear manifestations of these two principles? Life and electricity must be clearly distinguished. Thus, today there is a tendency to confuse them, and to reduce them to electricity alone. However, electricity is due to the antagonism of opposites, whilst life is the fusion of polarities.
– Anonymous

It is necessary to restrain the bull in us in order to elevate it to the Bull. This means to say that the instinctive desire which shows itself as rage concentrated upon a single thing, and which blinds one to everything else, is to be restrained and thus elevated to the propensity for profound meditation. This entire operation is summarized in Hermeticism by the words “to be silent”. The precept “to be silent” is not, as many authors interpret it, solely a rule of prudence, but it is moreover a practical method of transforming this narrowing and blinkering instinct into a propensity towards depth and, correspondingly, an aversion towards all that is superficial in nature.
The winged Bull is therefore the result obtained by the procedure of “being silent”. This means to say that the Bull is elevated to the level of the Eagle and united with it. A marriage of the impetus towards the heights and the propensity towards depth is effected by this union. The marriage of opposites – this traditional theme of alchemy – is the essence of the practice of the law of the Cross.
– Valentin Tomberg

Yet to hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.
– Roland Barthes

[…] Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it, and so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. […]
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
– T.S. Eliot

there were two reasons
i was scared
to let people in;
the damage they could do,
and the damage they could find.
– Chris McGeown

Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.
– Hannah Arendt

Treading along in this dreamlike, illusory realm,
Without looking for the traces I may have left;
A cuckoo’s song beckons me to return home,
Hearing this, I tilt my head to see
Who has told me to turn back;
But do not ask me where I am going,
As I travel in this limitless world,
Where every step I take is my home.
– Dogen

The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behavior. The parent has to second-guess what the cry, the kick, the grief, or the anger is really about. And what marks out this project of interpretation—and makes it so different from what occurs in the average adult relationship—is its charity. Parents are apt to proceed from the assumption that their children, though they may be troubled or in pain, are fundamentally good. As soon as the particular pin that is jabbing them is correctly identified, they will be restored to native innocence. When children cry, we don’t accuse them of being mean or self-pitying; we wonder what has upset them. When they bite, we know they must be frightened or momentarily vexed. We are alive to the insidious effects that hunger, a tricky digestive tract, or a lack of sleep may have on mood. How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships—if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion, and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love.
– Alain de Botton

Georgia O’Keeffe, Faraway, Nearby, 1937, Camille Carter

Make no bones about it—
or better yet, make bones:
sand-borne, sun-bleached, bald-faced bones
naked but for a Southwest sky.

I began picking up bones
because there were no flowers.
More than enough to fill your pockets, a treasure
trove—in plain sight—atop sage-covered plains.

In the picture taken by your lover, you pose with them—
nestling them, caressing them, pressing them:
brush of bone against your cheekbone. Your eyes rolled back
in ecstasy—momentarily, you were someplace else.

Place was a metaphysics; the word “skeleton” meant “home.”
He will not follow you there. You return alone
to New Mexico, to your catacomb, curio cabinet stuffed
with canvases, with corpses.

It’s the summer of 1936 when you receive his letter:
I worry … the landscape makes you lonely … 
But it is his logic that makes you lonely. You will not
bother to reply. Outside at dusk,

you paint the desert, the broken fence, a single
chicken bone. Suddenly you are struck
to think how elemental they turned out to be,
your life’s preoccupations.

Where in the prism of  the painting antlers bloom,
as ascendant and gnarled as branches,
sits the alien skull of the once-majestic stag,
his eye-sockets hollow but for your projections.

One night you dream you see yourself as if from far away,
asleep and slumped on sand dunes the color of cream.
Walking backwards you watch with fascination as your body
fades into a hillock’s hump, is stifled by a sun-drenched sheet.

Between fourteen and nineteen I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
– Gore Vidal

Trust your material if it’s taking you into terrain you didn’t intend to enter but where the vibrations are good. Adjust your style accordingly and proceed to whatever destination you reach. Don’t become the prisoner of a preconceived plan. Writing is no respecter of blueprints.
– William Zinsser

It is very difficult to surprise oneself in one’s own mind. The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.
– Adam Phillips

When the soul finds peace, it appears in the eyes—soft as a dove’s gaze, steady as love unshaken.
– Meister Eckhart

If the doors of my heart ever close,
I am as good as dead.
– Mary Oliver

Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
– Adam Phillips

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads.
– Albert Camus

A good blister tells a better story than most selfies.
– Outside Magazine

I was keeping myself alive doctoring books.
– Gordon Lish

Be isolated, be ignored, be attacked, be in doubt, be frightened, but do not be silenced.
– Bertrand Russell

Out on a limb in Palisade
are a whole lotta blossoms
some tender saplings
and those who know the spring freeze

Out on a limb in Palisade are a whole lotta growers
and a whole lotta seeds, here where the river feeds
and recedes

and believes
in cottonwood trees

Out on a limb in Palisade are stilt walkers,
wine lovers, mancos shale, the holy grail, sand stone,
the round

crown of the town,
the song dog, the alley cat,
some bear scat
the bankers and the ancestors,

the artists and the makers,
the Kokopellis and storytellers,
the softly spoken, the fiercely driven,
the salt of the earth, the over
and the under heard

Out on a limb in Palisade, out past the dam,
under the moon, living the life of growing things
and gratitude —
takin a chance
on bluegrass and blue grass dance
out on a limb and lookin’ to
the buttes and the bluffs, lovin’ the sun,
lovin’ the shadows and the shade
here in the spring that is Palisade.

– Wendy Videlock

The best hiding spots are not the most hidden; they’re merely the least searched.
– Chris Pavone

It’s the sort of day that brought back to me what I’ve had so rarely for the last two years — that tearing hunger to do and do and do things. I want to walk 1000 miles, and write 1000 plays, and sing 1000 poems, and drink 1000 pots of beer, and kiss 1000 girls…The spring makes me almost ill with excitement.
– Rupert Brooke

There are three ways of arriving at an opinion on any subject. The first is to believe what one is told; the second is to disbelieve it; and the third is to examine the matter for oneself. The overwhelming majority of mankind practice the first method; of the remainder, the overwhelming majority practice the second; only an infinitesimal remnant practice the third.
– Bertrand Russell

If somebody truly cares about you, they will care about the impact their behavior has on you.
– Mel Robbins

Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

The Long Boat
by Stanley Kunitz

When his boat snapped loose
from its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn’t matter
which way was home;
as if he didn’t know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.

What can you teach? Not art, that’s impossible. Contrary to the common view, art can’t be taught. I believe that a piece of work comes out naturally from a human being just like one human being comes out of another… You must have life coming out of you.
– Kazuo Ohno

In your mind, you’re mad. But in conversation you have the chance of not being. In conversation things can be metabolized and digested through somebody else.
– Adam Phillips

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. Ans that means the old books…
– C.S. Lewis

As a person whose tendency is to be always revising, I thought, What happens if I write a poem a day and just let it be what it is?
– Terrance Hayes

If everyone’s lost on the roads, you might as well fly. Enjoy your life.
– Shirley Kaufman, Amazement

I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.
– James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
– Adrienne Rich

Taking a shower is a miracle, laughing is a miracle, being here is a miracle.
– Jared Singer

How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before?

– Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

What is it, the heart,
is it the sound of the pine trees
blowing in the painting?

– Ikkyū, tr. Mary Ruefle

Changes in a person’s feelings aren’t regulated by custom, logic, or the law. They’re fluid, unstable, free to spread their wings and fly away. Like migratory birds have no concept of borders between countries.

– Haruki Murakami

Boomers worked one job for 40 years. Millennials work 40 jobs in one year. Gen Z is questioning why jobs even exist.
– Josh Rincon

I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here.
– W.S. Merwin

The deeper I go into myself the more I realize how everything is just a concept and imagination.
– Robert Celner

Birdsong has a uniquely uplifting power, not because it demands our attention, but because it arrives softly, like a gift we didn’t know we needed. In the quiet hours of morning or the stillness between moments, the delicate calls and melodies of birds weave through the air, stirring something deep within us—a sense of peace, of continuity, of connection to a world far older and wiser than our own. Each note is a testament to resilience, echoing through trees and open skies as a daily ritual of joy and presence. In a world often overwhelmed by noise, birdsong is a gentle reminder that there is still harmony, still grace, still something pure to be found if we choose to listen. It doesn’t solve our problems, but it lifts us above them for a moment, returning us to a more grounded, hopeful place within ourselves.
– Gevee Boudreau

Real growth happens when we walk the path with others, not alone.
– Josh Korda

“Murmuration” is a cool word because it bears the trace of the sound. It’s beautiful when you watch those movements, but it’s even more beautiful when you hear them. The internal differentiation of the swarm is absolute wealth.

– Fred Moten

I don’t believe in specific goals. Scott Adams famously said, Set up systems, not goals.’ Use your judgment to figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in, and then create an environment around you so you’re statistically likely to succeed.
– @naval

This World
by Czesław Miłosz

Translated by Robert Hass

It appears that it was all a misunderstanding.
What was only a trial run was taken seriously.
The rivers will return to their beginnings.
The wind will cease in its turning about.
Trees instead of budding will tend to their roots.
Old men will chase a ball, a glance in the mirror—
They are children again.
The dead will wake up, not comprehending.
Till everything that happened has unhappened.
What a relief! Breathe freely, you who suffered much.

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

So Many Moons
by Braulio Arenas

So many moons come and gone
Stripes and more stripes tigers and more tigers
And the luxury hotel to sleep in
Dreams and more dreams kisses and more kisses
What will remain of so much moon
What will remain of so much water so much thirst
so much drinking glass
Window destined for you
So you can depend on it more perfect
You make of your beauty
What others make of the sky

Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity.
– Adam Phillips

When we die, we won’t be saying, “I wish I could have risen higher in the corporate hierarchy. I wish I’d been more popular, made more money.” In the end, it comes down to intimacy, to your own contentment, your own equanimity, your own ability to enjoy what’s in front of you.
– Sensei John Pulleyn

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art . . . The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made.
– Donald Barthelme

Every time you make art a fascist trembles.
– Joseph Fasano

Joyfulness is one of the greatest antidotes to cynicism.
– Scott Tusa

I used to think that paired opposites were a given, that love was the opposite of hate, right the opposite of wrong. But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality.
– Anne Lamott

Out of these parts, full of hundreds and thousands of stories, tales and yarns, the ship tells the stories over again, with all the details and minor twists.
– B. Traven, The Death Ship

You had to blaze a new path before they could find you because you don’t fit in their boxes. You had to create new language before they could hear you because you talk different. You had to become someone who has never existed before. And now you’re ready. This era is the reveal.
– Nika Solé

A secret law contrives
To give time symmetry:
There is, within our lives,
An exact mystery.

– Vernon Watkins

So long as we are immersed in body consciousness, we are like strangers in a foreign country. Our native land is omnipresence.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

How absurd meditation has become.
– Krishnamurti

Cosmic consciousness is a thing that can happen to anyone—like falling in love, or getting measles, or…. It’s an experience of being one with the whole scheme of things; where suddenly you wake up and see that, for always and always and always, you are one with this universe, and that the whole system of the universe—despite all its troubles—is fundamentally harmonious. It’s difficult to say that everything is right, because that doesn’t make any sense—because you don’t know right without wrong. But there’s this sensation of being “Aaaaah.” It’s called ineffable—that is to say, unspeakable. And the task of a poet and a philosopher such as myself is to eff the ineffable: to say what can’t be said—which is what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to express what it’s like to have cosmic consciousness because I believe that if human beings understand this kind of experience, they will be much more secure in themselves, and much less insane in their behavior. Because we behave insanely because we feel lost, because we feel alienated from the universe. And therefore we’re attacking the universe: we feel that we have to indulge in the conquest of nature, the conquest of space, that we have to beat everything into submission. And this is because we don’t realize that we are sons of god, or (if you want to say) true children of nature.
– Alan Watts

As far as I’m concerned, I believe the subject chooses the writer.
– Mario Vargas Llosa

The world is not rigged in such a way that the harder you work, the more you get.

Hard work is a prerequisite, it is an ingredient, but you cannot outwork everybody else;

There just aren’t that many hours in the day.

– @naval

What is the final bottom line of acceptance and surrender? That there is truly no “me” who can do anything. There is really, truly no “me”. Nothing happens, unless it is the will of the Source, the will of God. The sense of personal doership is an illusion.
– Ramesh Balsekar

I propose to think of our … utopias … as so many islands: a Utopian archipelago, islands in the net, a constellation of discontinuous centers, themselves internally decentered.

– Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future

i have no specific skills, i just drop beneath the waves and listen, and come back whispering a little of what i hear, and that seems to be enough most of the time.
– River Kenna

“Why don’t you read the books you already own before buying new books” why don’t you eat all the food in the house before going shopping? That’s what you sound like. That’s how crazy you sound right now.
– John Attridge

You carry medicine.

You are medicine.

May healing show up in you and with you everywhere you go.

Be not consumed. Shift the atmosphere.

– Dr. Thema

“I never see you out”

Ok well I never see you within.

– Nika Solé

one narcissus
draws close to another
like the only
two adolescent boys
in the universe

– Tada Chimako

You can’t remix your life in a day, but you can press play on one small habit. That’s how Bowie became Bowie. It starts in the bedroom studio of your mind.
– Eric Alper

There is a real gap between me and the next person, there is a space between every human being. And it is not a frightening space. The empty air which exists between people might be crossed by emotion, but it might not. You need something else, or you need something first… Now, I think the word we need is ‘translation.’
– Anne Enright

You get rewarded for unique knowledge, not for effort.

Effort is required to create unique knowledge.

– @naval

Becoming-imperceptible is the event for which there is no immediate representation.

– Rosi Braidotti

Since you came from God, you possess the same potential energy, or power, as God does—should you choose to resonate at the highest frequencies. This is why I stress the importance of knowing who you really are!
– Crystal Andrus

For profit healthcare is harmful.
– Andy Perrin

Your fancies and your fears make foes of nothing.
– Tolkien

Many are the strange chances of the world…and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter.
– Mithrandir (Tolkien, The Silmarillion)

Knowing yourself deeply has nothing to do with whatever ideas are floating around in your mind.
– Eckhart Tolle

Lost in his idiosyncratic joy or anxiety, hugging his peculiar purpose to his breast, he drifts through the frigid wilderness of society, as essentially alone as a sailor lashed to a spar on the ocean.
– W. R. Alger

With all due respect-why is everyone still fixated on Biden? We have Nazis taking over the U.S. government. Focus please.
– Claude Taylor

A dysfunctional system tries to cover, break or exile its mirrors so it doesn’t have to see its own reflection. Often it can convince the mirrors to cover, break or exile themselves.
– @_primamateria

Strength without compassion is fallacy.
– Manly P. Hall

When we come to the New York School, what do we make of the fact that so many of that first generation, the second, the third, were on the couch?
– Hannah Zeavin, On Poetry and Psychoanalysis

Some people only study
mystical works and holy texts,
Mystics write their own.
It’s different.
– @entertheunseen

green coolness
of the forest~
a raindrop falls
– @joy_pops

The Poet

You’re withdrawing from me, you hour.
The beating of your wings leaves me bruised.
Alone: what shall I do with my mouth?
with my night? with my day?

I have no loved one, no house,
no place to lead a life.
All the things to which I give myself
grow rich and spend me.

– Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Edward Snow)

Chose amnesia
To numb the pain of hiraeth.
Heartbroken nomad.

– @FoundLostAgain

Your spiritual journey begins when you..
decide to re-discover
who you REALLY are,
where you REALLY are,
and what’s REALLY happening in this
place we call our reality.

– Di Riseborough

Among humans, the fact that no one ever feels they are the aggressor is because everything is always reciprocal. The slightest little difference, in one direction or another, can trigger the escalation to extremes. The aggressor has always already been attacked. Why are relations of rivalry never seen as symmetrical? Because people always have the impression that the other is the first to attack.
– Rene Girard

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
– Terry Pratchett

Even disasters have design. I told her I distrust history now more than ever, because how much of it has always been gaslighting and ruthless curating? How much of what we believe was decided for us? I explained to her that we are always living in each other’s collective imagination. We can only be free to the extent to which we, or people who love us, can see.

– Eloghosa Osunde, Reality is Plasticine

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth–certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
– Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government

Hope envisages its future and then acts as if that future is now irresistible, thus helping to create the reality for which it longs. The future is not closed… Even a small number of people, firmly committed to the new inevitability on which they have fixed their imaginations, can decisively affect the shape the future takes.
– Walter Wink, The Powers that Be

Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this ‘Ah’, because there’s something in them that’s brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here’s the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling ‘why am I so ordinary?’, you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn’t realised or you’d forgotten human beings could shine so.
– Niall Williams

Memories do not have to be exact in every detail to contain an emotional truth. The trick is to recapture the details that point to those truths.
– Philip Graham

Jack Schlossberg – JFK grandson: This is what he said when he learned Trump unclassified his grandfather’s assassination. This is pretty powerful!

A.) “President Trump is obsessed with my grandfather — but not in his life or what he achieved in it. No, just like @robertfkennedyjr @realdonaldtrump is only interested in JFK’s carcass.”

B.) “JFK drafted the civil rights act — Trump made DEI illegal. JFK stared down Russia and did not blink — Trump is Russia’s closest ally. JFK sent a man to the moon — Trump gave Elon the keys to Air Force One. JFK created USAID — Trump eliminated it.”

C. “JFK fought fascism and Communism. Trump is selling us out to tech warlords, at home and abroad. JFK stood behind unions and labor, demanding healthcare, higher pay. Trump is stripping working families from lifesaving care , financial support.”

D.) “These men are stealing history from present and future generations — by appropriating the past for their criminal agenda, they normalize themselves in the minds of those without living memory.”

We don’t grow up,
we just grow tired.
Of people. Of love. Of hope.
And somewhere in between,
we start calling survival “life.”
– Charles Bukowski

I had a profound desire to be alone, because only alone, lost, silent, on foot, can I recognize things.
– Pier Paolo Pasolini

Anyway, I often think that the scarf, that should constantly blow over our consideration, would have a crimson inscription: ‘We don’t have universal recipes.’ What is useful to one, will leave the other indifferent, and may harm the other. This is why we can say one thing responsibly: a deep crisis will most likely affect you. Perhaps it will be a crisis that will require you to completely rephrase the foundations of your existence. But we won’t tell you how to do it. We can only encourage people to open up to such a transformation.
– Bartłomiej Dobroczy eszski

But what’s growth? I mean everything grows, that’s just the way life is, life just grows. You know, it grows and it dies, it lives and it dies. Whenever you get to a plateau, that’s not it, you got to go on to the next one. You can’t stay nowhere, there’s no place to stay, there’s no place that will keep you.
– Bob Dylan

Never compete… Your competitor will immediately try to find your faults and discredit you. Few wage war fairly. Rivalry discovers the defects that courtesy overlooks.
– Baltasar Gracián

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience.
– Alfred North Whitehead

When I look for freedom today, I find it not in fantasy or in dreams but in my sitting practice. What kind of freedom is it that exists in doing nothing? It is the freedom not to interfere or react. It is the freedom to merely observe.
– Ananda Baltrunas

I had, by the time I discovered Buddhism, spent several years preoccupied with the notion that I was the only person I knew who recognized that life was tragically flawed, and yet here it was as the central teachings of the Buddha. It was such a relief!
– Sylvia Boorstein

Without place-based Indigenous spiritualities, we cannot protect the world’s amazing biodiversity, engage in trauma healing, or develop ecological resilience.
– Kritee Kanko

Stay closer to your dreams. That’s the surefire way out. Don’t get up—stay down to become free. This is the principle of analysis.
– Hannah Zeavin

The spirituality of work. Work makes us experience in the most exhausting manner the phenomenon of finality rebounding like a ball; to work in order to eat, to eat in order to work. If we regard one of the two as an end, or the one and the other taken separately, we are lost. Only the cycle contains the truth.
– Simone Weil

When I saw so many living in the street, stores boarded up, and countless others seemingly aimless, wandering around, I felt a deep ache in my heart.

How can we live the Bodhisattva path: the path in which we see ourselves as part of the interdependent, unified field of life that leads us to recognize how important it is to be fully present to our suffering world?

– Radhule Weininger

To learn, one must have humility; the mind must be in a state of not-knowing.
– Krishnamurti

Evil must hide in plain sight, for the rules of the universe demand that the deceived must consent to their deception.
– Aleister Crowley

Awareness of what is, and fidelity to seeing what is with curiosity’s questioning and accuracy, are at the heart of both poetry and science. Poets and research scientists are equally dedicated to a primary observation. We draw from the available data of our lives—by which I mean also the lives and the data we share with plants, animals, rocks, galaxies.
– Jane Hirshfield

In the land of poetry,
nightingales, and roses,
living is a blessing.

– Forough Farrokhzad

I wouldn’t trade my solitude for a little love. For a lot of love, yes. But a lot of love is itself a kind of solitude.
– Duice María Loynaz

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
– Nelson Mandela

When you talk about the sins of others, their sins become yours.
– Imam Ali

Picasso revolutionized perspective. But so do you. Think of the ways you see the world differently, and how that shapes everything you touch.
– Ritu Negi

Knowledge is a burden if it robs you of innocence.
Knowledge is a burden if it is not integrated into life.
Knowledge is a burden if it doesn’t bring joy.
Knowledge is a burden if it gives you an idea that you are wise.
Knowledge is a burden if it doesn’t set you free.
Knowledge is a burden if it makes you feel you are special.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

The whole course of history proves that we do not learn from the past.
– Isaac Asimov

God has no religion.
– Gandhi

I must find a truth that is true for me.
– Søren Kierkegaard

Honesty pays dividends both in dollars and in peace of mind.
– B. C. Forbes

Christ can succeed only when law is defeated by love, when matter is defeated by spirit, when language is defeated by silence, when proof is defeated by poetry, when life is not ruled by economic, instinctive, historical laws, but life is ruled by grace. Then Jesus succeeds.
– Osho

I outlived who I was yesterday.
– Brandon Melendez

Lord, where we grow
so do the conditions
for surrender.
– Zach Goldberg

I don’t hate love,
I just hate what people do in its name.
They lie, cheat, beg, cry—
then post a quote and pretend they healed.
Truth is, no one’s honest when they’re in love.

– Charles Bukowski

Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.
– Mark Twain

We are in a struggle between a culture of solidarity and a culture of selfishness.
– José Pepe

The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you.
– B.B. King

Love and doubt have never
been on speaking terms.
– Khalil Gabran

I have not been so out of my depth in years. It’s thrilling. It made me realize that…my feet had been inscribing the same circles into the earth…and it was time to swerve in more ways than one.
– Michelle Wildgen

I don’t understand why this isn’t enough for you. Why the world isn’t enough for you. Why you are so obsessed with magic when you have all the wonder of humanity around you.
– Charles Montgomery

Keep your sense of humor, my friend; if you don’t have a sense of humor it just isn’t funny anymore.
– Wavy Gravy

I survived, carried on, glad to be like a weed, a wild red poppy, rooted in life.
– Marilyn Buck

Wild is the proximity of the sacred.
– Friedrich Hölderlin

The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.
– Wendell Berry

No matter what I say,
what I believe, and what I do,
I am bankrupt without love.
– Corinthians 13.3b

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
– R.D. Laing

The job of the artist is to find ways that creativity can come through them, and then loosen the ego and become expanded enough for the archetypal energy of creation to enter.
– Michael Meade

She thought it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.
– Jane Austen

When you defeat the greatest enemy, yourself,
you discover the greatest master, yourself.
– Shi Su Yan

Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn’t already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
– Thomas Merton

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
– Anne Carson

All obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born.
– J. G. Ballard

The craze for mass organization wrenches everyone out of his private world into the deafening tumult of the market-place, making him an unconscious, meaningless particle in the mass and the helpless prey of every kind of suggestion.
– Carl Jung

What had happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world was colored by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural passions becoming unnatural passions.
– G.K. Chesterton

We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day.
– Jack Gilbert

Compassion is where the rubber hits the road—it’s the essence of both practice and life.
– Barry Kerzin

Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.
– Emily Dickinson

Most people mistake their sexual preferences for a universal system that will or should work for everyone.
– Gayle Rubin

Be ruthless to the things that don’t matter.
– Ryan Holiday

The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Truth and Reason show but dim,
And all’s poetry with him.

– Robert Graves

what happens when poets speak the least poetry in life but insist they are the guardians of the poem; this, too, is a dead language
– Fady Joudah

Light must come from inside. You cannot ask the darkness to leave; you must turn on the light.
– Sogyal Rinpoche

The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
– Susan Sontag

Writing has been my one constant. I was about to be truly alone. For a night and a day and a night and a day and a night and a day.
– Lisa Carver

She is a lone enthusiast, sensitive,
Shivers, and can not keep the tears from her eye:
And such do love the marvelous too well
Not to believe it. We will wind up her fancy
With a strange music, that she knows not of . . .

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Remorse

Most of us are dragged
toward wholeness.
We do not understand
the breakdown of what has gone before.
We do not understand.
We cling to the familiar,
refuse to make necessary sacrifices,
refuse to give up habitual lives,
resist our growth.
We do not understand rebirth,
do not accept the initiation rites.
Most of us are dragged
toward wholeness.

– Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself

Children, then, open the dharma for us, offering a massive challenge of loving without attachment, of bringing mindful attention to them, of fathoming the full meaning of impermanence.
– Neil Gordon

The biggest distortion is distortion of view—an inherent bias in how we perceive the world.
– Bonnie Duran

Music still travels under top-secret orders. And assuredly these contain no references, directly or primarily, to an origin linked with material things and the magic of things.
– Ernst Bloch

gated
complex
in the grip
of wisteria

– Helen Buckingham

I’m thinking of how often I’ve been that person having a private moment in public space, aware of how easily I could wander off the map and wondering who had seen it.

What is the pull of the mineral fact of such a thought.

– Elizabeth Willis, Future Imperfect

How does anyone sleep.

– Elizabeth Willis, Future Imperfect

I am listening to Octavia Butler’s quantum thought, not science or fiction but the field that resides between thought and feeling. The capacity for thinking beyond narrative event or recorded fact.

– Elizabeth Willis, Future Imperfect

I’m sitting in a north so bent by its own systems that it banks its truth claims as Inevitability.

– Elizabeth Willis, Future Imperfect

We mean no harm. We keep our distance. I’m learning which sides of the street to walk on.
– Gabriela Valencia, Good Neighbor

My ideal job?
Inspector of the tideline
– Colette Bryce

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

– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Life is not a logical process.
It is poetry, it is love song
without any meaning, yet
it is utterly beautiful.

– Osho

One beautiful morning
you, too, can up and leave the house
never to return to it

– Ryszard Krynicki

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

No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint “living people who breathe and feel and suffer” and love.
– Edvard Munch

Complacency about our freedoms can lead to complicity in tyranny.
– Michael Roth

I wash my hair
and put on fresh clothes
repeating to myself,
“you change yourself
you change the world”

– Naomi Beth Wakan

I was required to read books that opened up the world for me and made me see how much roomier it was than I had imagined.
– Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

I just don’t think it’s possible ever to be fully conscious. I see it as the tip of an iceberg and then there’s this vast world down below. And I think we are meant to live with mystery. It opens up the dimensions that keep us human and compassionate.
– Marion Woodman

Why did you come here, to this place, if not in the hope of being understood, of being in some small way comprehended by your peers, and embraced by them in a fellowship of shared secrets?
– Mary Ruefle

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.
– Jim Harrison

He walked on water. The Christ
He crossed the Delaware
as portrayed in so many paintings.

– Eric Sirota, The Rent Eats First

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.
– Haruki Murakami

To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence… I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.
– Witold Gombrowicz

Your kids are not leaving the church
because you didn’t train them enough.
Your kids are leaving the church because
you trained them well enough to develop
a sense for truth and justice. You let them
read the words of Jesus – and they got it.
And they’ve recognized that the church
doesn’t seem to be interested in those
words. They’re not leaving because they
don’t know the truth, they’re leaving
because they do.

– Rhett McLaughlin

Some people get lucky and find that art works for them, but for so many people it doesn’t. I think that needs to be included in the picture.
– Adam Phillips

Little Town

Cobble your streets and no whining:
Stones are abundant here,
Stones and weather and air.

– Rita Dove

I have wrestled with the angel
and I am stained with light and I have no shame.

– Mary Oliver

Scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have successfully transformed lead into gold atoms, achieving an ancient alchemist dream through modern physics.
– ABC News

Ah ha!…but the real work will always remain: transforming one’s inner “lead” into inner “gold.”
– Frank LaRue Owen

When I’m old, I don’t want to look younger, I want to look happier.
– Anna Magnan

Childhood is still running along beside us like a little dog who used to be a merry companion, but who now requires our care and splints, and myriad medicines, to prevent him from promptly passing on.
– Thomas Bernhard

Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate. In all my works I take the part
of trees against all their enemies.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

New Age dabblers insist that if they can just focus their mind on a huge house and a career as a movie star, they’ll “manifest” what they want. These methods try to force reality to cooperate with the small imagination of our personalities. It doesn’t work. A wayfinder’s Imagination doesn’t dominate reality. It feels into Oneness, falls in love with “what wants to happen,” and gives itself to the vision created by that love.
– Martha Beck

Finding yourself doesn’t require that you fly to Tibet, join a convent, or build a meditation room. Just consistently keep a minimal commitment to empty time.
– Martha Beck

It is your integrity and your kindness that makes the world beautiful. May all beings be happy.

– Michael Kewley

Things will happen that will trample and pierce, but I shall go on, something that is here and there like the wind, something unconquerable, something not to be separated from the dark earth and the light sky, a strong citizen of infinity and eternity.
– Edward Thomas

Painters have a knowledge which goes beyond words. They are where musicians are. When someone blows the saxophone the sky is made of copper. When you make a watercolor you know how it feels to be the sea lying early in the day in the proximity of light.
– Etel Adnan

Our view of life is but a sliver of light in the thick, velvety darkness. […] Remember that any summary of life, even a well-written biography, fails to capture the details that comprise a life: the quiet evenings by the sink, the way a person smiled or laughed, an April sunset turning crimson behind a row of beech that sets them into a reverie of childhood, which is, itself, misremembered, since accessing a memory changes its form.
– Andrew Bertaina

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
– Annie Dillard

There are moments when things go well and one feels encouraged. There are difficult moments and one feels overwhelmed. But it’s senseless to speak of optimism or pessimism. The only important thing is to know that if one works well in a potato field, the potatoes will grow. If one works well among men, they will grow – that’s reality. The rest is smoke. It’s important to know that words don’t move mountains. Work, exactly work, moves mountains.
– Danilo Dolci

He was the solitary and lucid witness of a many-shaped world, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise. […] It was difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to become distracted from the world.
– Jorge Luis Borges

You see a vision that no one else sees. You understand the world in a way that no one else does. You are capable of things that no one else can do. At some point you just have to lean into that.
– Nika Solé

Every great man has a great shadow.
– Henry Abramovitch, Ph.D.

