Journal XXXI

Go now selkie-boy, swim from the shore,
Rinse your ears clean of human chatter…
– Spell Songs, from the Lost Words

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.
– Oscar Wilde

for DP

the way to write things down?

jot them, paint them, type them–

slow the flow of words into

– Alec Finlay

Some people have this extraordinary gift; their words and combinations of words have a greater effect than that of the average person. Some are capable of developing it. Surely it should be like any other craftsmanship. Practice and study and knowledge increase the ability to make words sing. Other people access that place where their words sound true, they have a real meaning, by being who they are. There we go back to what I said before: there must be after words an inner energy, an emotional inner quality, or intellectual. It is also true that people are gifted in diverse degrees regarding an enlightening language, just as in different degrees they are gifted in relation to painting, carpentry or music.
– William Segal

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us – a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain – it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.
– Leslie Jamison

We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings.
– Hannah Arendt, We Refugees

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

Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania, Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
– Robert Penn Warren

There’s more than meets the eye with the human body. It keeps score all on its own. It remembers; it hurts; it hides memories, secrets, even from us. The body is a record keeper, even when the brain forgets what’s been recorded. Bodies, bodies, bodies. Vanishing bodies.
– Moses Yuriyvich Mikheyev

The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
– Roland Barthes

Don’t get it crossed—
It’s a beautiful thing
When you become brave enough
To let colonies of the ego
Begin to die,
When they can no longer
Provide for themselves
With worn out strategies
To hide their pain.
It is a brutal
But beautiful thing
When addiction stops working,
When the privilege you’ve earned
From keeping your heart separate
Begins to wilt
And reveals its poverty.
Failing at living falsely
Can be the most meritorious
And victorious thing
You do with your life.
Take the invitation.
Let the truth
Of every unsustainable
Foundation
You’ve invested your whole life in
Crumble—
That which humbles us
Is not a true loss.
True loss is living
Avowed to distance,
Avowed to hiding,
Avowed to pride.

– Chelan Harkin

When the obstacles in the world become greater and more complex there are two great tendencies in the psyche. One is to simplify and quickly adopt some form of fundamentalism. The other is to accept the multiplicity and the great tension that come from embracing the world as it presents itself.
– Michael Meade

There’s a priceless diamond
inside your chest.
Why stop to buy trinkets
on the steps of the temple?
They are for tourists and pilgrims,
but you live here.
The door is always open.
Step into the darkness
where you were glowing
before your first breath
and the silence hummed
your true Name
before you were conceived.
Rest in your original body.
The one with edges is just a shell.
The real one has empty hands,
half-parted lips about to sing,
bare soles covered with soot
from other buildings, burnt and fallen,
an eye that never sleeps
shining between two wells,
the fountain of laughter
and the spring of tears.
Here you have a boundless heart
inside the one that beats.
This shrine isn’t holy,
or secret, or hard to find.
Nothing carved in marble.
No priests, no experts.
It’s a place where your
guru appears
as an ordinary person.
Where everyone whispers, I Am,
yet each of us is incomparable.
Friend, isn’t it time
to give up the journey
toward being right?
Come home.
Learn to smile again.
Master the skill of repose.

– Fred LaMotte

What I find most startling are the people who have convinced themselves that they are fighting for humanity’s freedom, while simultaneously oppressing the voices they don’t agree with. If that’s what you are doing, you are not fighting for freedom. You’re just fighting.
– Jeff Brown

i am not done yet

as possible as yeast
as imminent as bread
a collection of safe habits
a collection of cares
less certain than i seem
more certain than i was
a changed changer
i continue to continue
what i have been
most of my lives is
where i’m going

– Lucille Clifton

There was no end to
the
American sadness
and the American
madness.