We need poets to rescue us from the awful contradictions we get into. Speech is literal and rational and cannot easily contain the depths of the mystery. For that, we need symbols and symbolic language.
– Robert A. Johnson

How to upgrade your wellbeing?

Less politics on the mind.

More movement of the body.

Apply daily.

Witness the transformation!

– @moveorperish

What It Looks Like To Us and the
Words We Use
by Ada Limón

All these great barns out here in the outskirts,
black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass.
They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use.
You say they look like arks after the sea’s
dried up, I say they look like pirate ships,
and I think of that walk in the valley where
J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said,
No. I believe in this connection we all have
to nature, to each other, to the universe.
And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there,
low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,
and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets,
woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so.
So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky,
its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name
though we knew they were really just clouds —
disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.

And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.
– G.K. Chesterton

I wanted to stay put,
smell the spring,

just that. Not move,
let someone know me.

– Michael Burkard

We have a deficit of wonder. I think it’s because of computers. When I ask people questions now, they get on their computer – `Gimme a few minutes and I’ll let you know….’ And I’m, like, ‘Nooooo!’ I want them to wonder about it, man! I don’t want to know the answer. I just want them to wonder about it.
– Tom Waits

“It’s a comfort to become a tourist in old age … and enjoy my irrelevance,” he wrote in his book, “Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80.” – “because you lose your ambition, but you still love your work.”
– Garrison Keillor

I’m not trying to play the guitar. I’m trying to play music.
– Michael Hedges

All the letters I can write
Are not fair as this –
Syllables of Velvet –
Sentences of Plush,
Depths of Ruby, undrained,
Hid, Lip, for Thee –
Play it were a Humming Bird –
And just sipped – me –

– Emily Dickinson

And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?
– Rumi

People living in the West, in societies that we describe as Western, or as the free world, may be educated in many different ways, but they will all emerge with an idea about themselves that does something like this: I am a citizen of a free society, and that means I am an individual, making individual choices. My mind is my own, my opinions are chosen by me, I am free to do as I will…
– Doris Lessing

those large, vague, ill-defined collections of people who may never think of themselves as having a collective mind… The underlying assumptions and assertions that govern the group are never discussed, never challenged, probably never noticed…
– Doris Lessing

With no apologies.

This may come as a rude shock to some who have heard me wax poetic or write generously about entanglements, nonduality and relational ontologies. Having listened to me, some say these ideas boil down to one thing: we are all the same, united behind the ephemeral antics of the material, cut out from the one fabric of things, citizens of a harmonious mandate not yet fully disclosed. We are one, they conclude.

But I am wary of that reading of things. Let me share why.

Whiteness is the terraforming, racializing principle that enacts a hegemonic ordering of bodies – pressing many to the ignoble and dark ground and anointing some to float in the gushing light of transcendent purity. The excruciatingly painful losses suffered because of this flattening of lives, this decimation of landscapes, this scratching of mountain faces, this sanitization of unwieldy time into a militaristic temporality of progress and arrival, is well understood today. One way to respond to this burden of pain has been to read eastern cosmologies and popular renditions of quantum dynamics in a way that dismisses the vexed subject of race altogether and does away with differences. They say: don’t talk about race. Race is just a social construction. It has no physiological basis. It’s not real. Be nice. We are all one.

But lies are no less real in their material effects than the matters we label truths. And the attempts to banish any discussion of imperialism in its dynamics or a critical conversation about race and racial matters because of said conversation’s purported divisiveness – as if the notion of nonduality presupposes a smooth world without bumps and grooves and shadows – only reinforces the flattening stability of whiteness masquerading behind the relatively recent algorithms of one-world-ism.

Ironically, saying “we are all one” risks occluding the unintelligible prestige of my vast body, wiping away your histories and mine, reducing my wildness to the disturbing quietude of inclusion, and pathologizing differences as if they stood in the way of something more important. Oneness – at least one iteration of it – seems to reinforce the metabolic rift, the dissociative distance between bodies and the grounds they are indebted to. Whiteness raised to the nth degree.

Decolonial politics must be compassionate in response. But this compassion is not the kindness many are used to. It is not being nice. It is speaking with strange tongues to relieve the subject of the tyranny of his subjecthood. It is piercing the flesh with a thorn and refusing to take it out. It is the ferocious spitting of a Yoruba trickster-healer who must traverse worlds to advocate for his client. It is the gift of confusion, the smiting of the thigh so that a confident gait gives way to limping. It is burning the lips with coal so that eloquence gives way to a lisp. Compassionate politics is the decolonial attempt to relieve whiteness of the sole burden of world-building. It is not niceness. It is the shock of the dissensual that says there are other ways, there are other rooms, there are other worlds – yours is not the only one. This black ground, this dark hole, you press my face into in your bid to ascend – it is powerful too.

We are not one. The pendulum need not swing so far between polarities as to miss the universes in the middle. Our “choices” are not between an exhausting order of whiteness and a homogenous soup of unblemished spiritual sameness or a “diversity” that merely multiplies grids and jail cells. There are rumours of a politics that does not care so much for ones and twos: a politics that dances with the indeterminate. I want to sit with the trouble of that invitation. I want to “find” new mistakes to make, new problems we don’t know about, new colours we haven’t yet named, and new integers that would bring me to you – and you to me – as strange companions in “a world” too promiscuous for words to articulate.

– Bayo Akomolafe

C.G.Jung​ Quotes of Relevance for These Times (first uttered or written in pre- and post-WWII Europe, 1940s-1960s):

“Possession, though old-fashioned, has by no means become obsolete; only the name has changed. Formerly they spoke of ‘evil spirits’. Now, we call them neuroses or unconscious complexes. Here, as everywhere, the name makes no difference. If the unconscious disposition should happen to be one which is common to the great majority of the nation, then a single one of these complex-ridden individuals, who at the same time sets himself up as a megaphone, is enough to precipitate a catastrophe.” (The Collected Works of CG Jung, Volume 18, p. 509)

SPEAKING OF GERMANY & ITS “SUPREME LEADER”

“It fell prey to mass psychology, though she is by no means the only nation threatened by this dangerous germ.” (The Collected Works of CG Jung, Volume 10, p. 222)

“The impressive thing is that one man, who is obviously ‘possessed’ has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course toward perdition.” (The Collected Works of CG Jung, Volume 10, p. 185)

“Like the rest of the world, they did not understand wherein Hitler’s significance lay; that he symbolized something in every individual. He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.” (The Collected Works of CG Jung, Volume 10, p. 223)

“Nations have their own peculiar psychology, and in the same way, they also have their own particular psychopathology. It consists in the accumulation of a large number of abnormal features, the most striking of which is a suggestibility affecting the entire nation.” (The Collected Works of CG Jung, Volume 10, p. 233)

REFLECTIONS ON NATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

With regard to mass suggestion: “All that can be built with it are houses of cards [the Trump Administration] and concentration camps or death pits [the Southern border of the U.S.].” (The Collected Works of CG Jung, Volume 18, p. 602) [My emphasis placed in brackets]

“The most dangerous things in the world are immense accumulations of human beings who are manipulated by only a few heads.” (The Collected Works of CG Jung, Volume 18, p. 595)

“Perhaps in a more enlightened era, a candidate for governmental office will have to have it certified by a psychiatric commission that he (or she) is not a bearer of psychic bacilli.” (The Collected Works of CG Jung, Volume 18, p. 601) [Several psychologists and psychiatrists have published pieces that suggest Trump registers ‘high’ in what is called ‘the Dark Triad’: a deadly combination of psychopathology, narcissism, and Machiavellianism]

CG JUNG REFLECTS ABOUT THE NATION-STATE & ITS RELATIONSHIP TO THE SHADOW OF INDIVIDUALS

“A political situation is the manifestation of a parallel psychological problem in millions of individuals. This problem is largely unconscious.” (The Letters of CG Jung, Volume 1, p. 535)

“The statesman who toys with unlawful measures is ultimately working for the ruin of the nation.” (The Collected Works of CG Jung, Volume 18, p. 597)

“The man who promises everything is sure to fulfill nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.” (The Collected Works of CG Jung, Volume 10, p. 201)

“Evil needs masses for its genesis and continued existence.” (The Collected Works of CG Jung, Volume 18, p. 601)

I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.
– Gustave Flaubert

“How will you go back?” said the woman. “Nay, that I do not know. Because I have heard, that for those who enter Fairy Land, there is no going back. They must go on, and go through it.”
– R. Macdonald Robertson

The relationship between the body and the tool changes during apprenticeship. We have to change the relationship between our body and the world.

We do not become detached, we change our attachment. We must attach ourselves to the all.

– Simone Weil

Both Virgil and Dante set some of their greatest work in another world. But Shakespeare didn’t, and his is the attitude I prefer. There is enough of heaven in a hedgerow, and enough of hell in the perfidy of man.
– Clive James

Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway as thunder went crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

In the city’s melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched
With faces hidden as the walls were tightening
As the echo of the wedding bells before the blowin’ rain
Dissolved into the bells of the lightning
Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked
Tolling for the outcast, burnin’ constantly at stake
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind
An’ the poet an’ the painter far behind his rightful time
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

In the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken-for granted situations
Tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute
For the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an’ cheated by pursuit
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flared
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hang suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

– Bob Dylan

The problem when you are a strong, capable, self-confident person, is that more often than not, people think that you don’t really need things like comfort, reassurance, loyalty and guidance. People are more likely to look at you and say, “She doesn’t need this”, “She doesn’t need that”, “She’s already all of this and all of that”. But then the truth is that most probably, you are a strong, capable, self-confident person because you built yourself brick-by-brick into that person; because you HAD to BECOME that person; because you had determination enough to make yourself into the image that you knew you needed to become. At the heart of many strong, confident people, is a heart most longing of the things that most others simply take for granted.
– C. JoyBell C.

We meet each other on the steps of the story.
– Jeanette Winterson

Ascension
One summer, you walked your sadness on a leash the way people walk a dog. Remember how, immune to gravity, it floated somewhere above your right ear. At night the light was bronze, reverent like the halos around dead saints. Children tied balloons to your sadness, but it did not grow lighter. And what I know of wildflowers, of regret, I learned while standing beside your grave. We are made of glass. We carry our dead behind closed eyes.
– Shivani Mehta

I don’t believe it’s possible to be neutral.

The world is already moving in certain directions. And to be neutral, to be passive in a situation like that is to collaborate with whatever is going on.

And I, as a teacher, do not want to be a collaborator with whatever is happening in the world. I want myself, as a teacher, and I want you as students, to intercede with whatever is happening in the world.

– Howard Zinn

Poetry’s another word
For losing everything
Except purity of heart.
– Paul Durcan

The most interesting and dangerous people are directed, with purpose.
– @naval

I just wanna know, when you hold the sacred sounds / on your tongue, do you feel less holy?
– Ariana Brown

The great things are too important to be new.
– Somerset Maugham

We quite forget that we can be as deplorably overcome by a virtue as by a vice. There is a sort of frenzied, orgiastic virtuousness which is just as infamous as a vice and leads to just as much injustice and violence.
– CG Jung

I drank because life was too dull
and people were too loud.
Then I wrote because silence became louder
than their lies.
What a beautiful mess I became.

– Charles Bukowski

Consciousness is made up of its content; its content is its entire frontier.
– Krishnamurti

FLIGHT

In the end we love the line love cannot cross.
In the end we fall for what we fail.

Forget friendship. Ardor.
Forget the years that only grow harder

as the soul recedes in what the years bring,
grown alien to any touchable thing.

Touch me. As I am. As you can.
My heart a bird’s heart just beyond your hand.

– Christian Wiman

Ponderable
by Lyn Hejinian

The pine branches reach—the rain! the sun! the edge of the
moving air! three goats!
Girls on razor scooters turn the corner and scoot
Autonomy actually shows, it shines amidst the stars of decision
I sacrifice hearing to writing, I return to the back of the train
Surrounded by nothing but tattered island nasturtia, the
shoveler is prepared to exclaim, “Grief exterior, grief
prison”
Beastly pine cones are falling from the sky
Down in the middle, and a soft wall, the midnight breeze
billows
Check the role, the rock, the rule!
From cardboard pressed to ginger, water spilled on a list, salt
sprinkled over …
Why so many references to dogs, purple, and bananas?
Then the carnival—it came up afterwards like a vermillion
buttress to say of itself “it appears”
Wren in a ragged bee line, flora sleeping live
Yuki, Felicia, and Maxwell have between them $13.75, and they
are hungry as they enter the small café, where they see a
display of pies and decide to spend all their money on pie
there and then—how much pie will each get to eat if
each pie costs $5.25?
Invincible is my myopia, great is my waist, choral are my ideas,
wingéd are my eyebrows, deep is my obscurity—who am I?

If we argue, I say ‘Thank you,’ because owing to the courtesy of your taking a different point of view, I understand what I mean.
– Alan Watts

Tracing all the sources of Tolkien’s inspiration is notoriously impossible (he knew too much)
– Tom Shippey

and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement
– Frank O’Hara

I do not normally like to hang around people who talk about slow conscious breathing….But these slow conscious breathers are on to something, because if you try to follow your breath for a while, it will ground you in relative silence.
– Anne Lamott

I spent ten years editing Poetry, and part of my education involved learning to attend to poems, not names. Great poets will send you terrible poems. (I once rejected, with genuine sorrow but no regret, Seamus Heaney.) And great poems-great for the moment, I mean, piercing and refreshing reality in some surprising way-can come from the most inauspicious people and places. Heaney laments in Stepping Stones that there’s no “monster hogweed” talent sticking up out of the “great crop of ripe, waving poetry” in the United States, no single poet most people can agree is great.
– Christian Wiman

Free people make free choices. Free choices mean you get unequal outcomes.

You can have freedom, or you can have equal outcomes. You can’t have both.

– @naval

Writing is a sweet and wonderful reward, but for what? In the night, it became clear to me, as clear as a child’s lesson book, that it is the reward for serving the devil.

– Franz Kafka to Max Brod, July 5 1922

Most people don’t want to admit this but not being able to get your body in shape is a skill issue.
– Dan Go

It’s amazing, the journeys we take just to find our way back to one another.
– Nika Solé

A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
– C.S. Lewis

having some ego is fine, even The Universe has ego — that’s what *you are*
– River Kenna

Grendel was capable of killing 30 fighting-men at once (and carrying off at least most of their remains); Beowulf was as strong as 30 men. It was an equal number, with possible hope in it.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Where in life we do everything we can to avoid anxiety, in art we must pursue it. This is difficult. Everything in our life and culture, regardless of our background, is dragging us away. Still, there is this sense of something imminent.

And what is imminent, we find, is neither the past nor the future, but simply – the next ten minutes.

– Boris Pasternak

My therapist prescribes blue sunlight / and a spiritual lover for difficult days.
– Vikki C.

All you should do is what you want to do. If you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them, you get to listen to the little voice inside your head that wants to do things a certain way. Then, you get to be you.
– @naval

Earthling, the dark is true; the sun’s an accident.
– Theodore Roethke

You lose your grip and then you slip into the masterpiece.
– Leonard Cohen

When you’re a real one, the world will move in ways that you’re not willing to move. They’ll prioritize things that are not a priority to you. They’ll do things that make absolutely no sense to you. And you’re just going to have to keep doing what you do.
– Nika Solé

Dogs bark at what they cannot understand.
– Heraclitus

They’ll act like you’re behind when the whole time you were on the leading edge.
– Nika Solé

kaleidoscope
the sound of a little star
shattering
– Ellen Compton

Spring afternoon
the barber spins me around
towards the mirror
– Mike Dillon

With Boulez you have all the aura of a right or righteous gesture. It looks like art, smells and feels like nothing but art, yet there is about it no creative pressure that makes a demand on me. It lulls me to sleep with its own easily acquired virtues.
– Morton Feldman

Professionals insist on essentials. They concentrate on the things that make art. These are the things they identify with it, think of, in fact, as it – not understanding that everything we use to make art is precisely what kills it.
– Morton Feldman

Time of Tyranny, 50
by Lyn Hejinian

Birds hatch, eggs are laid, nests are built, trees branch, seeds
sprout: it’s always time. Time to recognize the sipping
self as girded shelf supporting stuff conducive to supporting self
recognizing time making its attempt to install
itself with all its belongings. They include forebodings
and long descriptions of the rifle butts that press
against the past shouldered by the men of firing squads
and the verminous skin of dogs with mange even at a very young
age outside cafes or on short chains as if their existence
were a prerequisite to mastering the arts of being
delicately human and a gambler with a passion for mortality
and substituting one value (vivacity) for another (history)
upon the heads of humans grotesque as the programs
they invent to send their opinions forward.

Abandon matrix
Independent thinking
Freedom flows

– Rachel Newcombe

If your mind becomes a conscious process, it is the most miraculous thing in existence.
– Sadhguru

I want my pictures to have a certain timeless, personal but allegorical quality […], but I like the rough edge that photography gives a nude.
– Francesca Woodman

But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished.
– C.S. Lewis

I don’t believe anything, but I have many suspicions.
– Robert Anton Wilson

At a concert in Manchester, England, on May 14, 2025 Bruce Springsteen warned: “In America, the richest men… [are]… abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.”

… but there we are: the portrait of our complicity in the national fantasy. I guess I’ve spent my whole career thinking about the relation between intimate personal and intimate political attachment.
– Lauren Berlant

If you want to know where to find your contribution to the world, look at your wounds.

When you learn how to heal them, teach others ..

– Emily Maroutian

I feel my separateness. I feel like a tiny piece of gravel cutting into the heel of the darkness. The darkness is whole and I am just an aberration. I don’t matter.
– Lisa Carver

The modern world must somehow be made to understand (in theology and other things) that a view may be vast, broad, universal, liberal and yet come into conflict with another view that is vast, broad, universal and liberal also.
– G.K. Chesterton

Patience is a skill in learning how to talk to yourself, learning how to give yourself encouragement, to remind yourself that what you’re experiencing right now is a combination of past habits and present habits.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu

I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl.
– Paula Fox

Surely in a democracy that has survived for 240 years, no foreign embedded Manchurian candidate would dare risk exposing himself by dropping such a cluster bomb of obviously and predictably damaging actions and policies all at once.
– Christopher R. Browning

To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts—such is the duty of the artist.
– Schumann

Isn’t a bookshop, to some extent, a temple to Browsing?
– Erik Satie

The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul – BOOKS.
– Emily Dickinson

The faerie people from our woods are gone,
No Dryads have I found in all our trees,
No Triton blows his horn about our seas
And Arthur sleeps far hence in Avalon.

The ancient songs they wither as the grass
And waste as doth a garment waxen old,
All poets have been fools who thought to
mould A monument more durable than brass.

– C.S. Lewis

Young men have the energy. Old men have the money. Women take their pick. I am an Elmore Leonard novel.
– Kenneth Folk

As for What the Rain Can Do

wash me in blossoms yet to come
lift my boat

flood the rice fields where the egret lands
complex math

rinse off a bench
turn on a dime

give you something to think about
feed an aspiring stream

tell you by thunder it’s coming
stand you up

play a little music on the rooftop
get a body good and wet

open the golden tulips
mix us a drink

– D. A. Powell

ripples in the sand …
these fault lines
I drew ten years ago
between reality
and my immigrant dream
– Chen-ou Liu

There are islands of light in the middle of the day.
Pure, fresh, silent, immediate islands.
Only love knows how to find them.

– Christian Bobin

You have to be a critic before you’re a translator, because when you get to moments of tension…, when there’s a question of which way you’re going to go, you can’t solve the problem unless you have a strong idea of what the poem is about globally.
– Daniel Mendelsohn

Evil is solemn, good is gay. … Evil imprisons, good sets free. Evil is tired, good is full of vigour. The one says, Let go, lie down, sleep, die; the other, All aboard! kill the dragon, marry the girl, blow the pipes and beat the drum, let the dance begin.
– C.S. Lewis

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.
– Theodore Roethke

Can a poem ever be a form of stability?
– Laura Kerr

I cannot save this world.
But look how it’s trying,
once again, to save me.

– James A Pearson

I suppose it would have been fitting if Frank and I had met on the train coming to New York, like in a Russian novel. Actually I’m not certain when my personal memories of him begin. Let’s just say he was there, waiting for us all.
– Morton Feldman on meeting Frank O’Hara

As much of my life as I’d spent in front of a TV thinking Oh, man, city’s where the money trees grow, I was seeing more to the picture now. I mean yes, that is where they all grow, but plenty of people are sitting in that shade with nothing falling on them.
– Barbara Kingsolver

The question of religion is not so simple as you see it: it is not at all a matter of intellectual conviction or philosophy or even belief, but rather a matter of inner experience.
– CG Jung

You are comprised of 84 minerals, 23 elements, and 8 gallons of water spread across 38 trillion cells.

You have been built up from nothing by the spare parts of the Earth you have consumed, according to a set of instructions hidden in a double helix and small enough to be carried by a sperm.
You are recycled butterflies, plants, rocks, streams, firewood, wolf fur, and shark teeth, broken down to their smallest parts and rebuilt into our planet’s most complex living thing.

You are not living on Earth. You are Earth.

– Aubrey Marcus

All wars are useless to the dead.
– Adrienne Rich

Everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is… life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.
– Richard Powers, Bewilderment

We are born to exist, not to know; to be, not to assert ourselves. Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin. It is Genesis, not our dreams and our systems, that has perceived our condition.
– Emil Cioran

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.
– Jorge Luis Borges

Mom if I hadn’t found punk
I’d be dead, but also
my jaw would work.

– Neil Hilborn

Writing is a subversive activity that exempts you from the rules.
– Janet Burroway

It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life. Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. The song, that song, was sent from somewhere else to find you, to pick the scab of your whole existence. The song was your personal shitty fate, manifest as a throb of pop floating out of radios everywhere.
– Jonathan Lethem

…when we try to change the world through aggression, we make what we hate stronger.
– Waylon H. Lewis

I don’t want thicker skin. I want a softer world.
– Katie Prentiss

It seemed that my identity had necessarily split, that I’d turned into a different person. I could look at her now and see all that stoic ferocity in her eyes, how she wanted to do something that could never be undone. Something permanent. Some little forever. But I’m not interested in forever. Not anymore.
– Catherine Lacey

Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. And this free form has become the refuge of common sense in its flight from pedantry.
– Friedrich Schlegel

For six months I dealt Baccarat in a casino. / For six months I played Brahms in a mall. / For six months I arranged museum dioramas; my hands were too small for the Paleolithic and when they reassigned me to lichens, I quit.
– Sandra Beasley, Vocation

The fear of being nothing is a gateway to our true identity.
– Santiago Santai Jiménez

The days and months go by like lightning: we should value the time. We pass from life to death in the time it takes to breathe in and breathe out: it’s hard to guarantee even a morning and an evening. Whether walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, do not waste even a minute of time.
– T’aego, (trans. J.C. Cleary)

Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Inner peace and world peace, personal prosperity and economic equality, personal health and planetary health—all of these are illusory dualisms in the eyes of the dharma.
– Allan Badiner

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?

Saints and poets, maybe.

– Thornton Wilder, Our Town

Let thoughtfulness be the bare minimum and watch how much clearer things become.
– Lia Mancao

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall.
– Marcus Aurelius lifelesson

Any world seems strange to people who don’t live in it.
– Isaac Asimov

The Chinese have it that the Sage will more often than not be found walking, not ahead of Humanity, pioneering away for it, but behind it, picking up the wonderful things it leaves behind it in its flight into a future that might well turn out to be what so many of our futures have been, costly failures.
– John Moriarty, Serious Sounds

It was clearly Jung’s view that psychotherapy could offer this link to the sacred, and that the whole analytic process was not so much about curing symptoms and enabling adaptation, but discovering through one’s pain a link to the
infinite.
– Veronica Goodchild

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing … to find the place where all the beauty came from.
– C.S. Lewis

a snowshoe hare
hops through its breath
morning star

– Chuck Brickley

I’ve constantly and actively looked for a means to distance myself from my traditional realist predecessors… Which is how I became what the critics call a postmodernist.
– Robert Coover in conversation with Art Spiegelman

morning walk
i fill my lungs
with birdsong

– Caroline Skanne

my whisky glass
half full or half empty?
with the Muse
this Jobian struggle
over noise and silence

– a struggling poet

If your open heart is big enough and open enough, others fall into that openness. In your open heart, there is no grasping and rejecting.
– Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel

cherry blossom rain …
the richest man
in the cemetery

– Chen-ou Liu

Don’t die old, die empty. That’s the goal of life. Go to the cemetery and disappoint the graveyard.
– Myles Munroe

When I was young, people used to say to me: Wait until you’re fifty, you’ll see.

I am fifty. I haven’t seen anything.

– Erik Satie

The question of ‘how to write in wartime’ is closely related to that of ‘how to live in wartime.’
– Olivia Elias

This life doesn’t need refining. It’s most nourishing when plucked
straight from the ground. Peel it with your teeth,
lick the honey from the comb.
– L.E. Bowman

Some persons fancy that bias and counter-bias are favorable to the extraction of truth – that hot and partisan debate is the way to investigate… But Logic puts its heel upon this suggestion. It irrefragably demonstrates that knowledge can only be furthered by the real desire for it, and that the methods of obstinacy, of authority and every mode of trying to reach a foregone conclusion, are absolutely of no value.
— Charles Sanders Peirce

It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another to put him in possession of truth.
– John Locke

Where’re the eyes, the eyes with the will to see?
Where’re the hearts that run over with mercy?
Where’s the love that has not forsaken me?
Where’s the work that set my hands, my soul free?
Where’s the spirit that’ll reign, reign over me?
Where’s the promise from sea to the shining sea?
Where’s the promise from sea to the shining sea?
Wherever this flag is flown
Wherever this flag is flown
Wherever this flag is flown
We take care of our own
– Bruce Springsteen

I would make for you / the barest of sounds, wing against wing, / there, at the point of articulation.
– Donika Kelly

Either we deal with the root of fear, or we trim its branches. Which do you want to do?
– Krishnamurti

data that nobody needed
and still it funnelled
downstream
upstream
and out

– Laura Kerr

The thing about academic theories of literature is they’re great till you go back to the books themselves and read one, at which point all the theories crumble because a single real work of literature is vaster and more complex than every butterfly-pinning theory put together.
– Max Lawton

The essence of evil is its refusal to think.
– Hannah Arendt

People sometimes take their shortcomings for the shortcomings of society and want to remake Cities, because they do not know how to correct themselves.
– Isaac Asimov

Spring is nature’s way of saying, ‘Let’s party!’
– Robin Williams

Of course! the path to heaven doesn’t lie down in flat miles. It’s in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it.
– Mary Oliver

A sickness known as hate; not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ – but a sickness nonetheless, highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Don’t look for it in the Twilight Zone – look for it in a mirror.

Look for it before the light goes out altogether.

– Rod Serling

Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: “Things must change — no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.” Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behavior. They learn whom to kill and how to kill and how to do it together. This is the much talked about Gleichschaltung — the coordination process. You are coordinated not with the powers that be, but with your neighbor — coordinated with the majority. But instead of communicating with the other you are now glued to him. And you feel of course marvelous. Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another.
– Hannah Arendt

We are all,
We are all the children of
A Brilliant colored flower,
A flaming flower.
And there is no one,
there is no one,
Who regrets who we are

– Huichol song

Why Did God Create Atheists?

There is a famous story told in Chassidic literature that addresses this very question. The Master teaches the student that God created everything in the world to be appreciated, since everything is here to teach us a lesson. One clever student asks “What lesson can we learn from atheists? Why did God create them?”

The Master responds “God created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all — the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs and act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that god commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality. And look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.”

“This means,” the Master continued “that when someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say ‘I pray that God will help you.’ Instead for the moment, you should become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’”

– Martin Buber

Reverence is the process of awakening to being alive. It’s the realization that life is amazing, and every living being is our sibling.
– Paul Hawken

If we can stay with the tension of
opposites long enough —sustain it,
be true to it—we can sometimes
become vessels within which the
divine opposites come together and
give birth to a new reality.

– Marie-Louise von Franz

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Bodhisattvas practice “in the middle of the fire.” This means they enter into the suffering of the world; it also means they stay steady with the fire of their own painful emotions. They neither act them out nor repress them. They are willing to stay “on the dot” and explore an emotion’s ungraspable qualities and fluid energies—and to let that experience link them to the pain and courage of others.
– Pema Chödrön

It’s nearing midnight and something holy
Is always coming around.
Take love for instance, and the bare
Perfect neck of a woman who’s given up everything for the forbidden leap
To your arms
[…].
It’s the midnight hour and sweet dark love bares
It all. I can hear it again; the blue moon caving in to tears.
– Joy Harjo

One existence, one music, one organism, one life, one God: star-fire and rock-strength, the sea’s cold flow And man’s dark soul.
– Robinson Jeffers

Will the river fill again.
Will there be pity taken.
Will it ever rain again.
What is ever. What is again.
What is it we mean by
ok. Take this October. The deep white turn
the air is taking.
How many more
Octobers. Is there another October with
us in it.
Blood flows in my hand writing this.
The crows glance through the upper
branches.
They are not waiting.

– Jorie Graham, Runaway

What mysteries remain to be revealed in the nervous system, that web of structures both material and ethereal, that network of threads that runs throughout the body, composed of a thousand Ariadne’s clues, all leading to the brain, that shadowy central den where the human bones lie scattered and the monsters lurk… The angels, also, he reminds himself. Also the angels.
– Margaret Atwood

From Bobbie:

Don’t fight the birth pains
Welcome them
So this New doesn’t arrive
Twisted and cursed

The old energy is dying to its vision quest
And the new is dying to its secret garden
Leaving its hidden grail
I cup my warm love around them
In their travail

– George Gorman

As a general truth, communities prosper and flourish, or droop and decline, in just the degree that they practice or neglect to practice the primary duties of justice and humanity.
– William Henry Seward

There is no greater illusion than fear,
no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself,
no greater misfortune than having an enemy.
Whoever can see through all fear
will always be safe.

– Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching

By creating all things, he entered into everything. By entering into all things, he became whatever has form and whatever is formless; he became whatever can be defined and whatever cannot be defined; he became whatever has support and whatever has no support; he became whatever is coarse and whatever is subtle. He became all manner of things: that is why the wise men call him the real one.
– Vedas (Upanishads)

A good homemaker not only knows what people like to eat, but also loves to create sweet places to hang out with others. Such a refined sense of discrimination about what works and what doesn’t also helps groups, societies, and ecosystems develop rewarding priorities.

This is the qualitative dimension to interspecies transactions that is synergetically unpredictable. A species often evolves through a new way of interfacing with another species. Such transformations cannot be controlled without impairing the creative vitality of the process. And to avoid morphing by avoiding the influence of other life forms could be the most devitalizing aspect of modern urbanization. Like the earth, we need all of our weathers. But since other animals are often more in touch with their emotions than most humans (some of us can’t even recognize that other animals have emotions), it shouldn’t surprise us that animals are often quite intuitive, or that such abilities have played an important role in evolution. As has curiosity.

Though association increases stress and potential for violence, it often generates fulfilling achievements that tip the balance toward the common good. Fulfilling satisfactions work with “mid-tempo” coordinations of how one’s behaviors are coordinated through purposeful accomplishments in respect to interactive others, thanks to the longer-term continuity of ongoing alliances. Successful groups, whether human or not, nurture shared values preferring mutual benefit. And such shared habits of attention are increasingly seen as an essential aspect of evolution.

– George Gorman

Peerocracy is both an extension of and an antidote to the shortcomings of representative democracy. Citizen assemblies take governance to a new level. …from a top-down pyramidical structure to a more lateral and distributed pattern, with decision-making increasingly being exercised at the most intimate level of the bioregion where people live their lives. … The birth of peerocracy is both an evolution and a revolution. It represents the coming of age of civil society organizations (CSOs) that blossomed under many banners. … These CSOs are social movements, economic enterprises, and new forms of proto-governance that bring the citizenry into the political arena. They are the forerunners of a new layer of governance – peerocracy – that distributes participation in governance more laterally and in greater depth at the most intimate space to which people are attached, their neighborhoods where they work, play, and thrive.

– Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Resilience

You see, I spent too many years of my life thinking that the big party was the whole thing. It took me quite a while to find out that the real deal is to be able to be enough of a person on your own to know when somebody loves and cares about you. You see, we are here, as far as I can tell, to help each other – our brothers, our sisters, our friends, our enemies. That’s to help each other, not hurt each other. Sometimes, to help them, we’ve got to help ourselves, so that we’ll know that they’re around in the first place. You see, it’s a big world out there with enough pain and misery in it, without me going around and helping it out by hurting myself, and consequently, those that care about me.

What l’m trying to get across to you is: Please take care of yourself and those that you love, because that’s what we are here for, that’s all we’ve got, and that is what we can take with us.

– Stevie Ray Vaughan

The essence of poetry is to find
strangeness in language.

– Hélène Cixous

The most important thing for poets
to do is to write as little as possible.
– T. S. Eliot

the use of drugs in spiritual practice is, unfortunately, a skill issue
– River Kenna

…there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.
– G.K. Chesterton

As Jung noted, in the end, all of our problems stem from one source—that we are separated from our instincts. As Friedrich Nietzsche added, we are “the sick animal.” Our surrogate gods have failed us and the new ones have not yet arisen. We are once again between worlds.
– J Hollis

Meditation is not something you do in the morning and you are finished with it, meditation is something that you have to go on living every moment of your life. Walking, sleeping, sitting, talking, listening – it has to become a kind of climate. A relaxed person remains in it.
– Osho

Many people do not get to themselves because of their admiration for some other person, perhaps of the same sex; they always strive to be like that person and thereby lose the possibility of becoming themselves. As a snake stares at a rabbit, they stare at someone else, or at a collective idea; that is something outside, it is not what they are, it does not belong to them and such things have not to be integrated. The dreams will tell you to get away from that, leave it alone, it is not yours and is none of your business. Individuation therefore also means separation, differentiation, the recognition of what is yours and what is not. The rest has to be left alone. Libido and energy should not be
wasted on things which do not belong.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

Jung found that the psyche is androgynous: made up of both masculine & feminine. Thus, every man and every woman comes equipped with a psychological structure that in its wholeness includes the richness of both sides, both natures, both sets of capacities & strengths.
– RA Johnson

Ultimately, the dharma belongs to you. Good or bad, like it or not, it is your dharma. If you give yourself the luxury of abandoning dharma the moment things become inconvenient or difficult, you are missing this quality of ownership.
– Mindrolling Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche

Every musical performance is a performance of relationship.

– Benjamin Piekut, On the NY Avant-Garde

Imagine how effective you would be if you weren’t anxious all the time.
– @naval

I flee all men, and horror to me is day;
I cry aloud my black lament of wrong,
Which sorrow sends to the sea’s unlistening ear.
– Francisco de Quevedo

Whatever is, is….it cannot be otherwise.
Wanting things to be other than they are causes Suffering.
– Eckhart Tolle

When you internalize an author whose vision or philosophy is both rich and out of fashion, you gain a certain immunity from the pressures of the contemporary. The modern world, with its fads, propaganda, and advertising, is forever trying to herd us into conformity. Great literature can help us to remain fad-proof.
– Joseph Sobran

All cool, all blue. Unlike you
– Sylvia Plath

My Dream
by Han Yong-un
When you go walking through the clear dawn in the shade of trees,
my dream will become the few little stars
that are staying on over your head.

When during summer days you are sleeping a daytime sleep
unable to conquer the heat, my dream will become the clear winds
that are floating about your vicinage.

When in the still Autumn nights, you sit alone reading books,
my dream will become the voice of the cricket, crying
under your table, “chirrup, chirrup.”

The purpose of art is to lay bare
the questions that have been
hidden by the answers.

– James Baldwin

Fasting is the greatest remedy, the physician within.
– Philippus Paracelsus

We must also make ourselves flexible, to avoid becoming too devoted to the plans we have formed.
– Seneca

Where the moon streaks through,
the night makes a sound of fabric being torn inside my head.

Dark and huge, it is frightening to be alive with a song in you.

– Shangyang Fang

god tossed a heart like a coin
inside me
as if i were a pond he made a wish
and lingered in the air
and everything belongs to me but hope

– Valzhyna Mort

You carry your spiritual gifts out into the world, and whenever you need them to they carry you too.
– Nika Solé

Humanists like to think they have a rational view of the world; but their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions. Outside of science, progress is simply a myth.
– John Gray

Being skeptical helps progress. Being cynical delays progress. Being vengeful destroys progress.
– David Sinclair

Their pessimism is your opportunity.
– @naval

The ego is not a source of strength. It is weakness in disguise.

Inside there is invincible strength. Remove the cloud of the mind’s ego, and the inner power will be free to shine.

– Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

But the evil philosopher is not trying to alter things, but to annihilate them.
– G.K. Chesterton

You know how when you go to the sauna, you sweat and you get rid of all the toxins in your body? Whenever I send a story to The New Yorker, I tell Alberto, ‘Oh, the story went to the spa.’
– Jhumpa Lahiri

People talk as if theory and criticism and radical politics want to take the depth and feeling and pleasure out of experience in art but I think capitalism has already done this and I’m attracted to theory and criticism to understand how, and what is recoverable.
– Alex Fields

No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good.
– Marcus Aurelius

Our obsession with brands also applies to the education market. What the donor class has done to higher ed in the US is abhorrent. Truly. It has to be considered when trying to untangle the violent anti-intellectualism here. Higher ed should be state-funded and free for students.
– Alina Stefanescu

My spring-board has always been long walks. I drink a great deal, but I do not associate it with writing.
– Thornton Wilder

A mind that is always comparing, always measuring, will always engender illusion. If I am measuring myself against you, who are clever, more intelligent, I am struggling to be like you and I am denying myself as I am. I am creating an illusion.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

It wasn’t that I thought I could be a good poet—I just knew I couldn’t be a good fiction writer.
– Sharon Olds

The real magic in Zen happens when we stop chasing special moments and simply see what is.
– Brad Warner

the way my inner state feels these days, i only used to be able to access with drugs and it’s such a weird thing to watch become a default – i assume i’ll get used to it at a certain point but that day is not today.
– River Kenna

it is better to live what one really is and accept the difficulties that arise as a result — because avoidance is much worse.
– C.G. Jung

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.
– Yasutani Roshi

What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.
– Gilles Deleuze

first snow flurries …
the shape of the day
after retirement

– Chen-ou Liu

A cloud was on the mind of men,
and wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul
when we were boys together.
Science announced nonentity
and art admired decay;
The world was old and ended:
but you and I were gay…
– G.K. Chesterton

Over and under
Splendour and wonder,
Sunshine and thunder,
Whirlwind and star;
Snows huge and hoary,
Sleet and sun-glory,
Fair is the story
Of all things that are.
– G.K. Chesterton

Dissent needs a different shape. It needed to feel like disruption—jagged, messy, scattered, incomplete.
– Aaron Boehmer

Just sit there and cut the crap.
– Lama Lena

Places I love come back to me like music.
Hush me and heal me when I am very tired…
– Sara Teasdale

Sacrifices

he was still
wet
her Hindu
amniotic fluid
on his new
Pakistani body.

two days or
two kilometers that way
he would have been Indian
but the border had been drawn

by white hands
and swords had been drawn
by brown ones.
either way, he was
and now, wasn’t.

she called him Yousuf—
the name my Muslim grandfather
would have given him

pulled out his tiny body
from between her legs
stumbled into the darkness
far away from the camps

dug a hole with bare hands
and placed him in his cradle.
the next night, wolves
looted the earth.

– Ain Khan

Climate change–fueled fires had burned the eyebrows off the rich and powerful, but many of them still could not see it.
– Friederike Otto

The weatherman blames the sky. The sky, the weatherman says, is filled with everything the earth doesn’t want. Clouds and fog and useless dreams.
– Francine Witte

Tears falling to earth in gulps of rain. No one knows why the moon is crying, but everyone’s making a guess.
– Francine Witte

A good world —
dew drops fall
by ones, by twos

– Kobayashi Issa

The Odyssey has always felt more modern to me than the Iliad. It has a meta quality, which is almost postmodern in the way it comments on its own narrative structures.
– Daniel Mendelsohn

no babe, i love your mixed signals, the clear ones scare me
– River Kenna

There is a desire in me to be accountable not to the extraordinary, but to the ordinary.
– Tina Campt

To be awake is to be prepared for the world to come at us in weird, painful, and unexpected ways.
– Stephen Batchelor

My longing is to go places where I can’t pronounce the names—which is to say, where I’m taken beyond what my rational mind can grasp or articulate and beyond the world I know.
– Pico Iyer

“all paths lead to the same goal” is one of those things that’s become an unquestioned truism, and is almost never true.
– River Kenna

Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.
– Flannery O’Connor

If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; better yet, give him none.
– Ray Bradbury

The goal of my therapy is eccentricity, which grows out of the Jungian notion of individuation. Jung says, “you become what you are.” And nobody is square. We all have, as the Swiss say, a corner knocked off.
– James Hillman

“i will grant three wishes”
— a genie

“i will wish for three grants”
— someone working in an under-funded field (so maybe also a genie?)

– Mike Kaplan

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.
– André Gide

Our misapprehension extends to everything we perceive, from things to beings of all stripes. Yet it’s in our human relationships that the gap between our fantasies and reality is most glaring because we’re so invested in wanting others to be the way we imagine them to be.
– Vanessa Zuisei Goddard

The past was like a bad dream; the future was all happy holiday as I moved Southwards week by week, easily, lazily, lingering as long as I dared, but always heeding the call!
– Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

I get deeply tired because everything touches me, I am never indifferent.
– Anaïs Nin

Throughout history many nations have suffered a physical defeat, but that has never marked the end of a nation. But when a nation has become the victim of a psychological defeat, then that marks the end of a nation.
– Ibn Khaldun

The chaos of the mind cannot constitute a reply to the providence of the universe. All it can be is an awakening in the night, where all that can be heard is anguished poetry let loose.
– Georges Bataille

I am eternal, immortal, universal, and infinite; and what I am is beautiful.
– Stuart Wilde

If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.
– Charles Bukowski

Fear is the way that they win, for one, so keep telling the stories and keep expressing yourself, and keep fighting to be who you are.
– Pedro Pascal

Free yourself of needing results. Free yourself of fearing failure. Your unique, inspired, space has room for false starts, experiments, adventures.
– Andrea Kreuzhage

I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.
– Carl Sandburg

You don’t need to be loud to be legendary. You just need to be true.
– Scott Grossberg

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

Invisible beauty has a word so brief, A flower can say it or a shaken leaf, But few may ever snare it in a song, Though for the quest a life is not too long.
– Grace Hazard Conkling

He who has conquered weakness, and has put away all selfish thoughts, belongs neither to oppressor nor oppressed. He is free.
– James Allen

In Silence God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.
– Thomas Merton

If you want to be successful, you must respect one rule – never lie to yourself.
– Paulo Coelho

Your mind is not the center of the universe, but a lens; one that can be cleaned widened and ultimately set aside.
– Don Juan

The writer has to become the other. It’s a truism to say that only by becoming the other, do you become yourself. Whereas if you dwell entirely [on yourself], if you live in a sort of cocoon, you may wave incredible arabesques of language, but I find it boring, that kind of thing.
– Paul Durcan

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old, and still they surprised.
– Jane Hirshfield

It is in the area of relationships that human beings are the most vulnerable, and consequently, it is here that they can make the greatest steps in growth and self-understanding.
– Liz Greene

The path of building a relationship based on love and on free choice is as valid, and as difficult, a path as the most abstruse of esoteric disciplines.
– Liz Greene

Very little is needed to make a happy life. It is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
– Aurelius

I hear clearly the voice of intuition and give instant obedience.
– Florence Scovel Shinn

You cannot unlock the gates of wisdom without sincerely acknowledging your ignorance.
– Philip Arnold

I love the country, but I hate the scene.
– Leonard Cohen

this tiny poem
this simple word:
peace

– Fred Andrle

There is great happiness in not wanting, in not being something, in not going somewhere.
– Krishnamurti

Why was it that the buzz of human beings talking could be so senseless?
– Charles Bukowski

Dear America,
If you can fund war overnight,
you can feed kids before lunch.
– @tarekmusicx

I could climb thousands of feet, on or off trails, carrying a backpack load of fifty or sixty pounds, with the ease and abandon of a mountain goat.
– Ansel Adams

You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.
– Haruki Murakami

Pain is our only connection with life;
only pain can reveal what life is.
– Roberto Bolano, Distant Star

It’s important to emphasize that distributed peerocracy is not a replacement for representative democracy but a deepening of governance that engages a broader segment of the citizenry more intimately and acutely. … …when it comes to participatory budgeting, local school councils, and community oversight of policing, some…representative governance is distributed to peer networks while other governing powers remain in the hands of the centralized governing jurisdiction. … While distributive democracy is a new form of democracy that deepens and extends citizen participation in the affairs that govern society, it also introduces a new pedagogy in decision-making. … Although peer governance shares common ground with practices emphasized in representative governance in policy making, it makes distinctions as well – the primary one being the weight given over to consensus building. … Advocates of deliberate democracy would argue that for a truly democratic decision to be regarded as legitimate, the political process should aim for common ground that best conforms to ‘the public will’ … That process requires that all the peers at the table be free to share their opinions and views but also be open to attentively listening to others’ perspectives in an effort to find common ground. Or…explore wholly new approaches to handling the issue under consideration, and then incorporating their intent in a way that surpasses their initial approaches to the subject. … If this sounds like common sense…this is what a jury of one’s peers is expected to do when the judge asks them to listen carefully to the evidence and the conflicting perspectives…and then retire to deliberate, make a judgement, and deliver a verdict that hopefully reflects a unanimous consensus. … But how do we tackle the more difficult process of find consensus in a world where millions of people get caught up in thousands of virtual echo chambers on social media…? The only way out of this box, it seems, is the coming together of citizens in their neighborhoods where they work, play, live, and interact, sharing common experiences of what’s going on around them…. …human engagements of neighbors…making consensual decisions on how to improve the lot of their communities. … …at a time in history when our very survival depends on how the body politic coalesces around a new role as stewards of the biosphere, defining the process will be critical to determining the effectiveness of this new extension of government. Our very lives will depend on it.
– Jeremy Rifkin

Dreams are the ultimate teacher for one who has no teacher.
– Wang Fuzhi

An intellectual is a person who has found a thing that is more interesting than sex.
– Aldous Huxley

It might be the trees –
they are buzzing with pulsing, hot life
and their leaves are
making love to the wind.

– L.E. Bowman

There is more to your story than you think.
– Lidia Yuknavitch

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person.
– Czesław Miłosz

Cancer is nonpartisan. Compassion should be, too.

Sadly, it isn’t.

– John Pavlovitz

The future is already here.
It’s just not evenly distributed yet.
– William Gibson

To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation.
– Carl Jung

Every essay ends
with white space.

– Jennifer Gravley

You are not my cure,
Nobody has that power

– Margaret Atwood

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of ‘world history’ — yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees on the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

During your life you might meet many people and cultures who will try to discourage you away from the path. But once you start to taste the fruits of your practice, you will be filled with so much unshakable faith and enthusiasm. Taste these fruits, and you will become like a mountain, that no wind can move.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.
– Anton Chekhov

Serious things cannot be understood without laughable things, nor opposites at all without opposites.
– Plato

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

I dislike your speaking of yourselves as though you were the only [ones] who know and taught the Gospel; …But what I most dislike is your littleness of love…your want [lack] of union…your want of meekness, gentleness, long suffering; your impatience of contradiction; your counting every [person] your enemy that reproves or admonishes you in love; your bigotry and narrowness of spirit, loving in a manner only those that love you…your censoriousness… of all who do not agree with you; in a word, your divisive spirit.
– John Wesley

The connections between and among women are the most feared….. and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
– Adrienne Rich

Thank you for this day made
of wind and rain and sun and the scent
of old-fashioned lilacs. Thank you

for the pond and the slippery tadpole
and the wild iris that opened beside the pond
last week, so pale, so nearly purple,

their stems already flagged and bent.
Thank you for the yellow morels hiding in the field grass,
the ones we can only see when we are already

on our knees. And thank you for the humming
that rises out of the morning as if mornings
are simply reasons to hum. What a gift,

this being alive, this chance to encounter the world.
What a gift, this being a witness to spring –
spring in everything. Spring in the way

that we greet each other. Spring in the way the golden eagle
takes to the thermals and spirals up to where
we can barely see the great span of its wings.

Spring in the words we have known
since our births. Like glory. Like celebrate.
like flowering. What is it in us that longs to unfurl,

to expand, to open up and leap out—
something feral, unnamable, something
so fierce it can push through the crust of the soil,

something so vulnerable it can freeze and overnight
disappear. Thank you for this return to exactly
where we are, this greening, this bright roar

of the river rising, this swooping
of swallows, this leafing of lettuce,
this now, this yes, this here.

– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

So the days pass and I ask myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life; and whether this is living. It’s very quick, bright, exciting. But superficial perhaps. I should like to take the globe in my hands and feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy, and so hold it, day after day.
– Virginia Woolf

The present breaks our hearts.
We lie and freeze, our fingers icy as a bunch of keys.
Nothing will thaw these bones except
memory like an ancient blanket wrapped
about us when we sleep at home again,
smelling of picnics, closets, sicknesses,
old nightmare,
and insomnia’s spreading stain.

– Adrienne Rich

Is ait an mac an saol, we say in Irish – ‘life is very strange.’ We create stories that protect an idea, and use power to exclude or include based on the same idea. History has shown that no religious or social ideology is immune from the capacity to make its doors as sharp as they are open, branding those who enter or maiming those who leave. Part of this, I am convinced, is because we speak in singular terms. I am a person, and I have a faith, and I belong to a group. Surely by now we must know that we are plural. I am peoples, with faiths and belongings. I have capacities and incapacities, and my power, too, is plural, hopefully hurting less with years.

Hello to power of belonging
Hello to the responsibility of the power of belonging.

– Padraig O Tuama

I have been dreaming, dreaming a
golden dream,

– Emily Dickinson

It isn’t just in distant galaxies that strange, unreasonable things are happening. Unreason has crept up on us so insidiously that we’ve hardly been aware of it. But think of the things going on in our country …
– Madeleine L’Engle

One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment… and I don’t believe it’s true… I have the impression that thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is a form of thinking.
– Susan Sontag

If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut science research and education the way we’re cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America’s long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war.
– Neil DeGrasse Tyson

This morning I have been pondering a nearly forgotten lesson I learned in high school music. Sometimes in band or choir, music requires players or singers to hold a note longer than they actually can hold a note. In those cases, we were taught to mindfully stagger when we took a breath so the sound appeared uninterrupted.

Everyone got to breathe, and the music stayed strong and vibrant.

Yesterday, I read an article that suggested the administration’s litany of bad executive orders (more expected on LGBTQ next week) is a way of giving us “protest fatigue” – we will literally lose our will to continue the fight in the face of the onslaught of negative action. Let’s remember MUSIC.

Take a breath. The rest of the chorus will sing. The rest of the band will play. Rejoin so others can breathe. Together, we can sustain a very long, beautiful song for a very, very long time. You don’t have to do it all, but you must add your voice to the song. With special love to all the musicians and music teachers in my life.

– Michael Moore

The two hardest tests on the spiritual road are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter.
– Paulo Coelho

Gradualities

Poetry explores the gradualities
of not fully knowing what the subject is.
Sometimes you know, and then it’s over.
A lot like dreams.

Dreams don’t really have a subject either.
Even when approaching a planet with a Star Trek team,
you don’t know the purpose of that dream.
Riding the waves of experience.

A life is like that:
uncountable gradualities.
But instead of getting philosophical,
the poem entrains the music of its theme.

Subjective, in the end,
a poem, like a friend,
can be met again,
gradually.

– George Gorman

We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.
– Aldous Huxley

Give thanks for a new day, for a day unmarred by anything. It is pure and glorious.
– Eileen Caddy

May every kind thing you do be out of love, not for love.
– Morgan Richard Olivier

Ireland. Once you live there, you are seduced by it.
– Frank McCourt

You will burn, and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

To be an artist is to believe in life.
– Françoise Gilot

What Jung says is that you should play your role, knowing that it’s not you. It’s a quite different point of view. This requires individuation, separating your ego, your image of yourself, from the social role. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t play the social role; it simply means that no matter what you choose to do in life, whether it’s to cop out or to cop in, you are playing a role, and don’t take it too damned seriously. The persona is merely the mask you’re wearing for this game.
– Joseph Campbell

This poem wants to be a description,
And I want poems to have
Only the faintest of tastes.
Myself I see as a creature, hopeful
As the grass.
These lines are almost improbable,
This is a journey through familiar speech
Towards the region that is no place,
This poem has to be sung, standing up,
Or read without voice, alone.
What else did I say.
I said that every thing lies outside,
And I am here.
I hung from the trees like the birds on the trees.
All doors are locked

– Paavo Haavikko (translated by Anselm Hollo)

I hid from my body inside
my body, hid from God
inside the passive voice.
I ruined my life by living it
without me.
Now the light is
hungry, & I must go in.

– Jeremy Radin

Lift to the vacant air / some sigh, some sign / I’m still inside.
– Robert Creeley

A quiet mind, that’s the definition of your Self. A quiet, still mind. When your mind is quiet you have bliss, you have love, you have compassion, you have Jnana [knowledge], wisdom. When your mind is noisy you have doubts, suspicions, anger, greed, jealousy.
– Robert Adams

Modern man is alienated from others & confronted with a dilemma: He is afraid of close contact with another & equally afraid to be alone & have no contact. It is the function of trivial conversation to answer the question “How do I remain alone without being lonely?
– Erich Fromm

Now and then he experienced a sense of uneasiness
because he was not able to walk on his head.

– Paul Celan, quoting Georg Buchner’s Lenz in The Meridian Speech

Ever, you are nevered,
forevered, Notever, you

– Paul Celan (translated by Ian Fairley)

I wake myself imagining the shape
of the day and where I will find
myself within it.

– Adam Clay

If he didn’t want them to eat it, he shoulda made it the root vegetable of the knowledge of good and evil.
– River Kenna

pines and blossoms
in the thick woods
make a mansion
– Basho

I will do nothing because of public opinion, but everything because of conscience.
– Seneca

At the very least, I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and strengthen as I get older. I want it to be weaker & more muted so I can be more in present everyday reality, accept nature & the world for what it is, & appreciate it very much as a child would.
– @naval

Two trillion galaxies and infinite timelines and still we are designed for one another.
– Nika Solé

German is the most consciousness-expanding language for an English speaker.
– Jonathan Fine

Sometimes expansion looks a lot like loss.
– Nika Solé

It is difficulties that show what men are.
– Epictetus

Never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.
– Stephen Hawking

If we make our home in loneliness, we begin to change our relationship with it.
– Judith Simmer-Brown

I fell out

into the street, handsome, but compelling.
It felt as if I had finally reached the full potential

of my own beauty (I’d turned
sixteen the previous month).

– Robin Coste Lewis

… the atmosphere in which we live weighs upon everyone with a 20,000 pound force, but do you feel it?
– Karl Marx

Modern luxury is the ability to think clearly, sleep deeply, move slowly, and live quietly in a world designed to prevent all four.
– Justin Welsh

I don’t see weakness — I see potential in progress. Every soul carries the power to rise. With love and faith, I hold the vision of who they truly are. I uplift, not by fixing, but by believing.
– Brahma Kumaris

I started realizing it’s all about habits. At any given time, I’m either trying to pick up a good habit or discard a previous bad habit. It takes time.
– @naval

Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.
– Albert Camus

I am in the habit — it is the only sport (by the way, self-invented) that I indulge in — of racing down stairs, a terror to all who are coming up.
– Franz Kafka

snowonsnow …
listening to the silence
between us

– Chen-ou Liu

I am weary with longing,
I am faint with love;
For upon my head the moonlight
Has fallen
As a sword.

– Skipwith Cannell

It’s not true that a pleasant feeling is better than an unpleasant one. Either can carry you away.
– Cuong Lu

the stamina of stupid
is far outpacing
smart

– Andy Perrin

contemplate
meditation rules
contemplate

– Charlie Lawler

I would like to build you a poem
with a table saw and drill,
pneumatic staple gun and box knife
and frame it
like a recessed refrigerator

– Matt Mason

What would be necessary to make this history not have occurred?
– Ariel Aisha Azoulay, Potential Histories

it does not feel right
writing poetry on paper

as the ash descends from
above the pyroclastic flow

– Andy Perrin

you came
like anglerfish;
soft light beneath the deep,
a glow that found the lost in me,
love-lit.

– Dr Anish K Gupta

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

embracing the boundless —
an empty boat
closer to the moon

– Steliana Cristina Voicu

Her weapons were eavesdropping, cataloging skills, and attention to detail, and her information later aided in the recovery of tens of thousands of artworks.
– Nina Siegal, On the French curator who foiled Nazi looters

meditation class
the coming and going
of thought balloons
– Garry Eaton

“conservative” didn’t always mean violently anti-liberal; it once meant simply a cautious approach to life, reverence for tradition, “playing it safe.” many liberals of my acquaintance are fiscal conservatives; they may have invested much money but it is in low-yielding “safe” bonds & they live “conservative”–i.e., conventional–lives.
– Joyce Carol Oates

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.
– Richard Powers

“doctor, you may find
these things hidden in my ears”
the refugee murmurs …
buzzing of drones, roar of fighter jets
screams of Gazans, living and dead
– Chen-ou Liu

He ponders, as any writer would, his role in the book and his lifelong belief in literature.
– Anna Aslanyan

Healing the nervous system is about creating safety within the body, allowing it to shift from survival to restoration.
– Dr. Stephen Porges

Mirkwood is not an invention of mine, but a very ancient name, weighted with legendary associations.
– Tolkien

late-night cafe
an old man murmurs
to his reflection

– Chen-ou Liu

Bad confessional poetry has always raised my hackles, because it goes skewering in deep, exclaiming, Ooh, look at all this blood! But I’m like, No one’s interested in your blood. Make me bleed as I’m reading.
– Rita Dove

Considering the way the world is, one happy day is almost a miracle.
– Paulo Coelho

Never borrow sorrow from tomorrow.
– Helen Steiner Rice

Theatre should move us—and mobilize us.
– Lyn Gardner

CoffeeTea

Coffee is drinking a little bit of ourselves when we were younger.
Tea makes round what at first was square.

Tea hums its way through the otherwise quiet world.
Coffee is brewed from all the black notes on a sheet of fast music.

Coffee is made of old pianos.
Tea is made of Parisian watercolors.

Tea is the palm of the hand.
Coffee always raises its hand in answer to a question.

Coffee is the expansive night sky.
Tea is the quiet turned-earth in the makings of a new garden.

Tea is the audience that has come to watch the actors.
Coffee is the actor who is the undeniable star of the evening.

Coffee shouts; tea whispers.
drink coffee, but I remember tea.

– Alberto Ríos

Kind hearts are the gardens. Kind thoughts are the roots. Kind words are the blossoms. Kind deeds are the fruits.
– Kirpal Singh

I am a lover without a lover. I am lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself.
– Warsan Shire

I asked time – What is the Solution?
It said – Let me Pass
– Kawaljit Singh

Poets die adolescents, their beat embalms them.
– Robert Lowell

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
– William Faulkner

ON THE NATURE OF THINGS

Of love I am slowly becoming
more aware. When love manifests from exactly
where it has always been
it fills in my head like a gold crayon.
Lucretius knew love to be suspect.
Given a potion for it it nearly killed him.
And in rare moments of lucidity for his remaining life
he railed against love, working endlessly
on his six-volume didactic poem
on Epicurean physics,
the nature of existence
and the condition of making the lover
into a godlike power
before he committed suicide.
And for this we consider love’s therapy.