– Jack Kerouac

The greatest discovery in life is to discover that our essential nature does not share the limits nor the destiny of the body and mind.
– Rupert Spira

Dispirited While Packing My Books Away One Summer Morning,
I Utilize Phrases From One That Was Destined For Fodder

By the Ming there were well over
A thousand theorists of poetry.
Some believed poems “look up into
Vast space and continue nothing”
(I saw a field full of empty snow).
Others that poems were like
“A lotus in first sunlight.”
Lotus after lotus
Into the dark boxes.
I looked up from packing,
And continued packing.
Conversation

– Mary Ruefle

Just because someone ‘receives downloads’, travels the astral, or has a wealth of spiritual knowledge, doesn’t mean they carry the light. The way to carry the light is to purify yourself as a vessel that can hold it. To raise your vibration. And a lot of people aren’t doing that.
– Nika Solé

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

– e. e. cummings

nearer I am to my hometown
the pain intensifies
wild roses

– Issa

I would rather be a swine herd at Amagerbro and be understood by the swine than a poet and misunderstood by the people…
– Kierkegaard

You blossom under kindness,
don’t you?
Like a rose.

– Sylvain Reynard

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
– Gandalf (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring)

All our best men are laughed at
in this nightmare land.
– Jack Kerouac

Love is hard to find, and the one who is sentimentally emotional is generally cruel.
– Krishnamurti

In sleep, of a heart attack, let Henry go.
The end of tennis. The beginning of the dark.
The beginning of the wagon.
It is the onward coming terrifies.
Now at last the effort to make him kill himself
has failed.

Take down the thing then to which he was nailed.
I am a boat was moored on the wrong shelf.
Love has wings & flies.
Amazed it could engineer such agony,
Henry tried the world again & again, falling short of the mark.
Unblock! let all griefs flow.

There are more over there than over here,
for welcome eerie. The whole city turned out
to rustle Henry home.
He’d made his peace & would no further roam.
He wondered only what it was about.
He felt the news was near.

– Berryman

We spend too much time arguing like we’re right—and too little time listening like we’re wrong.

Diatribes don’t change minds. Productive disagreement depends on showing respect, curiosity, and humility.

The most compelling teachers are the ones who are most eager to learn.

– Adam Grant

Breakfast in bed is not a treat. It’s messy, it’s uncomfortable, it’s a bit like being in hospital.
– Very British Problems

Some people amplify you energetically. Others are a disturbance in your field. Choose wisely.
– Nika Solé

small-town diner
the young widow
opens her mail

– Michael Dylan Welch

You just do not believe that you’re going to be old. People don’t realize how quickly they’re going to be old, either. Time goes very fast.
– Doris Lessing

We must learn to keep the Balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility. Who am I – though I have the power to do it – to punish and reward, playing with men’s destinies?
– Ursula Le Guin

Jung once told me that he made it a great point to see if his patients had a sense of humor. People who have no sense of humor are very difficult to treat and if they are psychotic they are practically incurable.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

It’s better to conquer grief than to deceive it.
– Seneca

Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines.
– Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.
– Goethe

Listening to yourself, it is not literature that you hear.
– Samuel Beckett

east or west
the same beauty
autumn wind

– Basho

tuning the cello
finches turn their heads
this way and that

– Bob Lucky

The moon is like a scimitar,
A little silver scimitar,
A-drifting down the sky.
And near beside it is a star,
A timid twinkling golden star,
That watches like an eye.

– Sara Teasdale

This is the oldest dialogue on earth.
The rhetoric of water
explodes upon the dogma of stone.

But in the invisible finale
only the poet knows how it ends.
He dips his pen in the rocks
and writes on a table
of foam.

– Cees Nooteboom

This is evil, evil…this loss of craft and pride, this joylessness, this waste. This is the work of an evil will.
– Ursula Le Guin

There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow.

– Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.
– Ezra Pound

You’re not struggling because you bought
coffee and avocados. You’re struggling because billionaires bought
Congress and
the Presidency.

FORM A UNION!

– @SEIU

The word ‘worry’ is from Old English wyrġan, which meant ‘to strangle’. That’s why we sometimes use it transitively, as in “Don’t worry yourself”; originally that meant “Don’t choke yourself.”
– @wylfcen

How did it get so late so soon?
– Dr. Seuss

You are not in the world. The world is in you.
– Sri Atmananda

It is because I dive into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.
– Clarice Lispector

We have the ability, in this generation, to imagine the world differently and construct new realities and mental categories for our planetary and ecological age.
– Lama Padma Samten