Love comes like a wave
but unmoving. It smacks upon the ground
in froths of salt and sand, says You
and disappears.

One shivers then.
Love makes you more susceptible to wind.
Of the erotic, forget what you know.
For love leaps along, the unremembered part of the dream.

Love is not memory, it is despite memory.

Who I am? The word nothing
always comes to mind.
Dwindling to the great phenomenological drama.

Nothing? I am nothing? Say that into the mirror
for as many times as it will take
to be onto something.
We go to mirrors to see what nothing manifests as.
Only to find we’re still there.
As if cleaned of all misunderstanding of stillness
by its lemon and metal and light
so slow you can barely tell it is happening.

One thinks: I’m ashamed to be alive.
But so what. Even God is a humiliated god!
Dismembered in the moonlight
and pasted back together in the morning
into reason, a word, like he never was.

We cannot even fully recall the circumstances
of our own lifetime, and its liars, its lying in the wave
any more than we can recall who that god of mirrors was,
written to on a wealthy woman’s bandages of linin
that no one could fully translate.

Where is the lost thing; where is the note
that divided the beginning—where is the manuscript
Walter Benjamin carried on his person
when he, in despair, killed himself at the border of Port Beau,
fleeing Hitler, denied asylum?
The manuscript he’d dragged
through the perilous mountains in a suitcase.
The one his companions called his “burden.”
The one he claimed was more important than his life,
and disappeared with his life.

In the absences of words consciousness grows wild and green and sentient,
a black sunflower pointed at the sun.
A mind searching for its mind.

Maybe that manuscript is being held somewhere
on a velvet pillow in a glass room
beside a cast jade tongue
and a precious ivory pipe with teeth marks on its tip.
Maybe it’s being read by only one man,
over and over again, who weeps every time.
Or, like all matter, it is dissolved,

as all our books one day will—though
the law of conservation of matter says it’s still there!
That something cannot be made into nothing.
And given infinite time it may reconstruct itself,
exactly the way it was, then on and on,
to every known object in existence,
that we’re all changing form
and all will return. I can’t explain the math.
Staring blankly at ourselves everywhere.
Surrounded by flowering weeds and grey waves,
leaning to drink from a mirror
and unable to look away,
committing suicide by ironic gaze.

What if your suicide poem
was the worst thing you’d ever written?
And of course it is: wrenching and hackneyed and tired.
But nothing really ends.
This thing that flops along the kitchen counter
grabbing at the rinds of sourdough and butter
goes on, ambivalent, tortured with thought,
tongued with the angel’s rambling, dissonant chord.

I speak to you now, old lying mind,
in all these short nightmares Valéry called language.
I speak to you
who hides, veiled among the image fires
in a body with hair growing grey upon it

a hand, writing of its hand—I speak from the body,
which hides a child, who is nothing.

– Bianca Stone

Queer culture is saying “I’m obsessed with her” and meaning it romantically, platonically, and existentially.
– April Kae

Everybody’s screwed up in their own special way.
– Joey Ramone

You must change at least one thing, or you’ll keep living the same story over and over.
– Simon Riley

Every human brain is different, the brain makes each human unique and defines who he or she is.
– Stanley B. Prusiner

What Your Body Knows
by Patrice Vecchione

What does your body know? Its ways of knowing will not desert you. Its knowing remains true and will be enhanced through your attention and reliance. The musician Jerry Garcia once said, ‘In the water you’re weightless. It’s so silent you’re like a thought. When I begin to relax, the songs start happening in my head.’ The body needs to relax to float. If you’re stiff and afraid, the water will not hold you well and you’ll flail and splash…. But if you have faith in the floating, faith in the water, alliances are made from that.

There are certain things in a man’s past, which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends. Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret. But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind.
– Fydor Dostoyevsky

Whoever, at any time, has undertaken to build a new heaven has found the strength for it in his own hell…
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Increasing personal isolation undoes the benefits of our shared embodied experience of meeting each other in the commons of our everyday life, where we connect, discover, learn from others, and negotiate contact and cooperation. Instead, so many of us find ourselves isolated in the two-dimensional disembodied cubicle of the digital world.
– Joan Halifax

Don’t just read your Bible. Eat this book.
– Eugene Peterson

Looking deeply, we can see that the history of social movements and enduring social change is not the work of single individuals but of communities living the narrative of connection, of interbeing, of ethical, courageous, and caring solidarity, interconnected communities dedicated to the wellbeing of all. One person like Gandhi, Dr. King, Lech Walesa, Thich Nhat Hanh, Greta Thunberg, Mohsen Madawi might be the spark, but the movement only works because, like fire, we rise up together.
– Joan Halifax

The man of light, the human Nous, is not incarnated and awakened in man except as the years pass, and even so only a small number of human beings can ever be said to possess the Nous.
– Henry Corbin

Empathy grows from the center outward, as the affection you have for family and friends expands to embrace those many distant souls whom you’ve never met.
– Lin Jensen

The sun, the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly-coloured glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal ray.
– Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

At the sight of a decent person, think about being equal to him, and at the sight of an unworthy person, examine yourself.
– Confucius

Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity.
– Judith Butler, Precarious Life

It was a source of pride for her, I think—that courtyard, and that house—even though the house was small and old and had a constant stream of problems.
– Andrew Porter

Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking—but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it.
– Lorraine Hansberry

Myth and utopia: the origins have belonged, the future will belong to the subjects in whom there is something feminine.
– Roland Barthes

It’s perhaps more laudable simply to keep heading out into the world than always tilting to leave one’s mark on it.
– Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

Time and reflection change the sight little by little ’till we come to understand.
– Paul Cezanne

Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything’s possible when it comes to love.
– Haruki Murakami

Like a good American, I wanted to sue somebody. But like a good librarian, I just sat at my desk and waited.
– Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower

what’s more punk rock
than living despite all that
which has tried to make you not?
– Neil Hilborn

Like a sculptor, if necessary,
carve a friend out of stone.
Realize that your inner sight is blind
and try to see a treasure in everyone.
– Rumi

When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves.
– William Arthur Ward

Surely there’s a teahouse
with a view of plum trees
on Death Mountain too
– Shiyo

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being
– Franz Kafka

THE CIRCLE

A good circle is not lopsided.
Every point is equidistant from the center.

An infinite number of points
make up the circumference

and yet not one can be lost
without spoiling the circle.

So it is with all things.
All are important

and none can be lost
without spoiling the whole.

Be the center.
Lose nothing.

– Deng Ming-Dao

That’s what poetry is
about: getting out of
your miserable self and
opening your eyes.

– Paul Durcan

My dream in poetry is to get every word right.
– Paul Durcan

The most terrible loneliness is not the kind that comes from being alone, but the kind that comes from being misunderstood. It is the loneliness of standing in a crowded room, surrounded by people who do not see you, who do not hear you, who do not know the true essence of who you are. And in that loneliness, you feel as though you are fading, disappearing into the background, until you are nothing more than a ghost, a shadow of your former self.
– George Orwell

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

If you cannot decide. The answer is No.
– Naval Ravikant

When you sit down to write, tell the truth from one moment to the next and see where it takes you.
– David Mamet

When the heart breaks open, it marks the beginning of a real love affair with this world. It is a broken-hearted love affair, rather than the conventional kind based on hope and expectation. Only in this fearless love that can respond to life’s pain, as well as its beauty, can we be of real help to ourselves or anyone else in this difficult age. The broken-hearted warrior is an essential archetype for our time.
– John Welwood

How fragile we are under the sheltering sky.
Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe,
and we’re just so small.
– Paul Bowles

Despite what techno-optimists have claimed, AI use is nearly always lazy. Yes, exceptions exist. But they are exceptions. The point of AI, for most people in most circumstances, is to do less work. “Less” soon becomes “as little as possible.” And “as little as possible” ideally becomes “none.”
– Lincoln Michel

Do you know? A lot of the time, so-called shamatha and vipassana students are trying to stop thoughts and that, actually, is a very, very unconscious attempt of suicide. Because you cannot stop thoughts. How? You cannot. But nevertheless, we try.
– Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche

TEN YEARS LATER

When the mind is clear
and the surface of the now still,
now swaying water

slaps against
the rolling kayak,

I find myself near darkness,
paddling again to Yellow Island.

Every spring wildflowers
cover the grey rocks.

Every year the sea breeze
ruffles the cold and lovely pearls
hidden in the center of the flowers

as if remembering them
by touch alone.

A calm and lonely, trembling beauty
that frightened me in youth.

Now their loneliness
feels familiar, one small thing
I’ve learned these years,

how to be alone,
and at the edge of aloneness
how to be found by the world.

Innocence is what we allow
to be gifted back to us
once we’ve given ourselves away.

There is one world only,
the one to which we gave ourselves
utterly, and to which one day

we are blessed to return.

– David Whyte

If he had so chosen, every street upon the northern slope might have been a noble terrace and commanded an extensive and beautiful view.
– Robert Louis Stevenson, Picturesque Notes

To his alert mind and ears, every experience was education.
– Will Durant, Rousseau and Revolution

If the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless and can give rise to no inference or conclusion.

– David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

The path to less suffering is through suffering.
– Jordan Peterson

You must learn to be comfortable with psychological disturbance. If your mind becomes hyperactive, just watch it. If your heart starts to heat up, let it go through what it must. Try to find the part of you that is capable of noticing. That part is your way out.
– Michael Singer

All mystical traditions view the enlightened person as someone who has seen beyond the illusion of opposites.
– Howard Sasportas

In real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It’s nothing but protagonists. It’s protagonists all the way down.
– Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

Jung realized the significance of what it meant to live without a myth. One without a myth “is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.
– Sonu Shamdasani

I keep pointing out that our attention has been colonized by the corporate world and we take ourselves out of the spaces for collective living. Without these public spaces, the commons of our churches and temples, our parks, our theatres, our museums, our protests… embodied experiences of mutuality and connection… it becomes more and more difficult for us to visualize a commonly held and lived future.
– Joan Halifax

As I passed I saw a cafe, a cafe on the street, with an open door, and one small round table outside, just big enough for two persons, two glasses of wine, two small iron chairs, a diminutive cafe…shabby, with a faded sign, a dull window, lopsided walls, uneven roof. The smallness of it, the intimacy of it, the humanity of its proportion… A human being feels one can sit in such a cafe even if one’s hair is not perfectly in place and one’s shoes are not shined… One could sit there and feel unique, feel in tune with the world, or out of tune, feel human and open to human emotion… One could sit there if one felt the world too big and too barbaric, and feel once more in a human setting, a proper setting for a human being… Why did I feel warmed by imperfections, discomfort, and patina? Because intense living leaves scars…inner scars, softened, human wear and tear.
– Anais Nin

When we use this term ‘basic goodness’ it indicates some fundamental possibility. Life is possible. Situations are possible. And anybody can start to gain some kind of insight and appreciation of their lives. That’s what we call ‘sacred’. It doesn’t mean something dramatic, but something very simple. There’s a sacredness… to everyone’s life. In order to relate to it, you have to build confidence. Because of this need to build confidence, we speak of ‘warriorship’. There’s a tremendous amount of fear in people’s lives. I think it’s based on not wanting to reveal oneself. You’re always protecting yourself. So the journey of meditation and the journey of Shambhala is: ‘One has to be fearless. One has to be brave. One must break out of the world which is comfort-oriented.’
– Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Weird doors open. People fall into things.
– David Sedaris

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

I use the word “Love” here not merely in the personal sense, but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy, but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

– James Baldwin

In its manifest, I think Vaudeville is very American. It touches us and our lives at many places. It appeals to the businessman, tired and worn, who drops in for half an hour on his way home, to the person who has an hour or two before a train goes, or before a business appointment, to the woman who is wearied of shopping, to the children who love animals and acrobats; to the man with his sweetheart or sister, to the individual who wants to be diverted but doesn’t want to think or feel; to the American of all grades and kinds who wants a great deal for his money. The vaudeville theatre belongs to the era of the department store and the short story. It may be a kind of lunch-counter art, but then art is so vague and lunch is so real.
– Edwin Royle

Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.

– Emily Wilson

So you my brothers, were invited to sit at the freedom table. But even so, don’t use your freedom for any physical advantage. Instead, serve one another in a spirit of love. For the whole social code can be summed up in one sentence: Love your neighbor as yourself.
– Galatians 5

Whatever you do, you need courage. 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. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

As strange as it sounds, given the austere, threatening quality of the monks’ life in the wilderness, what the desert finally taught them was love. There in the wilds, they could be ignored enough, invited outside of themselves enough, to love and to be loved in a way that met the deepest social needs of the tension-filled world of late antiquity. Loving God, loving other people, loving the created world in which they were placed—this was the grand and hoped-for conclusion of apatheia, that sublime indifference which ever ended in love.
– Belden C. Lane

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy, ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of my life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it next, because it relieves loneliness, the terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what, at last, I have found.
– Bertrand Russell

There are things of strange aspect in the world, things that you come upon without expectation, and they are the more meaningful for that.
– N. Scott Momaday

The principal effect of fear is that it prevents you from seeing where love is present, whereas love helps you to see where you are afraid. Love makes you conscious. It switches a light on in your mind. This light brings everything into view. You can see into every corner of your mind. Love does not judge, so nothing is hidden. Love does not condemn, so there is no deception. Love does not censure, so all is revealed. Love exposes the fears you identify with, the secret shame you haven’t forgiven, the old wounds not yet released, and every other unloving thought that blocks the awareness of love’s presence.
– Robert Holden

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labelled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.
– Simone Weil

Hope is not a form of guarantee, it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.
– John Berger

What one is missing is not what is hidden in the other.
This is the problem of love.

– Lacan

You get beyond the suffering. And you focus on the sweetness of your vision.
– Laura Nyro

Interviewer: “Does psychoanalysis teach us something about love?”

JAM: “A great deal, because it’s an experience whose mainspring is love.

It’s a question of that automatic and more of than not unconscious love that the analysand brings to the analyst, and which is called transference.

It’s a contrived love, but made of the same stuff as true love. It sheds light on its mechanism.

Love is addressed to the one you think knows your true truth.”

– Jacques-Alain Miller

I want to travel away from the dictionary / And to leave my lips / I am tired of my mouth / I want a different one.
– Nizar Qabbani

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication… it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine — to dream about things that have not happened — is among mankind’s deepest needs.
– Milan Kundera

If things that promise nothing, do contain
What is better than gold, who will distain
(That have an inkling of it) there to look,
That they may find it?

– John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad, for any other goodness is usually merely inertia or lack of will-power.
– La Rochefoucauld

rescue me / Before the night does.

You can make higher and higher levels of living a regular part of your daily regimen. . . by believing you are a soul with a body rather than a body with a soul. You will create for yourself a life that is literally without limitations.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer

okay i now think there may be significant downsides to teaching dreamwork to people before some other prerequisites are in place
– River Pilgrim

For honey bees, a dandelion is the first sign of Spring!
– June Stoyer

The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears.
– Hunter S. Thompson

All that you seek is already within you. In Hinduism, it is called the Atman, in Buddhism the pure Buddha-Mind. Christ said, ‘the kingdom of heaven is within you.’ …This is the space of full awareness that is in harmony with all the universe, and thus is wisdom itself.
– Ram Dass

The Poems Repeat as Dreams as Tears
by Vievee Francis

How to begin the story without being obvious:
the wet face, eyes swollen dim, the swallowed
moan … Who cares and Who cares, you ask. We all have
our pain, and it is so bloody boring, so obvious. But
that is the point: there is a sword, and we know
it is a sword, but despite our knowing we accept
the dual. What remains curious is our umbrage
when the tip of the blade enters. We are shocked. Why
do we never believe it will go through the skin,
that the skin, ephemeral as a cloud, does nothing to protect
the heart? I dream of Pushkin,
in my arms. Thrust through. I give him my breast.
A man who would never have loved me.
I kiss the tight curls on top of his head. It is the moment
after his duel for another’s love, another’s honor.
Being me, I believe I can save him. I can’t.
When I wake from this dream he is dead.
But the dream repeats itself. Every dusk,
the longing. Every daybreak the loss.

to be a poet is to bite as if it were a kiss, to be a beggar and give as if king, it is to have inside a comet that flames, an eagle’s claws and wings, it is to be hungry and thirsty for the infinite; it is to condense the world in a single scream
– florbela espanca, (tr. b. maciunas)

Life is intrinsically rich, but we can’t enjoy its fullness without courage.
– Anam Thubten

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life. The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important.
– Henry Miller

Never resist anything. If you think that by your resistance you will eliminate it, think again. You only plant it more firmly in place.
– Neale Donald Walsch

Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.
– John Keats

The essence of practicing the Dharma is to increase virtue and decrease non-virtue.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

Age itself is a license for eccentricity. There’s not so much fear, because there’s no place to go, nothing to lose.
– Ram Dass

That [the Beowulf poet’s] work cannot now be read at all without trouble, nor understood and valued in detail without sustained effort, is due under God to wyrd, the doom of men to live briefly in a world where all withers and is forgotten.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

The English language has changed…in a thousand years. Wyrd has swept away to oblivion nearly all its kin; but Beowulf survives: for a time, for as long as learning keeps any honour in its land. And how long will that be? God ana wat [God alone knows].
– J.R.R. Tolkien

When duty and religion are really destroyed, it will be by the rich.
– G.K. Chesterton

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.
– Viktor Frankl

Love is our nature — not something to demand, but something to radiate. When we expect others to behave a certain way to feel loved, we shift from giving to needing. True love flows without conditions. I choose to love as God loves — freely, purely, constantly.
– Brahma Kumaris

Poetry is so common hardly anyone can find it.
– Alice Notley

What if we kissed at the intersection of regeneration and revenue?
– @regenavocado

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

The pig has stopped eating
And stands among us thinking.
Already the crest of the rooster blazes
In the morning darkness.

– Charles Simic

And while you may not be everyone’s cup of tea, you don’t have to be. Tea has never apologized for not being coffee.
– Kirsten Corley

When I was young, I wanted to change the world. I tried, but the world did not change. Then I tried to change my town, but the town did not change. Then I tried to change my family, but my family did not change. Then I knew: first, I must change myself.
– Rabbi Yisrael Salanter

…the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.
– Tolkien

Refuse to disconnect from love and every relationship will be totally transformed; even the relationship with yourself.
– Adyashanti

no path
just walking
into the shimmer

– @joy_pops

You are killing me, and
you are keeping me
from dying. That is love.
– Mahmoud Darwish

I haven’t yet tasted
everything that can
keep me alive.
– Albert Camus

I play the piano pedal. I dance,
I am never quiet, I mean silent.
– Frank O’Hara

That was what I actually meant by banality. There’s nothing deep about it—nothing demonic! There’s simply resistance ever to imagine what another person is experiencing.
– Hannah Arendt

the limits of reason
leave us searching
for a defense
from ourselves
– Andy Perrin

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
– Henry David Thoreau

If you want to know how Banks views capitalist tech billionaires, you don’t have to hunt very hard… a capitalist tech billionaire is the literal devil, only he couldn’t be bothered to build hell himself.
– Constance Grady

An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
– Herman Melville

…it seems as if one must disobey everyone else in order to see at all. This is a persistent feeling in a poet but staying alert to all the ways one is coerced into denying experience, sense and reason is a huge task.
– Alice Notley

It wasn’t always like this. I moved to this city as a wide-eyed twenty-year-old, ready to take on the world with energetic abandon. Now, I’m no longer twenty years old. Something really has changed with this city.
– Devin Wallace

LOVE APPEARS IN THREE LINES

A boy danced. He was the Buddha.
At night, he shape-shifted into two rivers.
I stole into him, then drowned.

– E.J. Koh

The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.
– Henry David Thoreau

Education is not just about the passive assimilation of facts and cultural traditions, but about challenging the mind to become active, competent, and thoughtfully critical in a complex world.
– Martha Nussbaum

A writer is not a writer because he has written some books. A writer is not a writer because he teaches literature. A writer is only a writer if he can write now, tonight, this minute.
– Charles Bukowski

A vast mind moves to the side of the public good. When we engage in mind study, we begin to realize that the whole is me. This is to understand that in order for me to live a happy life, others must as well.
– Rev. Grace Song

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
– John Stuart Mill

Error never shows itself in its naked reality, in order not to be discovered. On the contrary, it dresses elegantly, so that the unwary may be led to believe that it is more truthful than truth itself.
– Iranaeus of Lyons

I try when I can to write before talking in the morning, just scrawling, basically, on paper until my hand outstrips my brain and whatever wants to appear appears.
– Margaret Ross

There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.
– John Stuart Mill

Every man is what he is, because of the dominating thoughts which he permits to occupy his mind.
– Napoleon Hill

Not to speak to a man with whom one can speak is to lose the man; to speak to a man with whom one cannot speak is to lose words. A wise man neither loses men nor loses words.
– Confucius

Love of country becomes a demon when country becomes a god, that is, when our loyalty becomes unquestioning and uncritical.
– C.S. Lewis

Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

Appalling is the soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in himself.
– Herman Melville, Pierre

I have never seen a man who could notice his own faults and internally condemn himself for them.
– Confucius

A man who has no distant plans will undoubtedly be subject to near sorrow.
– Confucius

To be poor and not to complain is hard. To be rich and not to be proud is easy.
– Confucius

No wind favors he who has no destined port.
– Michel de Montaigne

Begin your task before it becomes a burden. Put things in order before they get out of hand.
– Lao Tzu

The past is a dark, distorted mirror. You look at it, you only see your own pain. There is no room in there for someone else’s pain.
– Elif Shafak

Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it; every, every minute?
– Thornton Wilder

Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were.
– Cherie Carter-Scott

When a deep injury is done us, we never recover until we forgive.
– Alan Paton

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination. Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.
– Napoleon Hill

And The Young, they can loose hope because they can’t see beyond today. It’s Wisdom that the old can’t give away.
– Pearl Jam

Your voice is wild
and simple.
You—are
untranslatable.

– Anna Akhmatova

I rolled myself up into a tight ball of resistance and it was thus that I went through my school years.
– Sigrid Undset

Ecosystem is a world in which many worlds fit.
– Adrienne Maree Brown

In grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?
– C.S. Lewis

The truth is that the modern GOP is deeply anti-intellectual, and has as its fundamental goal not just a rollback of the welfare state but a rollback of the Enlightenment.
– Paul Krugman

The function of art is to do
more than tell it like it is-it’s
to imagine what is possible.
– bell hooks

It’s quiet now, / the storm splits open like sacramental bread, / and I love you I love you. Can you hear me?
– Todd Dillard

Men imagine that thought can be kept secret, but it cannot; it rapidly crystallizes into habit, and habit solidifies into circumstance.
– James Allen

that is the point: there is a sword, and we know
it is a sword, but despite our knowing we accept
the dual. What remains curious is our umbrage
when the tip of the blade enters. We are shocked.

– Vievee Francis

there is no summer door
that opens twice!

– Shimaneko-kun

This is not just my victory, but a chorus of voices often left unheard. A thousand fireflies lighting a single sky, brief, brilliant and utterly collective.
– Banu Mushtaq

I think the enemy of gratitude isn’t ingratitude, it’s entitlement.
– Nadia Bolz-Weber

I do think the term “intrusive thought” has lately been hijacked and is typically used far too casually. Like “antisocial”.
– Jacque Boatman

I think one of the roles of a good ~spiritual (or psycho-emotional) teacher is to put certain students on pause, or keep them in the shallow end of things for quite awhile

There’s this thing that happens when people dive in and go hardcore with like… hm how to describe this

One big example is very driven people, people who are extremely goal-oriented and efficient, whose ego-personalities are extremely good at breaking things down to their parts, stripping out what doesn’t matter, and gunning the accelerator on the things that do,

When they get into inner work, they often bring that mind and those impulses in with them. I mean, they always do. It’s just a matter of how much it affects things.

But there’s a thing that not-infrequently happens there, extremely “you can’t fix a problem from the level of consciousness that caused it” coded

they end up doing so many techniques, mastering so much knowledge, tasting so many states and traditions and so on… and doing it From That Mind that got them into this mess in the first place,

and I sometimes meet people who are like, 10, 20 years down the road from that,

and in quite a few cases, there’s something so *tight* about them, something *bound up* and *twisted around* about their emotions, their reactivity, the way they interact,,

and they also make it kind of impossible for themselves to recognize any of this or see any need to work on it

one example I’ve seen a few times is some version of “sure, I’m an asshole, but like, emptiness bro — ‘asshole’ is as much a fabricated experience as ‘kind soul,’ so why bother not being an asshole? in the larger scheme it doesn’t matter, and in fact the world *needs* assholes to tell it like it is, so actually i’m great”

They bum-rushed emptiness early on, used it to twist themselves into a shape where their shadow and trauma and knots are so tightly coiled in with their insights and practices and states,, it’s inextricable

plus they came in with this goal-oriented, box-checking mind… and they found an answer early on that allowed them to bypass a lot of emotional, relational, social, and personal stuff — cuz it’s empty, it’s a construct, it’s Good Akshully™, it’s Who I Am™, whatever,

and once that box was checked, that box-checking mind closed the issue. So these knots and twists just stayed, they closed down into read-only, write access became not just impossible to access, but like… even the ability to see Why write-access might be needed there became unthinkable.

That’s just one example, but not a super uncommon one,

I think in a lot of cases, a really good teacher would have found ways to pause students like that, to get them to let go and unclench and get less compulsively stuck in those habits of mind before allowing those habits of mind to dominate their entire approach to inner work

In other cases, it might have more to do with discernment and being able to hold stories lightly (I’m thinking of people who have a couple of visionary/imaginal experiences, and end up reifying them into True Visions Of The Way The Universe Is for the rest of their lives) — pausing those people until they can access a little more spaciousness, a little less meaning-grasping.

So often, the slow road is actually the faster and more reliable road, once you factor in a lot of the externalities, or once you take a more holistic view of where the road is going.

getting on a bullet train in the wrong direction helps no one. Not just because you go the wrong direction, but because it trains your system to feel that bullet trains are the way to go — and when you reach places where you have to hike a mountain pass or drive an old car around, you’ll refuse to do it, start looking around for more bullet trains, even when none of them go the way you’re going.

– River Kenna

Lately, I’ve been thinking that what drives so much of the anger and antagonism online is our helplessness offline.
– Roxane Gay

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move.
– William Faulkner

You always learn from observing. You have to pick things up nonverbally because people will never tell you what you’re supposed to know. You have to get it for yourself: whatever it is that you need in order to survive. You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for. This is the way genuine learning takes place.
– Audre Lorde

Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.
– Alexander Calder

Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.
– Alexander Calder

The universe is real, but you can’t see it. You have to imagine it.
– Alexander Calder

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

All my life,
since I was ten,
I’ve been waiting
to be in
this hell here
with you;
all I’ve ever
wanted, and
still do
– Alice Notley

“Amorbach” …or Sky in the Other Language

Cloudman [Wolkmann]: a mountain that is the image of its name,
a friendly left-behind giant.
– Theodor Adorno, “Amorbach” (translated by Susan N. Gillespie)

“Cloudman [Wolkmann]: a mountain that is the image of its name, a friendly left-behind giant.”

Theodor Adorno opened his 1966 essay, “Amorbach,” with this striking image. Cloudman, the “mountain that is the image of its name” greets the town below, eliciting a relationship between cloudscape and landscape. Other mountains appear and are named. Even the small mountain, Gotthard, exists “as if it wanted, gently, to accustom the child to consorting with mountains.”

Adorno’s essayistic reverie is punctuated by this as-if mode, woven through sixteen paragraphs that pay homage to a place that can no longer exist in the same way. It remains one of Adorno’s most tender essays, narrated by the adult reaching back into the land of childhood, where guilt has not yet bloomed into complicity. The critical theorist recollects his family’s annual summer vacations in the mountain town of Amorbach. Later, the adult Adorno would take his own family — his wife, Gretel — to similar retreats for their summer tidings. But what was he looking for in this memory? What do we seek when traveling back to the enchanted sites of childhood?

2 “Even now, the beauty whose ground I vainly seek when I stand before the whole reemerges in this part,” Adorno wrote. What later returns to haunt wholeness is the memory of those marked borders. All that exists could have been otherwise.

Finitude, completion, fulfillment: these are all stories about the completeness of time. As such, they assume the desire to be finished, or completed, in it. Just as finishing school is said to properly prepare the teenager for adulthood, the ideal of completeness calls us towards that “well-rounded” personhood
that is marketable on paper.

Only that thought and that expression are good which are musical.
– H.D. Thoreau

Deep down in your heart, know that all is well. Understand that the Universe is your friend and can never hurt you. It is the substratum of all existence, which is love! When you develop a loving consciousness, there can be no problems. Love takes care of everything.
– Robert Adams

The chair of poetry must remain empty, for poetry does not collaborate with society, but with life
– Frank O’Hara

Some people lean away from reality. Forever trying to avoid and escape it. Others lean all the way in. Leaving no other option than to master it.
– Nika Solé

The self is not a solid thing—it’s an abstract idea we learn to recognize as it arises.
– Rodney Smith

psychedelics destabilize the energy body – which can be good! breaking out of bad stabilities can be huge

but long-term/heavy psychedelic use seems to derange the energy body, which is a whole other thing

– River Pilgrim

Holding tightly to what must change is like gripping a spinning wheel—you’re bound to get run over.
– Sharon Salzberg

How poetic that the phrase “The Matter of Britain” in esoteric and mythical literature should refer to something immaterial: its soul.
– Mike Scott

Sympathetic joy, or being happy for others happiness, is the best way to diffuse any tension one may have with the world and others.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

Nothing is
the way you think it is
going to be.
Take this little flower
from me, and let it go
into the way you think of it.

– Ron Padgett, American Cowslip

Those people who see clearly the necessity of changed thinking must themselves undertake the discipline of thinking in new ways and must persuade others to do so.
– Kathleen Lonsdale

I am ashamed of my century
for being so entertaining
– Frank O’Hara

If you want to travel the Way of Buddhas and Zen masters, then expect nothing, seek nothing, and grasp nothing.
– Dōgen

Anxiety is often a reaction to living too far in the future. Come back to now—where your feet are, where your breath is, where your power lives.
– @tinybuddha

Truth isn’t for display; it is my inner alignment. It keeps my mind light, my heart fearless, and my life aligned — always. Even when the world chooses convenience, I choose clarity. Because authenticity doesn’t need approval.
– Brahma Kumaris

Bombastic poem
Full of noble intentions
Whimpers into nothingness.
– Sarita Talwai

They expect you to play by the rules of a game that is designed to slowly siphon your power and make you forget who you are. And see, I just can’t do that.
– Nika Solé

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
– William James

It is a denial of the divinity within us to doubt our potential and our possibilities.
– James E. Faust

I cannot expect even my own art to provide all the answers- only to hope it keeps asking the right questions.
– Grace Hartigan

There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer’s block, where you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling your talent run down your leg and into your sock.
– Anne Lamott

Your every thought, your every word, your every action is a statement to the Universe: This is Who I Am.
– Neale Donald Walsch

Seeing that I can find no subject specially useful or pleasing — since the men who have come before me have taken for their own every useful or necessary theme — I must do like one who, being poor, comes last to the fair, and can find no other way of providing himself than by taking all the things already seen by other buyers, and not taken but refused by reason of their lesser value. I, then, will load my humble pack with this despised and rejected merchandise, the refuse of so many buyers; and will go about to distribute it, not indeed in great cities, but in the poorer towns, taking such a price as the wares I offer may be worth.
– Leonardo da Vinci

a long dip in crystal clear water/peace.peace.peace.
– L.E. Bowman

Compassion is not sentimentality. It is a neurobiological offering—a space where fear deactivates, and learning begins.
– Dr. Steve Peters

How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?
– John Stuart Mill

Democritus invented the word atom, Greek for ‘unable to be cut.’ Atoms were the ultimate particles, forever frustrating our attempts to break them into smaller pieces. Everything, he said, is a collection of atoms, intricately assembled. Even we. ‘Nothing exists,’ he said, ‘but atoms and the void.’

When we cut an apple, the knife must pass through empty spaces between the atoms, Democritus argued. If there were no such empty spaces, no void, the knife would encounter the impenetrable atoms, and the apple could not be cut. Having cut a slice from a cone, say, let us compare the cross sections of the two pieces. Are the exposed areas equal? No, said Democritus. The slope of the cone forces one side of the slice to have a slightly smaller cross section than the other. If the two areas were exactly equal, we would have a cylinder, not a cone. No matter how sharp the knife, the two pieces have unequal cross sections. Why? Because, on the scale of the very small, matter exhibits some irreducible roughness. This fine scale of roughness Democritus identified with the world of the atoms. His arguments were not those we use today, but they were subtle and elegant, derived from everyday life. And his conclusions were fundamentally correct.

– Carl Sagan

Whether male or female, there is no great difference. But if a woman develops the mind of enlightenment, her potential is supreme.
– Padmasambhava

Humans of Naropa

I love nature. I find it’s one of the best ways to connect with reality, ourselves, and the living world in a deep way. I’ve always been drawn to it, and there aren’t many programs in the country like Naropa’s that incorporate mindfulness and nature with mental health. Most of my undergrad degree was learning about how corrupt governments and corporations can be, and how they treat humans, animals, and the planet. Afterwards, I tried working in the non-profit sector, but there was so much burnout in everyone around me who was trying to work towards a kinder, more sustainable world. It was heartbreaking. But something that stirred in me from that experience was: if I don’t want to be doing frontline work, how can I help build cultures of sustainable activism? I think counseling provides a lot of tools for the demographics I dream of working with, and it’s so vital to support activists and caretakers. There’s a lot of burden on these two very diverse groups of people who carry so much of our collective weight, and these are wonderful, capable human beings who are passionate about caring and deserve support.

Part of that support, I believe, includes reconnecting with nature—there’s so much evidence for the physical and mental health benefits of it, and it really puts into perspective what is at stake beyond the human world. Repairing that relationship is so essential for all of us. Even when I’ve lived in pretty polluted neighborhoods and pristine nature wasn’t accessible, I still found nature to be inspiring—like noticing a plant coming up from the concrete and seeing its resilience, beauty, and commitment to life, or tending to a houseplant, or looking up at a tree—it can get you in touch with that feeling of: it’s not just me here.

– River Coupwood

The question is no whether there is intelligent life out there, the question is, whether there is intelligent life down here. As long as you have war, police, prisons, crime, you are in the early stages of civilization.
– Jacque Fresco

Orfeo
by Dan Beachy-Quick

I created more loss where I meant to make less.
Created more debt where I meant to make depth.
Created more death. Mind is
the subject of the mind, but the poem becomes a
flower or a tree. Ask the wind. Ask
the wind that wrote this poem. Cirrus scarf
blowing through the endless blue its song
about a neck, a pulse, the inner gem, that stone.
Ask the wind that curls around the house’s eaves
with a moan. Erotic or—. Forlorn—.
It’s hard to know. It’s hard to know the difference
between Echo & Narcissus. You say the words
you say but you know—. They’ve already been said—.
Your mouth’s diamond mine. Filled with coal.

_____

I tuned the radio to the AM dial call letters YHWH.
A bride drags her veil behind her in the dust
between the olive trees in the orchard, leaving no
footprints but a sinuous line. News
from paradise at the top of the hour. Traffic
updates in spring. & every fall
a test of the emergency broadcast system
that lasts all season long. But it was winter, then.
& the station played Sappho—. Not the words—.
But the silences—. More comforting
than any song—. Because you know the words
& can’t get them wrong—. As you sing—.
As you sing along—.

_____

I heard the music that turned the m upside down
insisting the letter was a w—. stet,
stet in red yelled out the editors in the underworld.
But done with crying by the river, done
with begging the boatman to take me back where
I’d been, I let the wind
do my thinking for me. You
must know the roots of the willow
to bend the branch into a lyre. Or a liar—.
Which you bend yourself into becoming—.
Once you ve cut your roots
& wandered free. “Free.” “Free verse.”
The universe is deliberate sings the cosmic eros—.

_____

The song is over before it’s begun—.
This is one of the things you learn
in your music lessons.
When your teacher is a muse—. Or museum—.
& the myth is a mouth inside your mouth
you don’t know how to coax open.
Millet-seed or mustard—. Pollen smeared on a stone—.
Or honey in the honeycomb—.
Bloodless offerings that appease the gods
seldom satisfy the ghosts. Shades
stuttering in the dark cave hoping a tooth will bite
the tongue, or a thorn
prick the thumb. A drop of blood—.
Is that too much to ask—. A little sacrifice—. The letter a.

_____

A life—. The verb to read in the old tongue means “to know
again.” An ant crawls across the keyboard
looking for a way in—. Culvert of the letter o
for countless years led to the river in the labyrinthine cave
but leads to another culvert now. Water
so still it’s a mirror but look in and you see nothing
it is so dark. You have to ask where are you
to know if you’re there. & the shift key that makes the little o
call down a god in pain—. & the space bar
that adds to the unthinkable blank a different agony.
Not a blank face—. But a vibration in the void .
An indefinite article sung out with the force of the solar wind
might bring to you anything you sing of—. A moon—.
A name—. Have you ever looked the letter a in the face—.

_____

No—. Neither have I—. Some light
on some face shines & so the face is seen. Rabbit
in the moon that once a month is once again
your lost wife. Mind
& strife—. & the paring knife—.
Cutting the apple in two & in two again—.
A process you can repeat until the slice is so thin
you see through it. An apple that is an eye—.
An I—. Not knowledge exactly—. Not good,
not bad—. A lens of a kind
that lets you see a thought blow through the mind
as wind blows through a tree. Easy in summer
with leaves full & green. But winter
splays the nerve against the sky—. & the dove

_____

cooing a home in the empty air—. & the cloud
gathering the morning darkly within it—.
Tells you the snow you sang out for so long ago
has come—. Not a blizzard—.
A dusting that turns the willow branch white—.
White as the hem of a wedding dress—.
Hymen carried a sputtering torch across the heavens
praying sleep would arrive. Sleep that knows
no pain—. Sleep that blooms the stone-
cold seed buried in the dumb loam of the sad mind.
The mind is the subject
of the mind. It’s cute to think there’s an otherwise.
You have to find a word containing “wise”
to find a way to be wise. & then sing it—. Otherwise—

I like listening to Schubert while I’m driving… it’s because all his performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I’m driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there.

– Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Some people get an education without going to college. The rest get it after they get out.
– Mark Twain

Every single original musical genius in America, for instance, has been to jail or prison; I assure you the same holds true for literature.
– Jack Kerouac

I think, the world is actually huge. That’s the part no one can really explain.
– Jennifer Egan

Self-interest speaks all kinds of languages and plays all kinds of parts – even that of disinterestedness.
– François de La Rochefoucauld

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties or his possessions.
– James Madison

It was spring—yellow squares of light transformed the unlined curtains at the window, their pattern of purple bars wound with a clinging vine.
– Tessa Hadley

I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil.
– Mon Mothma, Andor

The fundamental job of a Buddhist is to see clearly what is real and true, and to not be fooled.
– Lewis Richmond

Attention is like a flame that burns out past and present hurts.
– Krishnamurti

Don’t seek God in temples. He is close to you. He is within you. He lives in you. Just surrender yourself to Him and you’ll rise above happiness and sorrow.
– Leo Tolstoy

In a life short and uncertain, it seems heartless to do anything that might deprive people of the consolation of faith when science cannot remedy their anguish. Those who cannot bear the burden of science are free to ignore its precepts. But we cannot have science in bits and pieces, applying it where we feel safe and ignoring it where we feel threatened.
– Carl Sagan

The object of the theoretical, as separate from the practical Qabalah, insofar as this thesis is concerned, is to enable the student to do three main things: First, to analyze every idea in terms of the Tree of Life. Second, to trace a necessary connection and relation between every and any class of ideas by referring them to this standard of comparison. Third, to translate any unknown system of symbolism into terms of any known one by its means.
– Francis Israel Regardie

Superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way, distracting the uninformed among us, providing easy answers, dodging skeptical scrutiny, casually pressing our awe buttons and cheapening the experience, making us routine and comfortable practitioners as well as victims of credulity.
– Carl Sagan, Does Truth Matter?

It is very silly to do something because people may admire you. It is your practice, not their practice. So you should be very independent.
– Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

You wanting to go when you want to stay
and you wanting to stay when you want to go
are an expression of the restlessness of mind,
– which takes place all the time.

When your disposition is like that,
the best place by far is where you are sitting.
Your present state is the most pleasant
– you cannot get any better than this.

You can make friends with your discomfort.

– Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

I see I am getting away from the question, but the question was not very interesting.
– Ernest Hemingway

Bend My Knee
by Dana Cooper

You may call yourself a king
I see your true worth
Surround yourself with shiny things
And the richest men on earth
I was raised proud and free
No man is above me
I won’t bend my knee
I won’t bend my knee to the king

I’ll bend my knee to humanity
I’ll bend my knee for love
Won’t bend my knee to tyranny
Won’t kiss the hand that shoves
I’ve fought long enough to know
The fight is never ending
I won’t bend my knee
I won’t bend my knee
I won’t bend my knee to the king

The king of fever dreams
The king of self conceit
You’d have me on my knees
Full of fear and flattery
But I’m never gonna sing your praises

You can white wash history
Laugh at your cruel jokes
Lie and deny your villainy
With your boot upon my throat
I’ll lift my head I’ll raise my voice
No bully can defeat me
I won’t bend my knee
I won’t bend my knee
I won’t bend my knee to the

Ketamine Kid and the Would Be King
Selling cars on the sacred lawn
With our stolen flag and their chain saw schemes
What could possibly go wrong
Someone must defy you
It might as well be me
I won’t bend my knee
I won’t bend my knee
I won’t bend my knee
I won’t bend my knee to the king

I’ll bend my knee to humanity
I’ll bend my knee for love

While it’s possible to be careless with language and be a successful writer, it’s not possible to be a great one, for the simple reason that words matter.
– Richard Russo

I think about the 90 percent of our ancestors who were peasants and how thrilled they would be to see us thriving in a literate world that was once the sole domain of kings. I read for them. I study to learn all the things they could never know.

– @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social

Sometimes it’s not strength but gentleness that cracks the hardest shells.
– Richard Paul Evans

The world of men has forgotten the joys of silence, the peace of solitude which is necessary, to some extent, for the fullness of human living. Not all men are called to be hermits, but all men need enough silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally.

When that inner voice is not heard, when man cannot attain to the spiritual peace that comes from being perfectly at one with his own true self, his life is always miserable and exhausting. For he cannot go on happily for long unless he is in contact with the springs of spiritual life which are hidden in the depths of his own soul.

If man is constantly exiled from his own home, locked out of his own spiritual solitude, he ceases to be a true person. He no longer lives as a man. He becomes a kind of automaton, living without joy because he has lost his spontaneity. He is no longer moved from within, but only from outside himself.

– Thomas Merton

Fairy tales — the proper kind, those original Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen tales I recall from my Eastern European childhood, unsanitized by censorship and unsweetened by American retellings — affirm what children intuitively know to be true but are gradually taught to forget, then to dread: that the terrible and the terrific spring from the same source, and that what grants life its beauty and magic is not the absence of terror and tumult but the grace and elegance with which we navigate the gauntlet.
– Maria Popova

‘And they lived happily ever after,’ says the fairy tale. The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was the need created by the myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest.

In the figure of the fool it shows us how mankind ‘acts dumb’ toward the myth; in the figure of the youngest brother it shows us how one’s chances increase as the mythical primitive times are left behind; in the figure of the man who sets out to learn what fear is it shows us that the things we are afraid of can be seen through; in the figure of the wiseacre it shows us that the questions posed by the myth are simple-minded, like the riddle of the Sphinx; in the shape of the animals which come to the aid of the child in the fairy tale it shows that nature not only is subservient to the myth, but much prefers to be aligned with man.

The wisest thing—so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to this day—is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits. (This is how the fairy tale polarizes Mut, courage, dividing it dialectically into Untermut, that is, cunning, and Übermut, high spirits.) The liberating magic which the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man. A mature man feels this complicity only occasionally, that is, when he is happy; but the child first meets it in fairy tales, and it makes him happy.

– Walter Benjamin

The devils have come and they say “we are angels.”
The henchmen have come and they say “we are brothers.”
They say “we have come from the light,”
but in truth they have come from the dark.
Did you really believe him, my country?
That he’s yours forever and ever,
that you’ll carry thieves and bandits in your womb,
to doze off in the dirt, and awaken to fire?
Why so silent, won’t you answer?
– Boris Khersonsky

It’s like a hole in my life, an eight-year hole. That’s what I find interesting in people’s lives, the holes, the gaps, sometimes dramatic, but sometimes not dramatic at all. There are catalepsies, or a kind of sleepwalking through a number of years, in most lives. Maybe it’s in these holes that movement takes place.
– Gilles Deleuze

Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street … Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.
– Wassily Kandinsky

Many historians have remarked on the fact that there are days when everything seems extraordinarily firm, with each part wonderfully fitted to the rest, and the entire course of world history rock-solid. And, on the contrary, there are days when everything is simply falling apart.
– Yury Tynyanov

Talk to me when you’re older. Talk to me when you’re forty, and I assure you that what will most disturb you, most occupy your mind and your writing, many of your waking hours, will be the willful and consistent cruelty of people against those whom they cannot understand or control or tolerate. Cruelty is the only plague that never ceases and for which no cure is ever adequately fought.
– Tennessee Williams

In modern culture, careers often form the basis for how we define ourselves within society. Here, the inner demons of ambition and identity can lead to losing contact with fundamental human kindness and forgetting the higher purpose of life. Some professionals become like a beast, willing to do anything to climb to the top of the ladder. People can become mesmerized by the spell of ambition. It is a palpable atmosphere in many modern professional environments. It happens everywhere: universities, hospitals, tech companies, and corporate offices.
– Anam Thubten

I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.
– Samuel Beckett

And every stone and every star a tongue,
And every gale of wind a curious song.
The Heavens were an oracle, and spoke
Divinity: the Earth did undertake
The office of a priest; and I being dumb
(Nothing besides was dumb) all things did come
With voices and instructions …

– Thomas Traherne

A human lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
– Thomas Mann

Then shall the chief musician declare:
“The phoenix is the measure of the fruit,
until the dream is knowledge and knowledge is a dream.”

And then once again the entire choir shall cry in passionate unity,
Singing and celebrating love and love’s victory,
Ascending and descending the heights of assent, climbing and
chanting triumphantly: Before the morning was, you were:
Before the snow shone,
And the light sang, and the stone
Abiding, rode the fullness or endured the emptiness,
You were: you were alone.

– Delmore Schwartz

Do I, then, belong to the heavens?
Why, if not so, should the heavens
Fix me thus with their ceaseless blue stare,
Luring me on, and my mind, higher
Ever higher, up into the sky,
Drawing me ceaselessly up
To heights far, far above the human?

– Yukio Mishima

Airless Spaces complicates the idea that speaking one’s truth can lead to liberation. It jostles between depicting people at their most atomized—outside consensus reality or social contracts—and their most blurry and indistinct.
– Audrey Wollen

everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale
– Salman Rushdie

…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

Although we all use the phrase “peace of mind,” there is really no such thing. When you are in your mind, you are never truly at peace, and when you are truly at peace, you are never in your mind Don’t believe or disbelieve that statement either, just honestly observe yourself. Then you will know — but it will be an altogether new kind of knowing.
– Richard Rohr

Glenn Gould’s Favorite Color Was ‘Battleship Grey’

Evidently, this is the ideal hue in which to
dissipate on the first day of spring, when layers of hot yellow
pollen cover the porch swing. Allergists are everywhere
like sexual sadness and microplastics but hearts must be hard
grey like Gould’s metallic raft. Of course I woke up
from a failed mantra. No birdsong, no Bach when
licking lust’s dust from my forearm. Inseminate
me, I said to the rowdy yellow flotilla. My friends say I’m totally
intellectually promiscuous which is the footnote to being
so empty that intellectual masturbation begins
to fail regularly. On a day without books, my brain
is a Build-A-Bear workshop at the mall and I am
the thing kids are building, the being that needs
to be patched together by small dinosaurs who know
themselves better than the adults who insist
that the dinos are children, which is one way of
owning a mammal to disown the cosmos. No tenor,
no accordion, no peanut sonata. Friends are there
for the remainder in that solo, tangelo polyurethane ear
which is as close as I’ve come to a livable homeland
when I’m being faithful to hues or to heritage.

– Alina Stefanescu

Whenever you become anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over.
– Eckhart Tolle

Healthy behaviors look boring to unhealthy people.
– Dan Go

undergraduates no longer know how to read, which is completely different from graduate students who also no longer know how to read, which is completely different from professors who also no longer know how to read.
– Jonathan Fine

Compassion takes guts. It means being willing to suffer with, to feel the pain of others.
– Pema Chödrön

His solitary cell is (resplendent as) the sun’s orb: how should alien night throw a veil over it?
– Rūmī (translated by Reynold A. Nicholson)

The New Brain
by Alice Notley

Consciousness travels, my sweet: don’t you remember?
One sends one’s thoughts to thee as on this footfall,
or in this poem. But, truly, remember how we left our old meat-
heads to enter the glyph and ride the crystal ark, un-
bodied but worded. My mother is a starred thought—
and, Don’t You Remember? the Mind from nowhere is everywhere,
not just under your skin. The first mind, not evolved but absolute
rainbow with me, you and me. Nothing depends on it either.

Someday I will remember this very future I am in, image in space.
I will at least see her, I say to myself, she will be someone
else than one ever thought and her eyes will be blue words on white.

Consciousness travels from Neptune the planet to Neptune the god of the sea.

I travel to your irony and perambulation, your decibels and vehement
budget: I perceive you for you. You don’t have time. I

have time, I am the goddess of the smooth doorway. Let me in,
so I can abolish your description.

There is a lot of beauty to live with uncertainty … the search doesn’t end when we find the answer; it ends when we become perfectly comfortable with not knowing the answer.
– C.G. Carl Jung

I’m babbling like this only because, in spite of everything, near you I feel well.
– Franz Kafka

Light is apt for communication, where there is reception and capacity, but it constrains no one, and waits its reception tranquilly.
– Karl von Eckhartshausen

Excess in anything becomes a fault.
– Seneca

flowers leaning into
the path of the sun
early summer rain
– Basho

Spirituality is the measure of how loving you are.
– Martin Kipp

In my mind, alchemy and magic are synonymous. Because alchemy is also a way of mixing the stuff of the heavens and the Earth together in a unique pattern or strategy to create an outcome that is more than the sum of its parts.
– David Avocado Wolfe

Time is a long-drawn thunder
of waters under the ground
– Tennessee Williams

Your first task is to find what feels effortless to you.

Your second task is to put maximum effort into it.

– James Clear

a lot of people get stuck on inner work prompts, hearing them as somehow literal attempts to point at a reality,

rather than as a side-door into practicing the muscle memory for certain mental moves

– River Kenna

The world is your laboratory, where you practice on yourself. Do not try to escape from the world. Do not try to change things, but watch yourself. Watch the things that upset you. Watch how many words you use during the day. Watch how you react to what people say.
– Robert Adams

“Traveling makes a person young,” notes Marina Abramovic, “because he doesn’t have time to get old.” She seems the living proof of her own assertion.
– Pico Iyer

A young man can know many homes in this world, yet his longing is always for the first of them.
– Al-Hasan Al-Yusi

Wait Until It Grows Roots
by Tarfia Faizullah

for Alex T.

a golden shovel after a line in ‘Gitanjali 73’ by Tagore

The plant trimming requires no
less than its water to be changed weekly. I
ask my friend who gifted it to me: when will
I be able to transfer it into soil? She has never
told me anything but the truth. I don’t shut
the window blinds now; my Plant-Friend loves the
sun too much. I’ve been leaving the doors
open too; the spirits flit more freely now. Yes, of
course I’m afraid of death, but no less so my
own life. A friend can bring you back to sweeter senses.

Why was I born
if it wasn’t forever?
– Eugène Ionesco

Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sunbeam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all,—that perfectness and harmony, is beauty.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

… By prayer

I mean I read the same poem over and over,
until my hair becomes sloppy with poem, that I eat

it slowly until it coats my mouth. All my prayers begin
with hunger

– Albert Abonado

Within me, there is a universe – a different kind of universe. When I close my eyes and focus within, the outside world stops and the world within begins.
– Prem Rawat

Domestic Mysticism
by Lucie Brock-Broido

In thrice 10,000 seasons, I will come back to this world
In a white cotton dress. Kingdom of After My Own Heart.
Kingdom of Fragile. Kingdom of Dwarves. When I come home,
Teacups will quiver in their Dresden saucers, pentatonic chimes
Will move in wind. A covey of alley cats will swarm on the side
Porch & perch there, portents with quickened heartbeats
You will feel against your ankles as you pass through.

After the first millennium, we were supposed to die out.
You had your face pressed up against the coarse dyed velvet
Of the curtain, always looking out for your own transmigration:
What colors you would wear, what cut of jewel,
What kind of pageantry, if your legs would be tied
Down, if there would be wandering tribes of minstrels
Following with woodwinds in your wake.

This work of mine, the kind of work which takes no arms to do,
Is least noble of all. It’s peopled by Wizards, the Forlorn,
The Awkward, the Blinkers, the Spoon-Fingered, Agnostic Lispers,
Stutterers of Prayer, the Flatulent, the Closet Weepers,
The Charlatans. I am one of those. In January, the month the owls
Nest in, I am a witness & a small thing altogether. The Kingdom
Of Ingratitude. Kingdom of Lies. Kingdom of How Dare I.

I go on dropping words like little pink fish eggs, unawares, slightly
Illiterate, often on the mark. Waiting for the clear whoosh
Of fluid to descend & cover them. A train like a silver
Russian love pill for the sick at heart passes by
My bedroom window in the night at the speed of mirage.
In the next millennium, I will be middle aged. I do not do well
In the marrow of things. Kingdom of Trick. Kingdom of Drug.

In a lung-shaped suburb of Virginia, my sister will be childless
Inside the ice storm, forcing the narcissus. We will send
Each other valentines. The radio blowing out
Vaughan Williams on the highway’s purple moor.
At nine o’clock, we will put away our sewing to speak
Of lofty things while, in the pantry, little plants will nudge
Their frail tips toward the light we made last century.

When I come home, the dwarves will be long
In their shadows & promiscuous. The alley cats will sneak
Inside, curl about the legs of furniture, close the skins
Inside their eyelids, sleep. Orchids will be intercrossed & sturdy.
The sun will go down as I sit, thin armed, small breasted
In my cotton dress, poked with eyelet stitches, a little lace,
In the queer light left when a room snuffs out.

I draw a bath, enter the water as a god enters water:
Fertile, knowing, kind, surrounded by glass objects
Which could break easily if mishandled or ill-touched.
Everyone knows an unworshiped woman will betray you.
There is always that promise, I like that. Kingdom of Kinesis.
Kingdom of Benevolent. I will betray as a god betrays,
With tenderheartedness. I’ve got this mystic streak in me.

Whether it is your body, your mind, or your life energies ‒ the more you use them, the better they get.
– Sadhguru

For years, there were opportunities that I didn’t fully accept because I didn’t know how, but there were people saying, You can do it.
– Hilton Als

Selkie sighting
Magnificent awe
Behold wonder

– Rachel Newcombe

Is there some way to pull a psychic plug so that shame leaks out from whatever void it’s been relegated to and into everyone’s dreams? Could we have a national dream of nakedness and guilt?
– Alice Notley

Plants can be friends, along with poems and poets.
– Tarfia Faizullah

Those who have hurt you in the past cannot continue to hurt you now unless you hold on to that pain through your thoughts….thoughts filled with resentment and regrets.
– Swami Sukhabodhananda

There is no distinction between being authentically oneself and serving absolute truth.
– A.H. Almaas

“To survive,” she mused, “you’ve got to keep wheedling your way. You can’t just fight against odds when it’s not going to work. You have to turn a corner, dig a hole, go through a tunnel-and find a way to keep moving.”
– Twyla Tharp

I’ve met people who think telling fellow authors you’re a fan is weird or cringe or fanboy-ish or whatever. I give zero fucks. I love books. I’m a fan of great writers. I’ve reached out to half a dozen just this week to say I loved something they wrote.
– Gabino Iglesias

For me, poetry is the thinnest barrier between abstraction and emotion. Queerness, too, has allowed the world to let me in: the unbridled joy of a people who have been shunned by the rest of society is like nothing else.
– Gabrielle Grace Hogan

On any day, this one even, a person, that arid average, capitulates to sixty thousand thoughts, a paraphrastic, unsubstantiated number, but a hamlet no longer cozy at a quarter the population.
– Austin Adams

Limited in his nature,
infinite in his desire,
man is a fallen god who
remembers heaven….

– A. De Lamartine

Too many people regard translation as the separation of a text from its source culture when it is just as much the integration of a text into a new context.
– Anton Hur

This feels like a win for all the weird rural, remote, and Northern kids who grew up into weird Northern adults with something to say! It’s proof that our viewpoints can resonate outside our communities.
– Dawn Macdonald

Your book must offer something those readers hunger for: answers, role models, sources of hope, empathy. Your book isn’t simply ‘saying something,’ it’s saying something that someone needs.
– Amy L. Bernstein

Because you are alive, everything is possible.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh

the term “normie” is slightly misleading because while normies do exist, they are a plurality, not a majority. normies are maybe 10-15% of the population. meanwhile the median human being is the weirdest person you’ve ever met. so many people are so, so strange.
– @adancerdances

The mind is body abstracting.
– @VinceFHorn

I have never felt fully at home in America: it’s too concerned with profit at the expense of morality and community.
– Sasha Vasilyuk

I think what we are all really seeking is a living and healthy tradition, something that isn’t just about words or arguments, but that is about life in all its fullness and about deep, deep love.
– Brian McLaren

Fiction is what shapes reality—it’s that easy … lies form a substantial part of who we are. There’s not one country that isn’t constructed on blood and garbage.
– Javier Cercas

Listening at Night
the Frog’s Song
is Lonely, isn’t it?

– mozu

Throughout my whole life,
during every minute of it
the world has been gradually
lighting up and blazing before my eyes
until it has come to surround me,
entirely lit up from within.
– Teilhard de Chardin

As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.
– Haruki Murakami

I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes.
– Ocean Vuong

Don’t shove me into your pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

You see that? That’s where I was born. You know, one day, when I was a little boy, my mother she took me on her knee and she said: ‘Gaston, my son. The world is a beautiful place. You must go into it, and love everyone, not hate people. You must try and make everyone happy, and bring peace and contentment everywhere you go.’ And so… I became a waiter…
– Monty Python, The Meaning of Life

I’m trying to live in a world of the spirit wherein I am concentrating on things such as the golden rule. This is my big thing; I am trying to live by it. The main thing is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Sure, everybody knows it, but nobody lives by it. We live in a world where it’s about “I’ve gotta get mine, and—too bad for you—I’ve gotta get mine first.”
It’s not about your music—it’s about what makes your music your music. You’ve got to have a feeling like that. You have to have a reason for your music. Have something besides the technical. Make it for something. Make it for kindness, make it for peace, whatever it is. You know what I mean?
– Sonny Rollins

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
– Hannah Arendt

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

And these poor nerves so wired to the skull
Ache on the lovelorn paper
I hug to love with my unruly scrawl
That utters all love hunger
And tells the page the empty ill.
– Dylan Thomas

farmers’ market
the crisp snap
of a paper sack

– Laurie Greer

A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires, tragedies, & comedies that shine a clean light into dingy corners of the human psyche & society.
– Robert McKee

To share the surgeon’s belief in healing,
you must trust what has been taken from you
is a blessing. Trust

– Alison Funk, On Pruning

Nothing could rouse her then

from that joy so violent

it was hard to distinguish from pain.