The masculine is the doing side. It carries the sword that discriminates, golden and sharp. It knows how to cut. Some things have to be cut out of our lives. All of us need that masculine . . . we need discrimination, discernment, a capacity for clarity and the courage to use a sword when necessary. The sword says, “This is what I value and will protect.”
– Marion Woodman

The weaker the consciousness of a person is, the more he or she is likely to get fixated in projection, even when the reality has long departed from it, and he or she will remain captive to the power of history, the agenda of longing, and the wheel of repetition.
– James Hollis

Posing is death. I think when you make people pose for a photograph, you kill them.
– Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously

The envious man grows lean at the success of his neighbor.
– Horace, Epistles

Each one depends upon others, and what happens to me by means of others depends upon me as regards its meaning; one does not submit to a war or an occupation as he does to an earthquake: he must take sides for or against, and the foreign wills thereby become allied or hostile. It is this interdependence which explains why oppression is possible and why it is hateful.
– Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

There is a quality of natural, effortless, innate patience in the heart-mind of every one of us. Consciously conditioning ourselves to patience and familiarizing ourselves with it will lead us to the discovery of this natural quality.
– Dza Kilung Rinpoche

I never pray or meditate, but in my mind, I pray when I create my pieces. For me, that is Buddhism.
– Kosen Ohtsubo

What is difficult is being on the surface. One gets bored there.
– Nathalie Sarraute

Grief is not gauzy; it is substantial, oppressive, a thing opaque. The weight is heaviest in the mornings, post-sleep: a leaden heart, a stubborn reality that refuses to budge.
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.
– Michel de Montaigne

I-love-you is active. It affirms itself as force — against other forces. Which ones? The thousand forces of the world, which are, all of them, disparaging forces (science, doxa, reality, reason, etc.). Or again: against language.
– Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

For sheep don’t throw up the grass to show the shepherds how much they have eaten; but, inwardly digesting their food, they outwardly produce wool and milk.
– Epictetus

In poverty and other misfortunes of life, men think friends to be their only refuge. The young they keep out of mischief, to the old they are a comfort and aid in their weakness, and those in the prime of life they stimulate to noble deeds.
– Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Put your good where it will do the most!
– Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

BURDEN STITCH
O permit thy gracious hand to gesture
Back on itself
reverse that curse faster
Than you dealt it Did you dream me vaster
In knowledge
skill
Teacher I was last or
Nearly so
of all
All you taught
How could I master
surpass enough to fluster
You
I’ll write
my name in web
Disaster
– Ashley McWaters

If you can make the reader laugh he is apt to get careless and go on reading.
– Henry Green

Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold of your mind again.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh

I took my power in my hand
And went against the world;
’T was not so much as David had,
But I was twice as bold.
I aimed my pebble, but myself
Was all the one that fell.
Was it Goliath was too large,
Or only I too small?

– Emily Dickinson

Our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration and resentment.
– Dale Carnegie

I believe there is a truth, and that it’s knowable.
– Mary McCarthy

As in the former dark age, the Christian Church alone will carry over any considerable tradition (not unaltered, nor, it may be, undamaged) of a higher mental civilization, that is, if it is not driven down into new catacombs. Gloomy thoughts, about things one cannot really know anything [of]; the future is impenetrable especially to the wise; for what is really important is always hid from contemporaries, and the seeds of what is to be are quietly germinating in the dark in some forgotten corner, while everyone is looking at Stalin or Hitler, or reading illustrated articles on Beveridge.

– Tolkien

Perhaps the novel will die because we’ll become so damn sick of talking about ourselves.
– Joy Williams

I approach the work as though, in truth, I’m nothing and the words are everything.
– Louise Erdrich

Once you learn how to create your own happiness, no one can take it from you!
– Robert Tew

The Witch’s Daughter
by Joan Murray

The witch, we knew. Because she lived below
the cliff we scrambled over. And she yelled
ten times worse than anybody’s mother. So the witch
was the one we took everyone to see. First, we’d
creep along the cliff edge soundlessly, then let out
a scream of laughter. Oh how the witch
detested laughter. To her it was a dog ripping out
her throat, or a knife doodling in her gut, or the fat
Monsignor sitting down and squeezing all her air out.