– Jane Kenyon

If the old world is not landing like it used to, fitting like it used to, exciting you like it used to, congratulations. You are here to live out the new.
– Nika Solé

and the hermit always wanting to be lone is lone at last.
– Frank O’Hara

Poetry is having nothing to say and saying it: we possess nothing.
– John Cage

Sometimes we look at a problem from the wrong angle. If your wife locks you out of the house, you don’t have a problem with your door.
– Anne Lamott

A Power Greater Than Oneself

First there is a yak. This is not an origin story; nothing comes after the yak; there is only the yak. The yak turns around & walks & turns around & walks, back & forth through the nothing else, & in what might be called circles were there circles, but only there is the yak. There is not the snow dusting the yak’s shoulders & horns. There is not the buttery moon melting over the pumpernickel night. The yak looks: nothing. The yak listens: nothing. But the yak is not lonely. Loneliness is a comparison & there is nothing with which to compare. There was the yak & now there is the yak, each as the other was & is. There will not be a small bird introduced, a small green bird who sits on the yak’s horns & eats the bugs that gather to drink from the yak’s lake-y eyes, for there are no bugs at the yak’s lake-y eyes, & the yak’s eyes are not lake-y, as no lakes. There is only the yak who though traveling great distances appears to be moving in place. & when the yak sleeps, it dreams of the yak. & when the dream-yak dreams, it dreams of the yak who dreams it. Everything begins & ends in the yak, even the yak, who cannot remember beginning, but if the yak did begin, it would have been on account of the yak, & should the yak end, it will be on account of the yak, of some whim of the yak— but for now, there is no such yak-whim. There is only the certainty of yak in what must be space in what must be time, but have here no names, have here only the operation of providing a distinction between yak & not-yak. For the not-yak is endless & frightening. For the not-yak is beyond comprehension. & so the yak does not attempt to comprehend the not-yak. & the not-yak does not attempt to comprehend the yak. They are simply together, held in place by something else, the only other thing that is, which is not the yak & not the not-yak, but a not that can’t be named, because it’s not nothing, & it’s not not nothing, & it loves the yak very much, as evidenced by this fact: the yak will never wonder if it is or is not there.

– Jeremy Radin

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

– Jane Kenyon

America has never known
a more dangerous time.
– Andy Perrin

The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.
– Voltaire

There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

– Robert Hass, Meditation at Lagunitas

i liked artificial intelligence when it was just a thought experiment.
– Jonathan Fine

So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping
our mouths shut? as if we’d been pierced by a glance!
– Frank O’Hara

The imperial piano, its 89th, 90th, 91st strings unsummoned, unwoken.

– Jane Hirshfield

The only freedom we’ve got is not to react to anything, but to turn within and know the truth.
– Robert Adams

the marrow of
democracy
is truth

but here
it flows green
and gilded greed

– Andy Perrin

Tolstoy, a ruthless judge of others, fell and stayed in love with Chekhov, and so do most of us.
– Harold Bloom

Meditate not to fix yourself, improve yourself, or become someone else. Meditate to meet yourself—right here, as you are, without needing to change a thing.
– @tinybuddha

“Oology” is too a word,
– Alicia E. Stallings

In the lovely city are the souls of the discarded. What time is it?
– Alice Notley

A hidden self rebels, its slumber broken;
Love, secret as crystal, forms in the spirit’s womb;
The heart as faithfully beats, its vow unspoken;
All things to silence come.
– Walter de la Mare

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.
– William Shakespeare

Mindfulness is not a selfish practice—it’s about being rawly, freshly present with whatever is happening.
– Deborah David

What if I told you that taking a 30 minute walk outside in nature without your phone will do more for your mental health than a drug ever could?
– Dan Go

Natural healing is about trusting the wisdom of your body to restore balance when given the right tools and environment.
– Aviva Romm

i like to think of myself as a barnacle on the side of academia
– Jonathan Fine

Buy poetry.

– Katie Dozier

Things get broken, and sometimes
they get repaired, and in most cases,
you realize that no matter what
gets damaged, life rearranges itself
to compensate for your loss,
sometimes wonderfully.

– Hanya Yanagihara

I think that’s what people say—it was a bad trip; it was heavy. I think I can safely say it changed my life.

– William Wei

Naming
by Julia Kolchinsky

For the first month of life, I was
unnamed. To my Mama, my body belonged
to one name, and to my Babushka, another, so

they called me Lyalya, Lyalichka, little
doll, baby, because neither would bend
their letters and though I was already known

to scream, to refuse sleep and strangers,
they couldn’t have known then how,
silently, I’d keep screaming, keep refusing

any name they’d give me, how in my mouth,
it wouldn’t feel like mine, and on the tongues
of others, even less like I belonged.

My mother imagined me maiden, Alyonushka,
who saves in every fairytale, saves her brother
when he is stolen by Baba Yaga’s wicked swan-geese

and turns him back into a boy when he becomes
a goatling. Alyonushka, who stays silent
for seven years, sewing twelve sweaters

out of nettles, fingers raw, skinned, only
to run out of time on the final sleeve, so her youngest
brother must wear a wing instead of an arm, reminding her

she’s failed. And in the painting, Alyonushka,
keeps her eyes cast down on water, her feet
bare and untouched against coarse stone, she is

meek and docile, alone, she would never leave
or disobey her mother, so eventually, mine
admitted this name could not belong to me.

A month before my birth, Dedushka Yuzya
died, some sudden spell Soviet doctors
connected to his heart because they only knew

it stopped, and in our people’s way of wearing
our dead, of carrying them along the gumline,
Babushka named me Yulya, because its sound

was closest to her love, because two syllables
are an easier loss to bear, because
like all our matriarchs, she wanted me named

for a man none of us could save. How could they
know such naming would curse us to a life worse
than a single wing? What if I’d stayed, Lyalya,

from speech and voice, stayed screaming,
how many more of us could have been
saved? How many would have stayed

swan, refusing to give up the sky.

How could I have been living under the illusion that I was the one in touch with nature, with human nature, when in fact I was just messing around with signs and abstractions?
– Karl Ove Knausgaard

Except when one is in the sleep state, the effort to meditate should continue always. Just like the river which is flowing constantly towards the sea, our awareness should flow without a break. We should not have this concept that we should meditate at certain times. The meditation on the Self (Atman) should continue while walking, working, eating, etc. It should be naturally flowing in all places at all times.
– Ramana Maharshi

It’s a compulsive need to wreck everything. You might notice there’s a pattern of stripping down and building back up again throughout my life. I guess that’s how some of us conduct our lives.
– David Bowie

America cannot long remain free, nor first among nations, if it becomes the kind of place where universities are dismantled because they don’t align politically with the current head of the government.
– Pete Buttigieg

Instability is the death knell for economic prosperity.
– Andy Perrin

There is a time for reciting poems
and a time for fists.
– Roberto Bolaño

and if I look at her again I may never look away
because how can someone as myopic as I am turn away
from introspection disguised as a stranger?

– Eric Sirota, The Rent Eats First

One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.
– Frank O’Hara

The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask.
– Alan Watts

The Buddha can inhabit this body.

The Buddha can inhabit this mouth.

The Buddha can inhabit this mind.

– Kenneth Folk

I am in the unfortunate position that I can listen to a writer for hours making the most beautiful and needed philosophical and artistic statements but let them express one single political opinion and its complete banality crushes my interest in their work.
– Bernard T. Joy

Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.
– Michel Houellebecq

little prayer

let ruin end here
let him find honey
where there was once a slaughter
let him enter the lion’s cage
& find a field of lilacs
let this be the healing
& if not let it be

– Danez Smith

All of us who lived on Earth
and all our loves and wars
may not appear at all
in the moon’s memoirs.
– Bill Knott

Your soul . . . is yours to consult. … It will provide all the tools that you need to produce magical results in your life, but only if you let it take priority and truly guide your material life. …
– Dr. Wayne Dyer

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the silent treatment isn’t teaching them a lesson. It’s teaching them you can’t handle conflict.
– Nedra Tawwab

Back before the Internet, we thought the reason for human stupidity was the lack of information options.

I’ll put it this way: That wasn’t it.

– Andrea Junker

I’m not so interested in revelation for revelation’s sake, but revelation coupled with a devotion to form and writing, used to harvest something really deep from inside.
– Sasha Weiss

Oh, must we dream our dreams / and have them, too?

– Elizabeth Bishop

I am flowing again—I have lost my fears, my anguishes. I have multiple desires,
curiosities, interests. I can be everywhere.
– Anaïs Nin

Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us… We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops.
– Maya Angelou

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
– Susan Sontag

Relationship is both the path and the destination.
And in true reality, there’s no split between them.
– Marc Gafni

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.
– Niels Bohr

A song ain’t nothing but a conversation fixed up to where you can talk it over and over without getting tired of it. And it’s this repeating the idea over and over that makes it take ahold. If the conversation is about good crops or bad, good politics or bad, good news or bad, good anything else or bad, the best way to circulate it amongst the people is by way of singing it.
– Woody Guthrie

You are not who you thought you were.

Enjoy the spinning swirl of perspectives.

Rest in the heart and all will become clear.

– @VinceFHorn

The easiest way to improve your health most people aren’t doing is drinking more water.
– Dan Go

In trading the pleasures of an ordinary life for a meditative life, you’re trading candy for gold.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Luck? Nah.

This is devotion. This is consistency. This is willingness. This is determination. This is loyalty. This is a promise to God to not leave this earth without maximizing every single gift I’ve been given.

– Nika Solé

Poetry is a sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.
– Carl Sandburg

On the fringes of conversations
surging around me in a different language,
my tongue is frozen in English.
Silence funnels into my body
I reach for words I recognize—
‘kitap’ book, ‘café,’ brand names.

– Pramila Venkateswaran

Because the world is not going anywhere there is no hurry. One may as well “take it easy” like nature itself, and in the Chinese language the “changes” of nature and “ease” are the same word.
– Alan Watts

She had a cultivated mind, and was, generally speaking, rational and consistent.
– Jane Austen

the sunset bell
was not heard
spring evening

– Basho

As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him…
– C.S. Lewis

If someone is vexing you right now, say a prayer for that person. Send them all of your best energies. Nothing changes the environment like one person deciding to love another, no matter what.
– Neale Donald Walsch

It’s hard to sincerely occupy feelings that are fully oppositional to yours—to be able to look at yourself from that other position and think, What a twit!
– Mary Gaitskill

Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.
– Søren Kierkegaard

What a difference a day makes. The fine weather has ended in a splurge of water colours. And a rumble of thunder.

Vies across Red River Croft and the sea to Skye.

– Annie O’Garra Worsley

But once in a while the odd thing happens, Once in a while the dream comes true, And the whole pattern of life is altered, Once in a while
the moon turns blue.
– W.H. Auden

How could America ever love you?

– Jalen Eutsey, Bubble Gum Stadium

Tell me/you haven’t wanted to stifle what hovers/dumb before your heart?
– Vievee Francis

Money can only make your surroundings pleasant. It cannot create inner pleasantness.
– Sadhguru

Spiritual practice is about inhabiting life in a full-hearted, undivided way.
– Diane Musho Hamilton

From the universal perspective we don’t have to see through anything because we’re the seeing through.
– @VinceFHorn

The moon and sun are travelers through eternity.
– Bashō (translated by Sam Hamill)

Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
– C.S. Lewis

Die before you die. There is no chance after.
– C.S. Lewis

We have no choice, we must all die. How we live, however, is entirely of our choosing.
– Simon Sinek

Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. It is your window on time’s infinity. Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.
– Joseph Brodsky

If You Took the Sistine Chapel

and wiped blank
Michelangelo’s sibyls and saints,
the great, outstretched
hand of God, the spark
of life, Adam and all
his progeny, and the angels
of the heavenly host;
if you plastered over
the little window
that the cardinals who gather
from every nation
send white smoke through
when they have chosen
the new pope;
and then if you expelled
the whole hive of drifting,
gaping, sweating tourists
and their guides
babbling Dutch, Italian,
Japanese, French, and German
under lofted pom-poms,
bowler hats, and stuffed toy kittens;
and swept away the robed man
who appears every five minutes
to shout “Silenzio!”
it would look and smell
remarkably like
the Fellowship Hall
of the First Methodist Church,
Maywood, California,
built in 1928.

– John Nimmo

The hour trembling at the root of tangled time

– Paul Éluard (translated by Nancy Kline)

In my experience, there is great relief that can be experienced when we examine and drop our narrow, tightly held judgments about right and wrong.
– Tara Anand

It seems to me that love should not make all else disappear but should simply tint it with new nuances; I would like a love that accompanies me through life, not that absorbs all my life.
– Simone de Beauvoir

We’re not just embedded in nature — we are nature.
– Annaka Harris

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.
– Max Eastman

A moment more, her task is done,
And sealed the letter lies;
And now, towards the setting sun
She turns her tearful eyes
– Charlotte Bronte

Despair is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality—it is a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it.
– Philip Slater

The main affliction of civilization is that we don’t know how to handle suffering inside and so we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh

There is none of us whom life regards with any partiality. Sleet falls as she walks these streets, holding this knowledge inside her. Sleet that leaves cheeks and eyebrows heavy with moisture. Everything passes.
– Han Kang

As Jung said, “Thank God for our neuroses!” It is thanks to them that we learn to confront ourselves and are forced, frequently through exasperating circumstances, to grow.
– Alice O. Howell

I don’t want an AI-assisted experience, I want old-growth forests.
– @atmos

“Life without a design is erratic,” Seneca wrote. We must create order. We must design routines and systems. When we do, chaos, uncertainty, disorder, complacency, and confusion is boxed out—by the order and clarity you built.

One never says a quarter of what one knows. Otherwise, all would collapse. How little one says, and they are already screaming.
– Albert Camus

Breath and emotion are linked. When you are shocked, your breathing changes. When you are full of rage or passion of any kind, your breathing changes. When you are at rest, your breathing changes. So, the goal here is to make your breathing regular, to calm the mind.
– Joseph Campbell

The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, ‘Seek simplicity and distrust it.’
– Alfred North Whitehead

She is a wild, tangled forest with temples and treasures concealed within.
– John Mark Green

War’s tragedy is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick

Your spirit is mingled with mine, as wine is mixed with water; Whatever touches you touches me. In all the stations of the soul you are I.
– Mansur Al-Hallaj

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for, and I hate very much to leave it.
– Ernest Hemingway

Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world.
– Francis Bacon

Do not run after the one who tries to avoid you.
– Imam Ali

It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.
– Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

The real safe place is within us. Our awareness, kindness and compassion and wisdom are the real safe place – and that is with us all the time, this innate wellbeing. We just need to discover it.
– H.E. Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.
– Voltaire

The street was small and what is called quiet, but it drove a thriving trade on the week-days.
– Robert Louis Stevenson

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers.
– Gilbert K. Chesterton

Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality by which you invite strangers to become friends.
– Henri Nouwen

The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.
– Shirley MacLaine

I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me.
– June Jordan

A friend may be waiting behind a stranger’s face.
– Maya Angelou

Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger, he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.
– Germaine Greer

Humanity’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.
– Walter Benjamin

In science, if you don’t do it, somebody else will. Whereas in art, if Beethoven didn’t compose the ‘Ninth Symphony,’ no one else before or after is going to compose the ‘Ninth Symphony’ that he composed; no one else is going to paint ‘Starry Night’ by van Gogh.

– Neil deGrasse Tyson

One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
– Tom Wolfe

the lonely find love everywhere
and often it is not love
– Warsan Shire

Close some doors today. Not because of pride, incapacity, or arrogance, but simply because they lead you nowhere.
– Paulo Coelho

I wish poets had special rings we could wear and whenever three or more of us were gathered together in the same place we could put our hands in the middle and our rings would combine to project a giant super poet like Lorca and the sky would turn dark and the wind would pick up, carrying the scent of rain over dry ground, and every face would turn upward with no idea why.
– Justin Hamm

Rulers’ speeches became somewhat chaotic,
they even gibbered,
but still,
when did we ever really listen?
Music was better…

– Adam Zagajewski

One day
this joy too
will be unbearable.

– Ashok Vajpayi

A little science estranges a man from God. A lot of science brings him back.
– Louise Pasteur

I do not treasure God’s promise in my understanding but in my heart. It is not to be analyzed by my intellect, but to be pondered in my heart… If I have God’s Word only in my mind, then my mind will often be busy with other things and I will sin against God.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.
– Michael Chabon

The enemy of my enemy is Harvard.
– Andy Borowitz

Trump hates Harvard because they don’t sell diplomas.
– John Socci

In every disaster throughout American history, there always seems to be a man from Harvard in the middle of it.
– Thomas Sowell

I’d rather be ashes with integrity than gold on a leash.
– Lilith

In human society, in the same way, too much wealth or too much poverty is a great impediment to the higher development of the soul. It is from the middle classes that the great ones of the world come. Here the forces are very equally adjusted and balanced.
– Swami Vivekananda

Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.
– Joseph Brodsky

… the passions of a revolution are apt to hurry even good men into excesses.
– Alexander Hamilton

Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.
– Peter Lynch

I outgrew the pain, but not the poetry it taught me.
– O. B. Dainhurst Valtieri

Writing remains the best route we know toward clarity of thought and feeling,
– Kevin Larimer

Solitude is where I place my chaos to rest, and awaken my inner peace.
– Nikki Rowe

You can’t stay well without telling — and living — the truth.
– Martha Beck

I’m just interested in people on the edges. I feel an affinity for people who haven’t had the best breaks in society. What I want to do more than anything is acknowledge their existence.
– Mary Ellen Mark

The most ordinary conversation
is often the most poetic,
and the most poetic is precisely
that which cannot be written down.
– Virginia Woolf

I don’t understand the concept of two sides and I think that probably there’s good on both sides, bad on both sides, and there’s a middle ground, but it never seems to come to the middle ground and it’s very frustrating watching it and seemingly we’re not moving forward.
– David Lynch

I believe curiosity can be a moral quality.

I believe imagining the other can be an antidote
to fanaticism.

– Amos Oz, The Woman in the Window

I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.
– Haruki Murakami

R.I.P., Alice Notley

Here are some quotes from the superb writer’s oeuvre:

“Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.”

“I think I try with my poems to create a beginning space. I always seem to be erasing and starting over, rather than picking up where I left off, even if I wind up taking up the same themes. This is probably one reason that I change form and style so much, out of a desire to find a new beginning, which is always the true beginning.”

“Well, there aren’t any borders. What people have been doing for the last couple million years has been creating these mental compartments so they won’t have dreams spilling over into regular life, that sort of thing. I have this experience where I dream at the same time that I’m awake. It’s really irritating. Everyone always says it must be wonderful but it isn’t, it’s terrible. There’s a whole part of civilization that’s dedicated itself to walling off certain parts of the psyche. That’s why we know nothing, we know nothing at all. All we know how to do is to make new machines. That is the death of us.”

“We’re all being this. What I’m making is a place for all of us to see that we’re all being this, that we’re all being this intense and light-filled existing. That we’re all poetry.”

“It’s about the odd points of connection in a life. There are times when you look back, and everything that was back there rushes up here. And poets can be engaged with that process. It’s part of what makes them poets. It’s something that happens inside poetic stress: you get to this point where it’s like this black hole, and then everything just comes in, past and future.”

“I think that when we die, we talk to one another and thereby hold the cosmos together. The only possible thing that’s holding everything together is communication […]. That’s all there is. And obviously you don’t disappear, because there’s nowhere to go. There’s no nothing to go to because there’s no nothing. And it’s obvious there’s no nothing. So we become communication.”

“The hardest place is the beginning. You never know how to begin.”

“I always think of poems as something to be performed. And I always think of how they’re going to sound. There wouldn’t be poetry without that. It’s utterly important. And people should read poetry aloud. Reading aloud is key. I read each poem aloud in my room after I’ve written it, and I often picture myself in a room performing it.”

“The tyrant is what enslaves us to our forms. The tyrant is the form of our life, the form of our politics, the form of our universities, the form of our knowledge, our thinking we know something. All of that is the tyrant.”

“Voice is everything.”

“And if I say I represent the dead, your head has to kind of turn, and you have to think about something besides poetics. Poetics! As if how people say poetry should be written is of any consequence at all or any importance. Critics create value. We don’t need any value, we need poetry.”

“As a poet you can talk to anyone you want to, and you can write down anything you want to. You don’t make any money, so it doesn’t matter what you say. You can give yourself great pleasure just speaking to whoever or whatever might exist. But also, you do rip yourself open if you go through the experiences I have, and you do stand on the chasm between life and death. There is communication, I am certain of this. I’ve also been ill and in my illness I’ve reached out further. The more defective you become the more you learn, the more you know, the more shamanic you’ll be.”

“Every election everyone turns into idiots, partisan idiots. All these very intelligent people I know become total partisans in the way they think. They lose a sense that there are all these other kinds of people in the United States who haven’t been represented at all in a while and may have some thoughts that are just as important as theirs.”

“I think words are what we have. I think there might be some other kind of language made up of something else, that we used to speak or that we’ll speak when we’re dead. I’m always working on what that might be.”

“A poem comes to exist somewhere between the mind and the vocal equipment, also with the hand or hands involved (sometimes I feel that my writing hand is speaking). Also between the poet and the poet’s audience (reader). But a poem is spoken, it has always been spoken since ancient times. It would be too easy to say that the words on the page stand in for what it is—that isn’t quite correct, but it doesn’t just exist on the page. It has to be said, and prose doesn’t, most bad poetry is acting like prose with linebreaks (or not). A poem is composed of vibrations jostling each other, auditory but also visual—those letters tremble too! And I certainly do. The point is probably that a poem isn’t verified until it’s read aloud, live. I can’t tell anything about it till this happens.”

“We’re in a situation where there are too many people, with diminishing resources, in a rather rapidly changing climate. Really, people are supposed to figure out what they need, and get rid of the rest—and they don’t need much. Though they do need art.”

“I think a poet has an alone place in their head, always, though it probably has to be maintained—if it’s lost, you probably stop writing. When you’re crowded, you mostly stay aware that it’s there and try to get to it as soon as you can. It’s the place, partly, from which you observe and listen, so you’ll have something to write later.”

“I prefer loneliness to alternatives I can envision.”

“The poet place I’m talking about—the mental space—is quite detached, and detachment is probably its most salient characteristic. It’s a deeper place than the reading place, and a different one from the one in which I talk with the dead. It’s the automatic, cold place you go to to write a poem. That’s the place you have to cultivate to keep writing.”

“I meditate a lot on whether language really is words, or whether language exists in an apartness from everything else, or what all our connectedness might really be.”

“Poetic language exposes what’s happening, if you’re true to it, the language, and the process through which you get it. But you don’t always understand a poem when you write it, not entirely.”

“I am persuaded that I am changing the world.”

“But I do truly believe that the cosmos, universe, whatever is there, is composed of communication—that is its basis. Everything communicates. Screens exist in order to obfuscate that fact and to try to make it easier to be nothing except part of a great machine with medieval aristocrats in charge. No one has any skills anymore, they don’t dare sing their own music, they have to listen to whatever they’re told the music is, sung by an expert.”

“[O]ur production of the world, our interpretation of it, what we’ve been told to experience and what we’ve been told we have to do, both bore and distress me. I don’t want to live in someone else’s dream.”

“Poetry has different tones of voice and vocabularies available to it and can even mix them. Environmental ruin is something we experience all the time now but as part of everything else we are doing and thinking; poetry is good at presenting inside and outside, mind and experience, imagination and outer circumstance at the same time. It can be dense and clear and forlorn and yet serene all at the same time.”

“There’s a now long tradition of nontradition: therefore nothing looks new to me. Though it might be. What’s really new when something’s new is a change of consciousness or sensibility in poetry, and that dictates novelty of form if a new form’s involved. It’s not so easy to change consciousness or that evident that there’s been a change. It comes from inside you the poet. In other words you have to listen for the poem demanding to be written, to the exclusion of what your friends might say should be written, or the school or group you seem to be associated with, or whatever theory of novelty or shouldness—’you should write like this!’—is being passed around.”

“The poet serves poetry, not society, which is a group fantasy. Poetry does make for change, but it does it by being rather singular. It is involved in the creation of reality out of tiny sounds and meanings, sort of like particle physics but on the creation level. I know this sounds highfalutin, but I believe it.”

“People think you’re only supposed to heal good people, but actually you’re supposed to heal everyone. There are no sides in the healing. […] No one’s excluded. It’s a very hard place for people to go because everybody’s on a side. But things have to heal on both sides for anything to happen, really.”

“Poems, a lot of the time, are supposedly not made up . . . but they’re all made up. Everything’s invented. The notion of concreteness is therefore very slippery. I’ve always wanted there to be something to see, and poetry is about the tangible and what you can hear. It’s about the form, it’s about voices, and it generally is about telling things. We tell each other things, and so I allow a lot of voices in my poems. I can’t seem to keep them out. I consider them to be concrete entities. At this point, when I write a poem, it seems like a community of voices. My voice is perhaps overpowering, but I don’t know what my voice is. So then other voices come in and I try to let them speak, but I don’t always know where they come from. I make them up. Sometimes they’re people on the street, and sometimes they’re people I know. But that’s concrete. Voices are concrete.”

“We have to choose something. We have to choose something to be in the new universe. So anyone gets to paste on something. And there’s a continuous choosing all the time that the poem’s going on. […] Everything’s also evanescent, transitory, and what’s left is a sense of each other’s presences. And that’s not pasted on. I mean, we’re really there. We’re really here. We’re real. So there’s something behind all that. A real form of us inside us that isn’t always picked up on by the outer world. The most concrete part of us is invisible.”

“Nobody understands what thinking is. When we think, what goes on in the mind is completely unexplained. I’ve never read a proper explanation of it. There’s a mental space and there are many things that happen inside of it. Some of the things that happen inside of it involve thinking in words, but mostly we don’t think in words. If you try hard, you can think in words. When people are writing, like, papers, they think in words. But most of the time they don’t think in words.”

“Poetry remakes the future.”

“If you’re writing poetry, you’re not doing anything bad. You’re just sitting by yourself writing something that is likely not to be published or to affect anyone. So, it’s a good thing. Something is happening where we are constantly deprived of the ability to be alone and get space around ourselves. I think that’s one of the things we should all be demanding.”

– John Madera

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts…it is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.
– Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts

Based on my experience of life, which I have not exactly hit out of the park, I tend to agree with that thing about, If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. And would go even further, to: Even if it is broke, leave it alone, you’ll probably make it worse.
– George Saunders

We declare that the world is not a mosaic, where a plurality of worlds which are essentially strangers to one another are fitted together, but that it is an organism—all of whose parts are governed by the same principle, revealing it and allowing reduction to it.
– Anonymous

The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.
– Annie Dillard

The one thing on the planet most closely resembling the forgoing conception of the divine is money. It is an invisible, immortal force that surrounds and steers all things, omnipotent and limitless, an “invisible hand” that, it is said, makes the world go ‘round. Yet, money today is an abstraction, at most symbols on a piece of paper but usually mere bits in a computer. It exists in a realm far removed from materiality. In that realm, it is exempt from nature’s most important laws, for it does not decay and return to the soil as all other things do, but is rather preserved, changeless, in its vaults and computer files, even growing with time thanks to interest. It bears the properties of eternal preservation and everlasting increase, both of which are profoundly unnatural.

Money proved to be a capricious god. As I write these words, it seems that the increasingly frantic rituals that the financial priesthood uses to placate the god Money are in vain. Like the clergy of a dying religion, they exhort their followers to greater sacrifices while blaming their misfortunes either on sin (greedy bankers, irresponsible consumers) or on the mysterious whims of God (the financial markets). What we call recession, an earlier culture might have called ‘God abandoning the world.’

– Charles Eisenstein

Tolkein wrote: “I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “escape” is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or, if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about the other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”

I was, in a sense, wanting to escape a religious belief that said I shouldn’t be ill, I couldn’t be gay and I couldn’t go on. And so, in a monastery, surrounded by rules, silence, and four-part harmonies, I was finding myself in some kind of prison. I did what made most sense at the time: I turned to myth. Myth is, after all, what is more than true.

My favorite poem from David Wagoner is “Lost” :

Stand still, the trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called
Here And you must treat it as a powerful stranger.

The truth of this poem is an old truth. There are the places you wish to go, there are the places you desperately wish you never left, there are the places you imagine you should be, and there is the place called here. In the world of Wagoner’s poem, it is the rooted things – trees and bushes – that tell the truth to the person who is lost, the person with legs and fear who wishes to be elsewhere. The person must stand still, feel their body on the ground where they are, in order to learn the wisdom.

This is not easy wisdom, it is frightening wisdom.
In Irish, there is a phrase ar eagla na heaglab that translates as “for fear of fear.” It is true that there are some things that we fear, but that there is, even deeper, a fear of fear. So we are prevented from being here not only by being frightened of certain places but by the fear of being frightened of certain places. So “stand still” the poet advises. Learn from the things that are already in the place where you wish you were not.

Hello to the fear of fear
Hello to here ..

– Pádraig Ó Tuama

These words are for the sake of those who need words to understand. But as for those who understand without words, what use have they for speech? The heavens and earth are words to them, sent forth themselves from the Word of God. Whoever hears a whisper, what need have they for shouting and screaming?
– Rumi

Be not the slave of your own past – plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us
And urge us on to futile activity
And in the end, judge us still more severely
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?
– T. S. Eliot

You can be sad and clean and pure, if you go far enough inside yourself you are against yourself, or under yourself, like the Metro, the train cars tunneling life under life.
– Gillian Cummings

he had offered some of his own background. A youth in the South. An education in the North. Bred for life in the East. Trying not to die in the West.
– Mary Doria Russell

I talked about places, about the ways that we often talk about love of place, by which we mean our love for places, but seldom of how the places love us back, of what they give us. They give us community, something to return to, and offer a familiarity that allows some portion of our own lives to remain connected and coherent. The give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a balm to loss, trouble, and ugliness. And distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren’t so deeply entrenched and we can imagine other stories, other selves, or just drink up quiet and respite.
– Rebecca Solnit

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.
– Stephen King

MOST THIS AMAZING DAY

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any – lifted from the no
of all nothing – human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

– e. e. cummings

Now You Know The Worst
by Wendell Berry

When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.

You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you will have the courage for love,
you may walk in light. It will be
the light of those who have suffered
for peace. It will be
your light.

After the Fact

The people of my time are passing away: my
Wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year old who

Died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it’s
Ruth we care so much about in intensive care:

It was once weddings that came so thick and
Fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo:

Now, it’s this and that and the other and somebody
Else gone or on the brink: well, we never

Thought we would live forever (although we did)
And now it looks like we won’t: some of us

Are losing a leg to diabetes, some don’t know
What they went downstairs for, some know that

A hired watchful person is around, some like
To touch the cane tip into something steady,

So nice: we have already lost so many,
Brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves: our

Address books for so long a slow scramble now
Are palimpsests, scribbles and scratches: our

Index cards for Christmases, birthdays,
Halloweens drop clean away into sympathies:

At the same time we are getting used to so
Many leaving, we are hanging on with a grip

To the ones left: we are not giving up on the
Congestive heart failures or brain tumors, on

The nice old men left in empty houses or on
The widows who decided to travel a lot: we

Think the sun may shine someday when we’ll
Drink wine together and think of what used to

Be: until we die we will remember every
Single thing, recall every word, love every

Loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to
Others to love, love that can grow brighter

And deeper till the very end, gaining strength
And getting more precious all the way….

– A. R. Ammons

…the silence swooped down once more and tightened…but this time it was a different kind of silence. An old river silence.
– Arundhati Roy

We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God.
– Annie Dillard

…did you ever long for what seemed like the power of wind and water as they made their fleeting prowess known by moving things and then by moving on?
– Margaret B. Ingraham, What the Mountain Knows

There’s nothing so enchanting as a glimpse of the innumerable mysteries that surround us.
– Vítězslav Nezval

The Church must become a holy disruption, not a chaplain to the status
quo.
– Otis Moss III

I am rain and belong to no one.
– Marguerite Duras, No More

Pain is important:
how we evade it,
how we succumb to it,
how we deal with it,
how we transcend it.
– Audre Lorde

It’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.
– Clarice Lispector

I said to myself, ‘I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me…shapes and ideas so near to me…so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.’ I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.
– Georgia O’Keeffe

Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes…
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

– Ursula K. Le Guin

I’m not interested in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I’m not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don’t want the earth, if that’s where all the bodies are buried.

– Patricia Lockwood

It is up to all of us to fix this. It’s not going to be because somebody comes and saves you. The most important office in this democracy is the citizen— the ordinary person who says, no, that’s not right.

– Barack Obama

In English, we say,
“Can I be a child again?

But in poetry, we say,
“Take me back to days so bright,
When laughter danced from morning to night,
When dreams stood tall without the tears,
And hope was louder than my fears.”

– English Literature

Whoever cannot be mobilized when freedom is threatened will not be mobilized at all.
– Hannah Arendt

Nothing
substance utters or time
stills and restrains
joins design and

supple measure deftly
as thought’s intricate polyphonic
score dovetails with the tread
sensuous things
keep in our consciousness.

– Basil Bunting

It is hard to remember that when you are young and have lived only a few years in a place, but the truth is that the places where you were happiest are not always the places where you belong.
– Joan Didion

You’ll ache. And you’re going to love it. It will crush you. And you’re still going to love all of it. Doesn’t it sound lovely beyond belief?
– Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend…
– Faramir (Tolkien, The Two Towers)

Night and day are essential; both give life, energy, to all living things. Only man dissipates it.
– Krishnamurti

The Mermaid
by Mark Jarman

At Avenue C below the lifeguard tower,
That silver body of the coiled bonita

Flowed with her silver hair, bonita,
My catch in whose green eyes I saw my face.

In the surfcaster’s bucket I saw my face
And hers drawn by the line out of the water,

We were both living creatures from the water,
Half-human and half-human on one shore.

But which of us was welcome on that shore
Of recognition? Our soles painted with tar,

Barred at the threshold till we cleaned the tar
From our bare feet, we both came home.

She gave me a new word to say for home
At Avenue C below the lifeguard tower.

Your cure is of yourself, and yet you’re unaware. Your malady’s of yourself, and yet you know it not. The whole world’s held within you, and still you claim you’re just a jot?
– Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī

Presence is not a given; it is made and remade, a construction you wear like a coat, sometimes perfectly fitting, sometimes awkward and heavy, but always your own.
– Joan Didion

Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.
– Rebecca Solnit

It takes

seven seconds
for a petal to drop

Seven years
for us to mourn

– Shangyang Fang

Westport, 2006

I went away because I was blue,
but told friends it was an adventure,
that I’d write a book.
I house-sat near a sick sea
in a small gray town
and saw no one for a time.

8 months of no one
is hard, like eating less food
or losing day after day
to nothing but loss-

unending chains of loss, a
terrifying stillness where
nothing ever happens.

Nothing except this hole blown in my chest
by long sadness.

Nothing except for that.

– Robert Allen

For any in need of a stern reminder:

“War is a grim hard ugly business.”

– Tolkien

Not wanting something is as good as having it.
– Naval Ravikant

Your family is broken but you’re gonna fix the world.

It defies credibility if you can’t fix your own life first. I’m not gonna take you seriously if you can’t fix your own life.

– Naval Ravikant

Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.
– Alan Watts

while the sun of the Orient rolls calmly not getting through to him
not caring particularly because the light in Japan respects poets
– Frank O’Hara

To the Sun

Come back
so I
can forgive you.

– Andrea Cohen

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.

Isaiah answer’d, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and as I was then persuaded, & remain confirm’d; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.

– William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

When I close my eyes for a second, it’s as if I were being interrogated by the secret police of a very small country.
– John Herschel

When either way may lead to evil, of what worth is choice?
– Meneldur (Tolkien, Unfinished Tales)

Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value.

– Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

Passage
by Victoria Chang

Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place —
someone’s hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isn’t that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?

Intensely held beliefs may be no more than a person’s unconscious effort to build a sense of self to fill what, underneath, is experienced as a vacuum.
– Gabor Maté

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

– Anthony Doerr

The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop.

– Philip Roth

I decided to…try to give the others and myself, one last time, the illusion that I am, until its very end, the master of my life.

– Gaspard Ulliel

A novel should reflect its society and its circumstances.
– Penelope Lively

We shouldn’t make a division in our meditation between perception and field of perception. We shouldn’t become like a cat watching a mouse. We should realize that the purpose of meditation is not to go “deeply into ourselves” or withdraw from the world. Practice should be free and non-conceptual, unconstrained by introspection and concentration.
– Chogyam Trungpa

the nation, like the sun,
flares up, rears back,
strikes—

– Daniel Elias Galicia

Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
– Zadie Smith, On Beauty

Pull the heart of your work out of your chest and lay it out there for the gods, that’s all I’m asking of you.
– Sam Freedman

Finally admitting yourself lost
In this jungle among even the smallest
Participants in the play. It’s at first staggering.
Where only moments ago…you were enormous.
A force for belief and of logic.
Now you’re stuck between what you think,
And who you feel yourself to be.

So listen past what you are certain of…
Beyond the scope of fragile desires.
Can you hear the singing through the trees?
Get smaller…find your true voice…
It may sound like the singing
Of your own children, welcoming you back home
At the end of a journey. Embraced again.

Playing amongst the tender shoots of imagination.
Weaving a path through the thundering footfalls of foraging sheep.
Leaping! stone to stone…star to star!
And when soft grass breaks through stern rock
The silent cheers are deafening.

– Hawk Durham

(…) In the firmament that we observe at night, the stars shine brightly, surrounded by a thick darkness. Since the number of galaxies and luminous bodies in the universe is almost infinite, the darkness that we see in the sky is something that, according to scientists, demands an explanation. It is precisely the explanation that contemporary astrophysics gives for this darkness that I would now like to discuss. In an expanding universe, the most remote galaxies move away from us at a speed so great that their light is never able to reach us. What we perceive as the darkness of the heavens is this light that, though traveling toward us, cannot reach us, since the galaxies from which the light originates move away from us at a velocity greater than the speed of light. To perceive, in the darkness of the present, this light that strives to reach us but cannot – this is what it means to be contemporary. As such, contemporaries are rare. And for this reason, be contemporary is, first and foremost, a question of courage, because it means being able not only to firmly fix your gaze on the darkness of the epoch, but also to perceive in this darkness a light that, while directed toward us, infinitely distances itself from us. In other words, it is like being on time for an appointment that one cannot but miss. (…)
– Giorgio Agamben

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
– Gaston Bachelard

When you embark on a journey, you have already arrived. The world you are going to is already in your head. You have already walked in it; eaten in it; you have already made friends; a lover is already waiting.
– Dionne Brand

Small Shoes

If there are fewer stars now
than when I was a child,

I can’t say
which are missing,
who was the last to see them.

Is it not a crime
unless we call it a crime?

It is difficult to document
a disappearance,
a boat full of stars

capsized.
Stars lying in the sand

face-down,
wearing small shoes.
Add that to the report:

some of the stars washed up
in small shoes.

– Maggie Smith

The worst thing that can happen to words is that they go unsaid. Let them sing in your ears and dance in your mouth and ache in your guts. Let them make everything tighten and shine.
– Kate Tempest

We may know the anatomy of the body down to the anatomy of atoms, and yet we love and instruct our children as whole persons. And we accept an obligation to help them to preserve their wholeness, which is to say their health. This is not an obligation that we can safely transfer to the subdivided and anatomizing medical industry, not even for the sake of cures. Cures, to industrial medicine, are marketable products extractable from bodies. To cure in this sense is not to heal. To heal is to make whole, and is not so ideologically definable or so technologically possible or so handily billable.
– Wendell Berry

At times memory insists so strongly it torments us, as around some ecstasy denied. And from time to time, with cruel, angelic obstinacy, a recurring dream presents it to us all at once: the walled garden we seek weeping at its gate, the house deserted or destroyed, the invisible water that might speak to us, like the river Scamander, if only we could plunge our hand into it. . . .

For others it may be elusive music, or a voice behind a series of doors, or a perfect word, or language that is erased in the act of putting it down on paper. We wake from such dreams in a desolation fiercer than rapture. The belief that, when we realize we are dreaming, the thread of our dream is broken, is untrue. Consciousness can hold on for a long time and lead the dream by the hand, the way a child leads an adult who can perhaps open the latch of a gate too high for him.

– Cristina Campo

The merrel also knew its wing had not healed. But I could reach a great height once more before it failed me, it said. And from there I would fold my wings and plummet to the earth as if a hare or a fawn had caught my eye; but it would be myself I stooped toward. It would be a good flight and a good death. And so I eat their dead things cut up on a pole, dreaming of my last flight.
– Robin McKinley

Mysticism is a way of describing an existential ecstasy that is outside and more than the conscious self. It is about releasement and detachment, what it might mean to lead a released existence, a fluid openness, a cleared looseness, a limpid intensity, where both the concepts of mind and world or the soul and God dissolve into something altogether stranger and yet simpler: an experience of freedom which is not freedom of the will, but freedom from the will.
– Simon Critchley, Mysticism

the cultivation of practices which allow you to free yourself of your standard habits, your usual fancies and imaginings and see what is there and stand with what is there ecstatically.
– Simon Critchley, Mysticism

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work. It means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”
– Adrienne Rich, Claiming an Education

The heavens opened for the sunset tonight. When I had thought the day folded and sealed, came a burst of heavenly bright petals. I sat behind the window, pricked with rain, and looked until that hard thing in my breast melted and broke into the smallest fountain, murmuring as aforetime, and I drank the sky and the whisper.
– Katherine Mansfield

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. My problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
– Ralph Ellison

It just doesn’t make sense anymore to have these ideas about “me” and “mine” and the terrible burden that has been created by so-called advanced nations about the primacy of ownership, the ownership of food. Or, you know, the terrifying thing in the United States, this idea that nothing is exempt from the application of a kind of economics that’s meant for profit. I mean, how can you make the care of another, the professional care of another person’s body, be informed by a profit motive? Even a fifth-grade kid can see there is something that doesn’t really add up here.
– Barry Lopez

I have watched the artists
rotting in their chairs
while the tourists took pictures
of an old iron railing not yet made
into guns

I have seen you, New Orleans,
I have seen you, New York,
Miami, Philly, Frisco, St. Louie,
L.A., Dago, Houston, and
most of the rest. I have
seen nothing, your best men are
drunks and your worst men are
locking them
up,
your best men are killers and
your worst men are
selling them
bullets

– Bukowski

Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.
– Eckhart Tolle

. . . the Absolute corresponds from world to world by its forms. Every determination of human will modifies Nature . . .

– Éliphas Lévi (translated by A. E. Waite)

O Moon, you have no like, In your enchanting beauty, So have mercy on a lovelorn youth, Whose mind’s confused.
– Fāris al-Shidyāq

What seems unpleasant can shift to ease—or even pleasure—if we stay with it.
– Laura Bridgman

The Ghost
by Frank Bidart

You must not think that what I have
accomplished through you

could have been accomplished by any other means.

Each of us is to himself
indelible. I had to become that which could not

be, by time, from human memory, erased.

I had to burn my hungry, unappeasable
furious spirit

so inconsolably into you

you would without cease
write to bring me rest.

Bring us rest. Guilt is fecund. I knew

nothing I made
myself had enough steel in it to survive.

I tried: I made beautiful
paintings, beautiful poems. Fluff. Garbage.

The inextricability of love and hate?

If I had merely made you
love me you could not have saved me.

All losse is lesse, and lesse the infamy,
Then losse of loue to him, that loues but one.

– Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

Develop aspirations that guide not just personal healing, but the healing of community and society.
– Lama Rod Owens

My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself.
– Anne Lamott

That you need a little care, anyone who is fond of you must realize.
– Franz Kafka

Most people are not seeking truth—they are searching for comfort in illusions.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

i’ve done a lot of work on not ‘pulling’ people, energetically and emotionally

noticing when i have an urge, a want, a desire to pull something from whoever i’m with – something i want them to do, say, feel, share, show, whatever – and letting go of my need to do that, just being more solidly with both them and with my desire to pull at them, without needing to actually do anything about it

i’ve gotten better at it than i would have believed was possible for me, which is nice; still work to do, but hooray for victories;;

and yesterday, i had a new experience where i was talking to someone, felt an urge to ‘pull’ something from them, allowed the urge to move inside me without putting it towards them,

and then heard a lil voice going “no no, you’re good — it’s fine to pull here, go for it”

which is new

not sure what that’s about yet; i did pull a bit and it went fine, great call; but yeah, weird and exciting to feel what felt like a healthy exploratory pulling

– River Kenna

A great poet is a very private person. In his or her privacy this poet creates a language in which he or she is able to speak, privately, to many people at the same time.
– Edmond Jabès

To bear trials with a calm mind robs misfortune of its strength and burden.
– Seneca

Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.
– Amy Clampitt

any words anyone says about deep practice are shit

and that’s great!!

the words are the scat left behind by practice;
you can track the animal by it’s scat –
just never confuse the scat for the animal itself

– River Kenna

I’m a bit retarded, like most Americans.
– Henry Miller

We have not yet got good coffee, but the fatigue is slowly sinking in us, after two days of heavy sleep, sogged with bad dreams: diabolically real.
– Sylvia Plath’s Food Diary

Ultimately, the most romantic thing is the heart, and every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls.
– Robert Walser, The Walk; tr. Christopher Middleton

The more you write, the bigger the imagined world gets. And the other life stays on the chair, quiet, where the body is still.
– Yu Hua

A sword hung huge on the cavern’s wall
once forged by ancient giants tall;
Beowulf seized it – as lightnings fall
it fell on the foe of Heorot.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

i swear to god every time i have a bit psychic shift and note down when it happened, i find out like a week later that some extremely related astrological transit was happening at the same time

how does it keep being so right? how even does this universe work?

– River Kenna

I love being at home. My life is very simple. I read a lot of books. I watch a lot of films. I listen to a lot of music. I walk the dog. I cook with my family. Yeah, I’m boring.
– Cillian Murphy

We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.
– Aldous Huxley

Take stock of yourself and find out what is deep within that is holding you up.
– Eileen Caddy

one thousand year clouds
hanging over grassy dreams
a pecos heartbreak
– Joan Halifax

Welfare isn’t just physical comfort—it’s room for curiosity, connection, expression, and a nervous system at ease.
– Dr. Stephen Peters

Unable to live in the present, man amasses things which weigh and subjugate him; the feeling of the future is a calamity to him.
– Emil Cioran

I try to keep an eye on my internal monologue. It doesn’t always work. In the computer programming sense, I try to run my brain in “debugging mode” as much as possible.
– @naval

We’re living in a time now when opinion is becoming as rigid and belligerent as religion and faith—so that’s another reason to keep quiet about most things.
– Leonard Cohen

And I kissed America when she was fleecing me

She knows I understand that she needs to be free

And I miss America and sometimes she does too

And sometimes I think of her when she is fucking you

– David Byrne

Many modern novels, poems, and pictures, which are brow-beaten into ‘appreciating,’ are not good work because they are not WORK at all. They are mere puddles of spilled sensibility of reflection.
– C.S. Lewis

You always stand somewhere inside and outside of every language you encounter. Orphaned in Vietnamese. Clumsy in French. Adopted in English. Mastered by Theory. Awed by Fiction.
– Viet Thanh Nguyen

Most of life involves our showing up, and we have so many ways of not showing up. Our popular culture is a vast array of protections, distractions, and soporifics, lest we be obliged to show up.
– James Hollis

Inspiration is perishable – act on it immediately.
– @naval

I do not think the poet is a divine animal, but I suspect the spark of mystery they carry is so great, it could suffice.
– Pamilerin Jacob

I believe that the era of epic poetry is over. As for the novel, it is still very young. It has hardly begun.
– Ismail Kadare

If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.
– Dashiell Hammett

The poems were a kind of bridge between the self that yearned for messy collisions with others and the self that was adamantly alone.
– Rick Barot, Ghosts

The battle between faith and doubt is a subtext in many of my poems. The simple glories of the world look to be all there is.
– Christopher Buckley

Desire
by Christopher Buckley

Hands in my pockets, I came up with nothing
but keepsakes of dust, a dulled archipelago of air
stretching past my arms . . . night winds galloping
toward the islands at the end of the sea.
All that spun
and landed here, turned out to be those like myself,
walking around each morning with our ticket stubs
of intuition, our recent best guesses . . . looking up
through a vacancy of trees to a couple rags of cloud
caught there, dingy blossoms floating branch to
branch.
Neruda said the stones fell from the sky,
and science backs him up—all our beginnings
blasting out and dropping here or there beneath
the dark. . . .
Nothing—not the perfect restatement
of waves nor the borderless dominion of birds, not
the Southern Cross shimmering like a signet of hope—
has saved the least of us in our sleep.
Shuffling down
the path in the park, I go on whistling what was once
considered a lively tune, thankful to even be a satchel
of ligaments and bone still able to transact enough chemicals,
one neuron to another,
that I can appreciate the day lilies,
star jasmine, and have some idea about what’s missing
when a streak of grey engraves hosannas of moonlight,
the spindrift off the rocks, anything that sounds
remotely like a prayer
sent into the air to a god who,
in his infinite memory, must know he abandoned us
here—so many self-conscious molecular assemblies—
specs in a starry whirlwind of desire.

The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.
– J.A. Baker

Consider this: Reading sutras only allows you to plant a few good roots and understand some ideas. It cannot resolve life and death.
– Benjamin Brose

The final revelation is that lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.
– Oscar Wilde

The beginning and the end are common on the circumference of a circle.
– Heraclitus, Fragments

When you see knowledge is necessary, and that knowledge is also divisive, then you know the function of knowledge without the dividing factor. The factor of division is the building of images.
– Krishnamurti

When the bridge fell, an abyss was formed.
– Les Misérables, Victor Hugo

There is a great deal of difference between living and surviving. You can survive in debauchery, even in sickness and despair. But you live with a spirit of vitality and a spirit of participation, of being wanted, and having something to contribute.
– Hubert H. Humphrey

Advances in artificial intelligence raise the possibility of a fourth canonical language—English—and a fourth Buddhist canon.
– Donald S. Lopez Jr.

If I had followed the multitude, I should not have studied philosophy.
– Chrysippus

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

If a captive mind is unaware of being in prison, it is living in error. If it has recognized the fact, even for the tenth of a second, and then quickly forgotten it in order to avoid suffering, it is living in falsehood. Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood.
– Simone Weil

Live things are different. You don’t measure them the same way. You can’t. It’s not so consistent. You can’t make simple behavioral rules.
– Don Norman

There is nothing that I may decently hope for that I cannot reach by patience as well as by anxiety.
– Wendell Berry

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
– Hubert H. Humphrey

Don’t tell your problems to people because 80% don’t care, and the other 20% are glad you have them.
– Lou Holtz

I know wherever you are
there are poems.
– Marina Tsvetaeva

The purpose of today’s training is to defeat yesterday’s understanding.
– Miyamoto Musashi

See enough and write it down, I tell myself. And then some morning, when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I’m going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do… On that bankrupt morning, I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest. Paid passage back to the world out there. It all comes back. Remember what it is to be me.
– Joan Didion

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.
– George Orwell

By letting it go it all gets done.
The world is won by those who let it go.
But when you try and try.
The world is beyond the winning.

– LAO TZU

Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.
– John Adams

You don’t know what narrow lives girls have, how few real adventures there are for them; misadventures, yes, like abortions and little men following them in subways, but seldom anything like seeing ships at night.
– Joyce Johnson

I don’t wish power, only art —art and passion.
– Anaïs Nin

In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.
– Walker Percy

A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance of the matter which is causing the anxiety.
– Bertrand Russell

People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.
– Charles Bukowski

I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative.
– Joan Didion

I would like to pass on
one little bit of advice I give to everyone:

Relax. Just relax. Be nice to each other.
As you go through your life, simply be kind to people.

Try to help them rather than hurt them.
Try to get along with them rather than fall out with them.

– Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche

Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.
– Nikos Kazantzakis

Rest at ease in the infinite vast expanse and don’t rely on the hardships of hundreds of paths.
– Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche

Justin Whitaker: Yup. Buddhism has an identity crisis. But perhaps that’s because WE just want to pin this or that identity neatly on it, while it–or rather the 500 million humans currently practicing it–defy reduction to any particular identity marker.

What do you think?

Do you agree with Asa Hershoff when he writes:

The thing is that, from the start, Buddhism has struggled to enter the “psychological age,” departing widely from its recognizable Eastern profile, so how can it move forward into the digital, artificial intelligence age, without completely losing its essence? After all, religions have a “brand” just the same as a pair of jeans or a restaurant chain. This is the nature of human perception. But the Buddhist brand, those external trappings, buzzwords, symbols, or taglines had better be a true reflection, a congruent expression of its inner essence. Because in this case, we are not selling fashion.

War is a game played
by maniacs who kill each other.
Locate the man who profits by war
and strip him of his profits—
war will end.
– Woody Guthrie

There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river: one was a god, and he drank ambrosia; one was a man, and he drank water; and one was a demon, and he drank filth. What you get is a function of your own consciousness.
– Joseph Campbell

Art is for other people, it’s not just for yourself.
– Pacita Abad

The habit of despair is worse than despair itself.
– Albert Camus

The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first;
Be not discouraged – keep on –
there are divine things, well envelop’d;
I swear to you there are divine things
more beautiful than words can tell.

– Walt Whitman

There is no other way to reach enlightenment than by recognizing Buddha nature and attaining stability in it. Buddhas of the past did that, and the present-day practitioners who will be the Buddhas of the future will do so by recognizing their own nature and attaining stability in it. There is no other way. Nobody else can accomplish enlightenment for us or pull us into liberation. It is completely up to ourselves.
– Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

Be the kind of person who runs out of daylight, not out of stories.
– Outside Magazine

I honestly hate that we’ve normalized the idea that all opinions are valid. I think we should get back to telling people that they are ill informed and ignorant.
– @DeeLaSheeArt

Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.
– Arthur Rimbaud

Home may be where the heart is but it’s no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
– Walker Percy

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
– D.H. Lawrence

The sky said I am watching
to see what you
can make out of nothing
I was looking up and I said
I thought you
were supposed to be doing that
the sky said Many
are clinging to that
I am giving you a chance
I was looking up and I said
I am the only chance I have
then the sky did not answer
and here we are
with our names for the days
the vast days that do not listen to us

– W.S. Merwin

The experience of breakdown can give one a very deep and optimistic view of the potential of others to grow from trauma, instead of being diminished. This is called post-traumatic growth and refers to the benefit from psychological changes that can be experienced as a result of the struggle with challenging life circumstances. It can foster greater resilience. We have to remember that people who have survived trauma can come back transformed by the experience and see that suffering has made them more resilient rather than more fragile, with the ability to thrive in the present rather than being overwhelmed by the past. Beyond the ending of the old way of being, there is hope for the emergence of the new, and to imagine a future in which the wounds are still there, but in a form that makes one wiser and humbler and helps one to thrive.
– Roshi Joan Halifax

One of the pleasures of getting older is learning that though we are not all broken the same, we’re all broken.
– Ross Gay

Sometimes the year looks back, lets out a scream,
Looks back, then passes out appalled.
– Miklós Radnóti

And as the night wears on,
The dim allegory of ourselves
Unfolds, and we
Feel dreamed by someone else,
A sleeping counterpart,
Who gathers in
The darkness of his person
Shades of the real world.
– Mark Strand

I always write to make myself worthy of the poem that is not yet written.
– André du Bouchet

i remember everything simultaneously; like the distant beam of a distant lighthouse.

– anna akhmatova
tr. judith hemschemeyer

The light is not idle, it is full of rapid
changes we can call voyages
– Barbara Guest

But lie to yourself, what you will
lose is yourself. Then you
turn into them.

– Frank Bidart

You know your nervous system best—listen to it.
– Kathy Cherry

If there is no harmony, no order in our daily life of relationship, then dreams are a continuance of that disorder.
– Krishnamurti

One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.
– Emil Cioran

The ground of being is the ground of our being, and when we simply turn outward, we see all of these little problems here and there. But, if we look inward, we see that we are the source of them all.
– Joseph Campbell

Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it.
– Psalm 34:14

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
– Marcel Proust

This is the era of pattern recognition and pattern interruption. Everything is changing. Power is being reclaimed. Who we are and why we’re here is being revamped in a major way. We are what comes next.
– Nika Solé

For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
– C.S. Lewis

No, love is like the sea’s
Measureless music; we are the shells,
Whose lips transpose it to a brief despair.

– R. S. Thomas

No person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don’t have, and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have.
– Seneca

It is important to differentiate between your needs and your wants. Your needs are few, while your wants can be limitless. In order to find out freedom and Bliss, minister only your needs. Stop creating limitless wants.
– Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda

the past is all periphery
the present reminiscent fiction
the future will never arrive
– Septimus Brown

It really is easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart.
– Anne Lamott

The total intelligence of this whole universe crystallizes in human brains.
– Alan Watts

Your life is a mission, in which you are directed to the divine sparks that belong uniquely to your soul, for which your soul has returned many times to this world until they will all be gathered.
– Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

Write truth, and don’t waste a word.
– @naval

We cannot control the evil tongues of others; but a good life enables us to disregard them.
– Cato The Elder

Democracy is “woven” through our collective spaces, our collective embodied actions, where we encounter each other, stranger and friend directly, and find our way through and with each other.
– Joan Halifax

You are the exact glitch my life needed.

And for this I am forever grateful.

– Rachel Newcombe

humanity
seems more the glitch
than glory

– Andy Perrin

I’m sometimes fascinated by people’s guardedness

not the existence of it, but the differing areas we guard

someone will be very open and free and unguarded about so much —
and then they get asked a particular,
innocent-seeming question, and they lock down fully.

– River Pilgrim

the nervous breakdown to Zen teacher pipeline.

(took 16 years)

– Sara Campbell

Our interpretation of experience drives our desire to grasp or avoid—thinking that’s where happiness lies.
– John Dunne

How do you maintain joy and passion in your life? There’s a bonus to consider. When you live with joy, passion and gratitude, it’s impossible to keep it to yourself. You become a magnet for others who will be drawn to your energy — often in a way that benefits you.
– Jack Canfield

Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind.
Too much sugar leads to a heavy body &
too many distractions lead to a heavy mind.
Time spent undistracted & alone,
in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves
the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.
– @naval

You can know all of the beautiful spiritual truths, but if you have not yet integrated them into how you operate then there’s more work to do.
– Nika Solé

dancing butterflies
my journey forgotten
in a moment of joy
– Issa

Solutions, a love language.
– Nika Solé

The kind of attention we pay actually alters the world: we are, literally, partners in creation [of the world].
– Iain McGilchrist

When you visited me the next year, // I was eating only grapes and English muffin pizzas. / My heart was beating fast like when you jump // in a cold lake and at first you think you might die.
– Laura Read

Hold with faith and purpose the vision of yourself in the better environment, but act upon your present environment with all your heart, and with all your strength, and with all your mind.
– Wallace D. Wattles

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
– Audre Lorde

One should not consider that the great principles of freedom end at your own frontiers, that as long as you have freedom, let the rest have pragmatism. No! Freedom is indivisible and one has to take a moral attitude towards it.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Not to have a thing is less humiliating than to beg it.
– Imam Ali

What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.

– Ursula Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness

I’d rather bleed from resistance than rot from obedience.
– Lilith

If we examine the lives of people who are world class at their particular art, they almost always struggle in the domain of human relationships
– Kapil Gupta

Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success.
– Lao Tzu

Here to remind you that Christian nationalism is antithetical to a healthy democracy.
– Raven Schwam-Curtis

Hatred is the lot of the vanquished.
– Confucius

No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay; yet we easily let others encroach on our lives—worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.
– Seneca

If you must quote me, remember
I said that love heals from inside.
– Yusef Komunyakaa

When a situation begins to feel like a matter of ‘life and death,’ the underlying soul is actually close at hand and trying to get our attention. Something in us is trying to die in order that a greater sense of self and soul might be born and grow.
– Michael Meade

Given that the main function of universities these days is filtering and signaling, the best move is to get admitted to Stanford and then drop out.
– @naval

I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.

– Czeslaw Milosz, (tr. by Robert Haas)

The only pleasure the melancholic permits himself, and it is a powerful one, is allegory.
– Walter Benjamin

Something you’ll see after 40:

People who haven’t taken care of their bodies will start using medications to live a normal life.

– Dan Go

We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.
– G.K. Chesterton

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.
– Bernard DeVoto

I spent so long in a lover’s
quarrel with my flesh
the peace seems over-
cautious too-polite

– Kaveh Akbar

The biggest mistake any performer can make is to look at the audience.
– @naval

Happiness cannot be found through effort and willpower—it’s already present in open relaxation.
– Dawn Scott

The inanities that go on in the modern world after nightfall are an escape from the daytime of routine and boredom.
– Krishnamurti

Meta-theories are different ways of exploring Wholeness.
– @VinceFHorn

Being human can be so dispiriting. It is a real stretch for me a lot of the time.
– Anne Lamott

Yet another day,
and I’ve not fallen
for Trump’s bullshit.
– Andy Perrin

The dark companion is a star
Very present like a dark poem
Far and unreadable just out
At the edge of this poem floating.
It is not more or less a dark
Companion poem to the poem.