But the witch’s daughter never came out. The witch’s
daughter made herself invisible with a spell.
Yet now and then, we’d see the pair of them,
walking together, step by step, trying hard to look normal,
step by step, putting one foot down and then the other,
like everyone else on Ogden Avenue, till we
couldn’t stand it a second longer, and someone
had to shout, Look out, it’s the witch and the witch’s daughter!
And we’d dive between two cars and hide for our lives.


But sometimes in the hallway of the school
we’d see the witch’s daughter without her mother,
looking like any other kid, looking almost like us
in her brilliant disguise of an ugly blue uniform
and even having a kid’s name like the rest of us,
till someone had to shout, Look out, it’s the witch’s daughter!
And then she would run. All the way home to her mother.
Where she could be as evil as a mountain. And as cold
as the dark. And as invisible as a star.

When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.
– Octavia E. Butler

You get old and your language gets like your shoes or your kitchen gear—you don’t need fancy stuff any more.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

It was 1990 I reckon

when Martin saw God
in the peaks of a pavlova.
It’s usually Jesus people see
so he knew it was real,
but when people asked him
what God looked like,
Martin got all agitated:
like the peaks of a pavlova.

– Tom Snarsky

What wears out our soul the fastest and most severely is: Forgiving without forgetting.
– Arthur Schnitzler

Guard your time. Forget the money.
– @naval

The poem is always in charge and you have to respect that.
– Sasha Debevec-McKenney

How you react emotionally
is a choice in any situation.

– Judith Orloff

You have to destroy, annihilate, the I-thought. This is the reason you came back to this planet, so it appears. To find the ‘I’ and destroy it. This is what you should have been concentrating on all the time. This is your purpose. There is no other purpose.

– Robert Adams

Nothing is true without its opposite.
– Martin Walser

I don’t put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.
– Honore de Balzac

In that part of my memory (…)
there is a heading, which says: Incipit Vita Nova:
Here begins a new life …

– Dante Alighieri

For this very thing means depravity:
no longer feeling
how deeply one has sunk.

– Kurt Tucholsky

Me to everything: the ocean will know what to do about this.
– Nika Solé

sidewalk café
I listen to the swell
of English accents

– Ashley Capes

These organs don’t work,
Not for lack of life mind you,
But for lack of rest,
These bones shift beneath the ever hateful Sun
and I’m exhausted but I still got work to do.

– @FalsePoetic

cut apple
browning in my hand
crystal clear
all that I hold
slowly fades into nothing
– @NituYumnam

They had begun to forget: forget their own beginnings and legends, forget what little they had known about the greatness of the world. It was not yet gone, but it was getting buried: the memory of the high and the perilous. But you cannot teach that sort of thing to a whole people quickly. There was not time. And anyway you must begin at some point, with some one person.
– Gandalf (Tolkien, Unfinished Tales)

Scientific research is the best method we have for obtaining information about ourselves and about our ignorance.

– Karl Popper

barren rock
the things I’ve left
unfinished
– @lafcadiopoetry

A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery while on a detour.
– Unknown

I stand here before you tonight,
old and wise: cured of vain dreams, debauched,
wayward and haggard. The mind’s a killjoy, if
I may say so myself

– Mary Ruefle

First you have to believe you have to practice spiritual disciplines, and after practicing spiritual disciplines you come to the conclusion there is really nothing you have to do. But to get to that point, you have to practice spiritual disciplines first.

– Robert Adams

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy.
– Yevgeny Zamyatin

The equanimous heart can accept outcomes without attachment.
– Gene Richards

The waitress
gives the blind man
a special smile

– Roswitha Erler

be addicted to real dopamine
experience new things
love the people around you
eat nourishing food
live in the moment
focus on your passion
give back
listen to music
spend time in the sunshine
wanting to grow & evolve
making a difference where you can
get a good sleep
dance in the kitchen
taking it all in
move your body
quiet your mind & meditate

– everyday connection

The morning after I die
Will be cool, like those misty September dawns
When the dog-days are over
And I blink awake in white air, making strange
At a woolly light in the trees.

– Ana Blandiana, translated by Seamus Heaney

He who holds that nothingness
Is formless, flowers are visions,
Let him enter boldly!

– Gidō Shūshin
(tr. Lucien Stryk & Takashi Ikemoto)

If your joints hurt from sitting too much.