– W. S. Graham

You don’t realize you are starving until you are fed the very thing you need to nourish your soul.
– Nika Solé

There can never be peace among nations until it is first known that peace is within the souls of men.
– Sioux Proverb

Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it.
– Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Every time I sit down to write, I think, Will I find someone at the crossroads? And sometimes I do, and I feel my soul. When I don’t, I’m disappointed.
– Jamaica Kincaid

The fundamental delusion – there is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.
– @naval

A vacation is a very expensive way to schedule the time to read a book in peace.
– @naval

We study science to learn how to get what we want. We study philosophy to know what to want in the first place.
– @naval

I want to get all the content down so that I can then move on to the fun part, which is sorting out the sentences.
– Geoff Dyer

I want my patients to see how their egos are getting the best of them. And their best chance of seeing it comes when my mind is quiet.
– Mark Epstein

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
– ​William James

Even when I’m stretched out in my coffin they may find me tinkering with some poem.
– Charles Simic

No single thing abides, but all things flow.
Fragment to fragment clings; the things thus grow
Until we know and name them. And by degrees
They melt and are no more the things we know.

– Lucretius

Absurdity is what I like most in life.
– David Lync

It’s a rare gift … to be able to paint pictures with notes.
– Joni Mitchell

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth-scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books-might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism.

We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it.

What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?

– Carl Sagan

my book is so black that white people will keep telling it to go see Hamilton.
– Steven Dunn

Leave it as it is and rest your weary heart and mind.
– Lama Surya Das

The moss, the mountains, the redwood tree, the marigold, the mourning dove calling for her love’s return—are our allies. Every natural thing in this world is invested in the peace of this world. All that is good and gracious whispers, “We are with you.
– Andrea Gibson

My goal as a writer is more to comfort than to disturb.
– Joni Mitchell

I don’t like to write and throw it away. I don’t like starting over. Usually I write because it’s already kind of written in my mind. I may not know the words, I may not know the character’s name, I may not know any of that. But like I say, I get the picture. It’s a matter of me transferring it to paper.
– John Prine

There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.
– Mark Twain

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
– Franz Kafka

There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.
– Blaise Pascal

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
– Thoreau

As troubling as the political divide in America right now is, it’s nothing compared to the average American’s complete lack of understanding of funk music. Try and prove me wrong.
– @mrdavehill

The USA is barely recognizable after 4 months; if you think you can sit on the sidelines and it will be handed back to you in four years you are out of your mind.
– Noel Casler

Journalist and novelist Carl Hiaasen on setting a high standard:

“Always aspire to act in a way that cancels out someone else’s cruel or stupid behavior.”

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it, just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good hot black coffee.

– Special Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks

The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.

– Florence Scovel Shinn

We’re all heading the same way… Whether we choose to walk together or separately, we’re going toward night. I am lucky. I have the angels of words beside me. So many of us are silent.

– Luis Alberto Urrea

Do people hate being still/unstimulated/without distractions because the body will automatically and wisely serve you whichever thing is higher on the stack of things you need to resolve? Is that why they’re so avoidant of it??
– @nosilverv

We take it for granted that we can instantly reach anyone anywhere in the world. But a century ago, it was a triumph against space, time, and cultural barriers for two great minds and great spirits to connect in a meaningful way across the globe.
– Maria Popova
(On Tolstoy and Gandhi’s little-known correspondence)

Just because ego and greed and hatred are doing cosplay as religion, I don’t want us to give it that much credit. I want us to insist that no, there is real religion!
– Omid Safi

The Internet will obsolete the industrial education system, just like it’s obsoleting every other physical purveyor of information goods.
– @naval

As I get older, I become more and more interested in what poetry can do. And not what poetry is.
– Rachel Zucker

I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea.
– G.K. Chesterton

You will learn at your own expense that in the long journey of life you will encounter many masks and few faces.
– Luigi Pirandello

It is such a declaration of pathetic insecurity to be at all concerned with another person’s sexuality.
– John Pavlovitz

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
– T. S. Eliot

And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain
– Walt Whitman

If you do not feed the hungry, they will eat you…
– Toni Morrison

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
– Edward Everett

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
– Alfred North Whitehead

Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through.
– Markus Zusak

I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some
backtalk
From the mute sky.

– Sylvia Plath

I spiralled again and I don’t know why,
my truth is a moth in a net of lies.
I sift the dust from the seeds I’ve sown,
but strain to gather my scattered soul.
– Priyanka Jaiprakash

Keep in mind that people will tend to leak out more of their true feelings, and certainly hostile ones, when they are drunk, sleepy, frustrated, angry, or under stress.
– Robert Greene

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

Either this
stripped-down
solitude or the
storm of love—
nothing else in the
world interests me.
– Albert Camus

What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

From causes which appear similar, we expect similar effects. This is the sum of all our experimental conclusions.
– David Hume

The way I see it, we are all perfectly mediocre day-laborers for God. We forget to punch in, we always forget some important element of inventory; our attitudes sour and fail; we come to act as if we own the store, and then, after all that, we wonder when the raise is coming. And, unlike our earthly supervisors, God bestows upon us, through Christ and the agent of art, which I believe to be God-given, such unfailing love and understanding that we feel we must turn over that new leaf, try to get to work on time, show some initiative, but we never do. In a matter of days—or moments—we are right back to our usual habits, because, as we already know, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. We are only human. We are conceived in sin. We are utterly shit.

I am amazed that in my worst phases, when I was most delinquent, I still knew what I was missing—which makes my dereliction even more fascinating, more pathological than ever.

We like to say that as writers we are own bosses, but I think writers realize more than others just who really is in charge. The blank page, the moistness under the arms and above the lip, the sheer terror of Nothing Happening. I know that it doesn’t come from some nook of the brain when the words start to come. I know that I’m not wrestling forth a novel, a phrase, one perfectly wonderful sentence. I know where it comes from. I can sometimes feel Him slip into me like a thief with good tools. I think Tennessee was permanently in search of his various gods, seeking, hoping. What kills me is that I repeatedly forget the wonder of it—the aid, the completion, the seeking again, the finding again.

– Walker Percy

Ancient texts compare the process of concentration to the taming of a wild animal. It is a difficult endeavor, full of ups and downs, but one that yields reliable results if practiced diligently and with patience.
– Mark Epstein

Are we obliged to be faithful to our errors, even when we realize that through this faithfulness we are injuring our higher self? — No, there exists no law, no obligation, of this kind; we have to become traitors, be unfaithful, again and again abandon our ideals. We cannot advance from one period of our life into the next without passing through these pains of betrayal and then continuing to suffer them.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

All experience could be put to use, recovered and reconciled, composted and transformed. Our refining process for neurotic patterns creates energy that can power contemplation, wisdom and compassionate action.

– Tarthang Tulku, Keys to Knowledge

The skills you really want can’t be taught, but they can be learned.
– @naval

When out of fear you twist the lesser evil into the lie that it is something good, you eventually rob people of the capacity to differentiate between good and evil.
– Hannah Arendt

To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin; though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.
– C.S. Lewis

The psyche of the child in its preconscious state is anything but a tabula rasa; it is already preformed in a recognizably individual way, and is moreover equipped with all specifically human instincts, as well as with the a priori foundations of the higher functions.
– Whitmont

People will take you being soft as a weakness. Not realizing that the fact that you’re still soft in a wild wild west world, is the result of absolute strength.
– Nika Solé

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle.

He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Glimmer glisten gleam and glow—
the sky’s the road; the song you know.

– Margaret Winikates

The patterns of anxiety, hypervigilance, and trauma responses that have been passed down through generations are not our destiny. They can be recognized, released, and transformed for our benefit and those who come after us.
– Alyse Bacine

Only through profound silence can we grasp terra firma.
– Hilma af Klint

To starve a people of their language, is to kill their memory.
– Ngugi wa Thiongo

Love, love, I know what you are.
– George Saunders

Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.
– Athol Fugard

what terrible tragedies
realism inflicts on people.
– Dostoevsky

Everyone’s a thought leader until the Wi-Fi goes out.
– JA Westenberg

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
– Frank Herbert, Dune

The one thing I want to leave my children is an honorable name.
– Theodore Roosevelt

They will act to misunderstand you, so they don’t have to admit you’re right.
– Zurayan Ittesaf

Christians have nothing to be smug about. We are not righteous people trying to correct the unrighteous. Just one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.
– R.C. Sproul

Knowledge is laughable when attributed to a human being
– Sun Ra

Acquire a peaceful spirit and thousands around you will be saved.
– St. Seraphim of Sarov

All is number.
– Pythagoras

If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom.
– @naval

practicing
tai chi in the park
white butterflies

– @AsurasHaiku

double meteor shower …
this urge to hold onto
what has been
– Chen-ou Liu

…a mountain stirs up awe not just because of its material presence, but because of the universal forces that lifted it into being.
– Ross Simonini

ruins after ruins …
these layers of silence
upon silence

– Chen-ou Liu

Literature reflects the prevailing ideas in a society and expresses it. But a society can also stagnate or fail to progress: then the writer’s task is to get to the root of things. That is where the revolutionary writer is born.
– Nicolás Guillén

We have to learn to be comfortable with the space in-between.

That awkward space between not knowing and knowing.

The space between effort and progress.

The space between making a decision and change.

Trust the process.

– Yvette Ratshikhopha

Wandering footsteps
Not all ‘whys’ get to find their
Respective ‘because’
– @PreetiRel

You cannot have a positive life and a negative mind.
– Joyce Meyer

People generally “see what they look for,” and “hear what they listen for.”
– Harper Lee

Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.
– Carl Jung

Clearly the hardest thing for the working artist is to create his own conception and follow it, unafraid of the strictures it imposes, however rigid these may be… I see it as the clearest evidence of genius when an artist follows his conception, his idea, his principle, so unswervingly that he has this truth of his constantly in his control, never letting go of it even for the sake of his own enjoyment of his work.
– Andrei Tarkovsky

I want to be either somebody or
nobody. I don’t want to be anybody.
– Ruskin Bond

When Summer lies upon the world, and in the noon of gold, beneath the roof of sleeping leaves the dreams of trees unfold; when woodland halls are green and cool, wind is in the West, Come back to me! Come back to me, and say my land is best!
– J. R. R. Tolkien

Turn within, seek within for every answer, and you will find it. It may take time.
– Eileen Caddy

Whatever one frequently thinks and ponders upon,
that will become the inclination of the mind.
– Buddha

It’s the very intentness of our own will that causes us to be blind to other realities.
– Rachel Cusk

The present breaks our hearts. We lie and freeze,
our fingers icy as a bunch of keys.
Nothing will thaw these bones except
memory like an ancient blanket wrapped
about us when we sleep at home again,
smelling of picnics, closets, sicknesses,
old nightmare,

and insomnia’s spreading stain.

– Adrienne Rich

The years between seemed a period of waiting, of marking time. There was a growing feeling of stagnation, of lethargy, clearly evident among many of my own contemporaries. Those who were aware of the trend of political events, on the other hand, were almost too clever, too politically minded, too high-powered intellectually for me altogether. What I seemed to sense and wait for was frowned upon by the first group, though I learned very early not to air my thoughts and fears; they were morbid, they were too self-centered and introspective altogether. Why — my brother-in-law spent such a happy holiday in the Black Forest (with — so-and-so — chapter and verse) and the food was so good — everybody was so hospitable and so very charming. If, on the other hand, I ventured a feeble opinion to the second group, I was given not chapter and verse so much as the whole outpouring of pre-digested voluminous theories.

My brain staggers now when I remember the deluge of brilliant talk I was inflicted with; what would happen if, and who would come to power when — but with all their abstract clear-sightedness, this second group seemed as muddled, as lethargic in their own way, as the first. At least, their theories and their accumulated data seemed unrooted, raw. But this, I admit — yes, I know — was partly due to my own hopeless feeling in the face of brilliant statisticians and one-track-minded theories. Where is this taking you, I wanted to shout at both parties. One refused to admit the fact that the flood was coming — the other counted the nails and measured the planks with endless exact mathematical formulas, but didn’t seem to have the very least idea of how to put the Ark together.

– H.D., Tribute to Freud

At times memory insists so strongly it torments us, as around some ecstasy denied. And from time to time, with cruel, angelic obstinacy, a recurring dream presents it to us all at once: the walled garden we seek weeping at its gate, the house deserted or destroyed, the invisible water that might speak to us, like the river Scamander, if only we could plunge our hand into it. . . .

For others it may be elusive music, or a voice behind a series of doors, or a perfect word, or language that is erased in the act of putting it down on paper. We wake from such dreams in a desolation fiercer than rapture. The belief that, when we realize we are dreaming, the thread of our dream is broken, is untrue. Consciousness can hold on for a long time and lead the dream by the hand, the way a child leads an adult who can perhaps open the latch of a gate too high for him.

– Cristina Campo, The Unforgivable

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

Today, all time-consuming practices, such as trust, loyalty, commitment and responsibility, are disappearing. […] I think trust is a social practice, and today it is being replaced by transparency and information. Trust enables us to build positive relationships with others, despite lacking knowledge. In a transparency society, one immediately asks for information from others. Trust as a social practice becomes superfluous. The transparency and information society fosters a society of distrust.
– Byung-Chul Han

Sometimes compassion compels us to confront, sometimes to cajole, sometimes to be silent and wait, sometimes to do or say what it would never occur to our egocentric self to do or say, for we can never say for certain in advance just how compassionate love may prompt us to act, to see, and accept within ourselves and others. Yet, in our willingness to recognize and go forth to identify with the preciousness of ourselves and others in our collective frailty, we discover our contemplative community in the intimate texture of our daily interactions with one another.
– James Finley, The Contemplative Heart

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

Intrinsically, we are all completely and perfectly sane. We are enveloped and imbued by this sanity. But unable to bring ourselves to acknowledge this, we hatch a hodgepodge of beliefs which we embrace and then chase as if they were real, stumbling and falling on the great way. These beliefs embroider the entire sky with their flowery efflorescence.
– Dogen

It would be better, think they, if Heaven were above and Hell below – anywhere outside, but not within. But that comfort has been knocked from under us. There are no places to go to, either for reward or punishment. The place is always here and now, in your own person and according to your own fancy . . . You are the author, director and actor all in one: the drama is always going to be your own life, not some one else’s. A beautiful, terrible, ineluctable drama, like a suit made of your own skin. Would you want it otherwise? Could you invent a better drama?
– Henry Miller

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

Most rules direct us to
average behaviors.
– Rick Rubin

Political activists generally know what to ask of other people, but they hardly ever talk about asking anything of themselves.
– Rudolph Steiner

The religious function is probably the strongest drive in the human psyche. If it is not directed towards its natural goal it loads up the other areas of life and gives them an unmerited emotionality.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

You know that song that you can’t get out of your head? All thoughts work that way. Careful what you read.
– @naval

Jung once told me that he thought the dream was always going on in the unconscious, but that it usually needs sleep and the complete cessation of attention to outer things for it to register in consciousness at all.
– Barbara Hannah

refugee train
small hands starfished
against the glass

(haiga)

– Debbie Strange

Love in action is
a harsh & dreadful thing
compared to love in dreams.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

The relationships most worth cultivating are those between peers with mutual respect. The rest are unstable over long timescales.
– @naval

It is occasionally refreshing to no longer have a seat at any table.
– Lisa Lucas

When you stop thinking, you are no longer imagining things that are not true.
– Papaji

When someone tells you to get home safe, stay warm, have a good day, or sleep well, I hope you understand what they’re really saying is, ‘I love you.’
– @tinybuddha

Sure some would cry it’s better far

To crown their days with sleep

Than face the road, the wind and rain,

– Countee Cullen

You have to strengthen your mind so absolutely that it cannot be co-opted. You have to amplify your spirit so massively that it cannot be infiltrated. You have to build your emotional frame so completely that it cannot be hijacked. This is how you save your soul.
– Nika Solé

Those who do not love the fellow villagers or fellow Townsmen, whom they have seen are not likely to have got very far towards loving ”Man” whom they have not.
– C.S. Lewis

Anything, anything can change a writer, if one is open to it.
– Suzan-Lori Parks

The important details are more likely to come as blades of grass than as whole meadows of inspiration.
– Hillary Moses Mohaupt

Sometimes it was so hot that we carried our dinner table out into the bay and set it down in the water. The water was so still and clear that the candles hardly moved on such summer nights.

And the bronze moon was huge.

– Lawrence Durrell, Corfu

We pick up the states of mind around us—we’re sensitive, relational beings.
– Jake Dartington

If I have an ethics, it is simply to be true.
– Henri Cole

Whenever you are fed with life, start writing: ink is the greatest cure for all human ills, as I have found out a long ago.
– C.S. Lewis

Seminary student; taught to think; disenrolls.
– C. B. Mosher, Faith

His presence reminded me what it’s like to live with someone. And how very awkward it is. How much it diverts you from your own thoughts and distracts you. How another Person starts to irritate you without actually doing anything annoying, but simply by being there. Each morning when he went off to the forest, I blessed my glorious solitude. How do people manage to spend decades living together in a small space?
– Olga Tokarczuk

“Men built this world.”
Yeah and it sucks and we’re all miserable.
Literally no one is happy, least of all men.

– Maria DeCotis

Many are ready to fight the evil they see in others. Fewer know how to bring out the capacity for goodness in themselves and others. This is the crying need today.
– Lama John Makransky and Paul Condon

A good fit is not the same as a perfect fit, if such a thing even exists. Rather, a good fit contains good imperfections, things that don’t fit, problems you can sink your teeth into. One circles around them, going a bit deeper with each turning.
– Andrew Cooper

When the stanza was finished, I felt a rush of adrenaline, that nervous energy that accompanies the birth of a new poem. And I kept going.
– Nasser Rabah and Wiam El-Tamami

Thinking is sometimes easy, often difficult but at the same time thrilling. But when it’s most important it’s just disagreeable, that is when it threatens to rob one of one’s pet notions & to leave one all bewildered & with a feeling of worthlessness. In these cases I & others shrink from thinking or can only get ourselves to think after a long sort of struggle.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Utopias collapse under the weight of their own denial.
– Kyle Humiston

You are not here to shrink your soul into digestible pieces. You are here to expand into your myth.
– Maria Sayde Hraiki

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.
– Iris Murdoch

The way you treat yourself sends a very clear message to others about how they should treat you.
– Denise Linn

Nonetheless for long it seemed to the Númenóreans that they prospered, and if they were not increased in happiness, yet they grew more strong, and their rich men ever richer. For with the aid and counsel of Sauron they multiplied their possessions, and they devised engines, and they built ever greater ships.
– J.R.R. (Tolkien, Akallbêth)

You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement and, at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.
– Marie Curie

If you let lesser people determine your self-worth, you’ll never reach higher than their limited imagination.
– Ana Huang

I know it’s hard, but it’s real important we do what we can to validate our post traumatic hypervigilance– that is, communicate to the “part” driving that anxiety that its feelings, needs, & reactions make sense; that they’re not “crazy;” & we won’t ignore or punish them.
– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle

Stop entertaining what tried to destroy your bloodline.
That thing isn’t just toxic.
It’s territorial.
And it wants your kids next.
– Bryan Meadows

Some people are mad at you for actually having the balls to move out your city against all odds ‘ to actually persue your dreams because you believed in yourself you went through the trials and tribulations in a new city ‘ you still built your brand and are still making something out of yourself while they are doing the same exact thing they were when you left ! They’re going in circles while you’re soaring ! And that’s why they mad!! Stay blessed while they stay pressed !
– @ayhollywood

It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of Being itself and what lies at the heart of Being.
– Frederick Buechner

Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the forgiveness of debt?
Because debt, in our current order, is sacred. It is treated as a moral obligation, a legal certainty, and a foundational pillar of financial civilization. But this sanctity is not just about personal responsibility or thrift—it’s about power. Debt allows banks to own futures, not just property. It gives bond markets the final say over public budgets. And it ensures that those who lend money exercise control over those who borrow, from the poorest student to the richest government.

Forgive a person’s debt, and you challenge an individual belief. Forgive a nation’s debt, and you challenge a global hierarchy. That’s why modern jubilees are feared—not because they’re impossible, but because they’re revolutionary.

The real guardians of debt are not preachers or politicians, but bondholders, banks, and the institutions they control. They’ve created a system in which public goods are collateral, and democracy comes second to creditworthiness. Cities like Detroit or San Juan found this out the hard way—when the terms of their loans came due, it wasn’t voters who decided what services would be cut, but creditors. The streets stayed dark, the schools stayed closed, but the bond payments were made on time.

– James B. Greenberg

The easiest way to descend from a cherished moment is to describe it.
– David Chadwick

It would’ve been better if I’d followed the admonition of Dōgen Zenji, founder of Soto Zen: think three times before speaking and then choose to speak in only one out of ten of those instances.
– David Chadwick

There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky’s variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.
– Samuel R. Delany

But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window–maybe rearrange all the furniture.
– Raymond Carver

Reading keeps you from going gaga.
– Mary Ann Shaffer

…Lay your shoulders to the wheel; … Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it. Say not that thousands are gone, turn out your tens of thousands; throw not the burden of the day upon Providence, but “show your faith by your works…
– Thomas Paine

Ah, God, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling had
one all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years a
Barrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty a
Soldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! All
Roads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more than
another, so that with one Life to spend I am a Man
bare-bumm’d at Taylors with Cash for but one pair of
Breeches, or a Scholar at Brookstalls with Money for a
single Book: to choose ten were no Trouble; to choose one,
impossible! All Trades, all Crafts, all Professions are
wondrous, but none is finer than the rest together. I
cannot choose, sweet Anna: twixt Stools my Breech falleth
to the Ground!
– John Barth

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit that there will be music despite everything.
– Jack Gilbert

My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn’t that enough for a whole lifetime?
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

If you know a view as a view, you can be free of that view. If you know a thought as a thought, you can be free of that thought.
– Norman Fischer, Beyond Language

…so embedded that even modest proposals—like canceling student loans or medical debt—are met with moral outrage. What about personal responsibility? What about fairness? But no one asks whether it’s fair that Wall Street got a bailout while working families got foreclosure. Or that tax cuts for the wealthy are “investments,” while relief for the poor is a “handout.”
Debt functions like religion: enforced by ritual, defended by dogma. The high priests wear suits, not robes. And the heresy they fear most is not inflation or default—it’s forgiveness.

But even the most deeply rooted beliefs can be questioned. Even the most rigid structures can fall. History tells us that jubilees were not utopian fantasies but practical resets—ancient acknowledgments that too much debt leads not to productivity, but to bondage and collapse. The cancellation of debts wasn’t charity. It was survival.

– James B. Greenberg

The white clouds are scudding across the blue sky.
– Anne Brontë

Christianity without love is the negation of what Jesus proclaimed and demonstrated. Christianity without love is a violation of the Spirit of God. Christianity without love is worse than useless. It is actively dangerous.
– David P Gushee

As far as I’m concerned, there is only one study and that is the way in which things relate to one another.
– Wayne Thiebaud

I am no longer a fan—of anyone or anything. I no longer love any image enough to raise it to that level of adoration. All that remains is a cheerless lucidity that wants to be thought of as intelligence.
– Hervé Guibert

Management is the oldest, and most over-rated form of leverage. Capital, Media, and Code are the modern forms.
– @naval

Anytime you feel discord, it’s an outcome of believing something that’s not true.
– Adyashanti

We should always allow some time to elapse, for time discloses the truth.
– Seneca

Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
– Dorothy Parker

No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today. No one (except perhaps the acidic Mencken, who famously described American democracy as the worship of jackals by jackasses)
– Philip Roth

Eustace had read only the wrong sort of books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.
– C. S. Lewis

Don’t you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?
– Søren Kierkegaard

Some years ago, I was struck by the large number of falsehoods I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.
– Rene Descartes

All these philosophies have a common failing. They imagine life can be ordered by human reason. Either the mind can devise a way of life that is secure from loss, or else it can control the emotions so that it can withstand any loss. In fact, neither how we live nor the emotions we feel can be controlled in this way. Our lives are shaped by chance and our emotions by the body. Much of human life – and much of philosophy – is an attempt to divert ourselves from this fact.
– John Gray

We must live for the future of music.
– Sun Ra

The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them knows anything about the subject.
– Marcus Aurelius

To the extent that Universities Filter, Rank and Accredit, rather than Teach, the Internet will eventually crush them.
– @naval

the quest to connect the city’s broken
neighborhoods would eventually
end up breaking
others.

– Zach Goldberg

The history of other cultures is non-existent
until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.
– Edward Said

How sick – to wait – in any place – but thine –
I knew last night – when some one tried to twine –
Thinking – perhaps – that I looked tired – or alone –
Or breaking – almost – with unspoken pain –

And I turned – ducal –
That right – was thine –
One port – suffices – for a Brig like mine –

Our’s be the tossing – wild though the sea –
Rather than a mooring – unshared by thee.
Our’s be the Cargo – unladen – here –
Rather than the “spicy isles -”
And thou – not there –

– Emily Dickinson

Spring
by Jenny George

Speckled egg, brown egg, or sky blue with black marks —

Having broken once, the world re-forms
in miniature.
Over and over, in the nest
between two limbs; in the hollow of grass
at a marsh edge.

It’s relentless, the way it keeps trying
to return.
Joy
Joy
Joy

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done
– Walt Whitman

People who try to look smart by pointing out obvious exceptions actually signal the opposite.
– @naval

Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.
– Ernest Holmes

The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.
– H.L. Mencken

I embrace a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.
– Frank O’Hara

Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? …Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.
– John Steinbeck

It is a fallen world, and there is no consonance between our bodies, minds, and souls.
– Tolkien

I’ve never been more sure of what the end of humanity will look like.
– Andy Perrin

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face — there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
– Fernando Pessoa

Science, like any tool, is neutral in morality. Its impact depends on the hands that wield it — whether for healing or harm, enlightenment or destruction.
– Carl Sagan

If each day falls inside each night, there exists a well where clarity is imprisoned. We need to sit on the rim of the well of darkness and fish for fallen light with patience.
– Pablo Neruda

He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.
– Gabriel García Márque

Dividing earth and sky
is not the right way
to think about this wholeness.
It only allows one to live
at a more precise address–
were I to be searched for
I’d be found much faster.
My distinguishing marks
are rapture and despair.

– Wislawa Szymborska

There was no use my seeing the sun high up in the sky in its place in space at noon, since I was always searching for it elsewhere. I looked for it in the flickering of its beams, in the echo which, as a rule, we attribute only to sound, but which belongs to light in the same measure. Radiance multiplied, reflected itself from one window to the next, from a fragment of wall to cloud above. It entered into me, became part of me. I was eating sun.
– Jacques Lusseyran

The more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and pain.
– Dante Alighieri

Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher a poet’s; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November, 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon: Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer “Yes”; if we are truthful we say “No”; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect ragbag of odds and ends within us—a piece of a policeman’s trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil—but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights.
– Virginia Woolf, Orlando

I have been hearing about the conversations people had about how to translate the word killjoy. Here are some translations. Killjoy Aguafiestas Psujzabawa Guastafeste Rabat-joie Oyunbozan Pretbederver If translation can be a form of travel, moving words and ideas between languages and not everything moves across, something else happens. After I shared a newsletter about different translations of “killjoy,” a Turkish feminist Irem Aydemir replied on social media. She said, killjoy has been translated as “oyunbozan” (word by word translation: game ruiner) mostly in Turkish but I think “keyifkaçıran” (joy repellent) resonates more because this is exactly how I feel as a killjoy, this annoying feminist who makes people uncomfortable but we also ruin the game of course! What I learn from translating killjoys is the important of feeling, that the task of moving the killjoy across different languages is also one of trying to capture the feelings that the figure embodies or the feelings we might have in embodying that figure. Sometimes words come out of us to express a feeling. We feel words. Words feel.
– Sara Ahmed

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

It’s only true love when you don’t have a choice.
– Martin Walser

Cuddle this sad ball of cells, Lord,
I’m splitting into too many pieces.
Sunday and there’s such a short line
between now and the mother of all
surgeries. As the crow flies.
Outside they call and a pair of shoes
hangs from the power lines.
The pastor today will preach
about feelings and I will hold a glass
of grape juice and tremble. The blood
as metaphor, the blood they take
and test, the cell counts, the science
of the body as this foreign land
I return to each morning. In this land
do they speak your name, Lord?
Coffee and some window panes broken
in the corners. There’s just never any way
to see things as they are,
but if I could feel….

– Clay Matthews

Mutual fascination is always a risky business. Lacan suggests that it is the consequence of an imaginary identification in which the self strives to incorporate the other in an act as aggressive as it is loving. It is never clear who, snake or snake charmer, is mesmerized by whom.
– Elizabeth Grosz

While father preached away in the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang, or listened, I devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the colored sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one’s imagination could desire—angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans…
– Ingmar Bergman

One of the unacknowledged advantages of the horrendous era we’ve entered is that it is revealing for all to see the putrid connections between great wealth and great power. And how Big Money has overtaken our democracy, leading to more control over our economy. It’s a vicious cycle.

The intentions of the oligarchs are fully exposed, and they are defiant. It’s like hitting the “reveal code” key on older computers that let you see everything.
This “reveal code” moment is, in a way, a blessing. It allows everyone to see where the money and power have gone.

It is a prerequisite to the long and difficult but necessary process of creating an economy and democracy for the many rather than for the few.

– Robert Reich

A mantra is basically a means of talking with your thoughts and feelings. It’s a time-honored method sometimes referred to as prayer, but really it’s an opening of a conversation between the heart and the mind.
– Tsoknyi Rinpoche

The Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, “I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable.” It’s a winding, meandering road. It’s really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles—or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you’re about 2200 feet below sea level. That’s a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the “Bloody Pass.” And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked—the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
That’s the question before you tonight. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?” The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question. Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.

– Martin Luther King Jr, I’ve Been to the Mountaintop

…unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall by carefully analyzing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.
– C.G. Jung

To realize our possibilities makes some demands on us. It resembles a second birth. Until this takes place we live in an invisible psychic womb of the collective, which is made of different components. We are not yet in close connection with our own reality, but instead we are separated from it by seven veils, like an embryo, which only has a contact with the outer world through the structure of the mother.
– Agnes Hidveghy

If we know what the bad thing is, we can plan for it. But when we don’t know what’s going to happen, we spiral.
– Liz Fosslien

June’s edge. The sun
Turns kind. Birds wallow in the sob of pure
air, Crated from the coast … Un-
real. Unreal.
– Louise Glück, Solstice