Move more.

If your joints hurt from moving too much.

Rest more.

– @moveorperish

I too would like my country back — that calm, sensible, peaceable, tolerant, rational, stable, essentially moderate Britain which extremists and rich American ignoramuses want to take from us. These, surely, are the values we should be defending.
– John Simpson

It is better to die of hunger having lived without grief and fear, than to live with a troubled spirit, amid abundance.
– Epictetus

I do not think discursively. It is not so much that I arrive at truth as that I take my start from it.
– Nikolai Berdyaev

That day I learned a person can get used to anything. Soon it all seemed normal to us, and we even joked about it…
– George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

Some people go to priests; others to poetry
– Virginia Woolf

The only way to create something that nobody hates is to ensure that it can’t be loved either.
– Brandon Sanderson

In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.
– Oliver Sacks

You are defined by what lies most deeply within you, by your values, and by your actions. The acts of others, especially those who are disordered, do not define you. Civilization has always depended on the good people doing what is necessary for the daily maintenance of their society.
– James Hollis

The will to make life beautiful was strong.
– Zora Neale Hurston

Those who will
not fortify justice
often justify force.
– Blaise Pascal

To know how to grow old is the masterwork of wisdom.
– Henri Frédéric Amiel

I’ve seen far more people’s lives ruined from psychiatric drugs than street drugs. Those who were negatively affected by street drugs could be admitted to rehab centres with endless support. Those facing damage from psychiatric drugs do not have such an outlet, they’re ignored.
– Brad Schipke

To run is not necessarily to arrive.
– Swahili Proverb

Don’t think: Look!
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

All theology knowingly or not is by definition always engaged for or against the oppressed.
– Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

How do you get through? Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt.
It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances.
– Toni Morrison

In a history paper in college I said the period / between the tsars and Leninism / was a period of transition, and my professor / wrote in the margin, ‘All periods in history / are periods of transition.’
– Stephen Dunn

The risk of making any choice is always that you might make the wrong one. We must make our choices nonetheless. Fear of being a grown-up is a poor reason to remain a child.
– Joe Abercrombie

I have not found another human bug more disgusting than that parasite who does not want to love, but does live on love.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him.

I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force.

– Carl Jung

To triumph fully, evil needs two victories, not one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil is returned. After the first victory, evil would die if the second victory did not infuse it with new life.
– Miroslav Volf

If you hate your parents, the man or the establishment, don’t show them up by getting wasted and wrapping your car around a tree. If you really want to rebel against your parents, out-learn them, outlive them, and know more than they do.
– Henry Rollins

There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons—moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on—no longer guide one’s life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.
– Emil Cioran

Ideas aren’t magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.
– Lynn Abbey

The invaders hung a swastika
The largest ever seen.
But a fresh breeze blew
And away it flew,
Never more to be seen.

– E.A. Bucchianeri

Like cartographers, the Language poets / hold tight to their non-sequitur ships.
– Alison C. Rollins, Cognitive Mapping

I love life’s casual beauty – I fear its awful strength.
– Jack Kerouac

Die to everything of yesterday so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigor and passion.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

Culture is not a battlefield. It is a garden.
– Makoto Fujimura

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.
– John Steinbeck

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.
– Seneca

When religion causes judgementalism, suspicion, and hate, there is something wrong with religion. It has become dehumanizing, and therefore it is a bad religion, and we become once more a horror and a hissing and an everlasting reproach.

– Madeleine L’Engle, Sold Into Egypt: Journeys into Human Being

A student does not know the experiences of his master, but his master has had the experience of being a student.
– Mandinka proverb

Sense melts
into a single surge of tears,
stripping away
my resolve to stay away.
– Priyanka Jaiprakash

She… lacks “warmth” by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.
– Sally Rodney; Normal People

It’s amazing just how angry some people can become if you try to take away their religion of revenge.
– Brian Zahnd

i like when it’s dark out, October will cure me.
– Isaiah Quinn

i miss being regular sad about the world and not
like, catastrophically worried and miserably horrified
– Chen Chen

Women drown in their own blood, sweat, or tears, wake up as holograms, and no one reads the audit or autopsy.
– Harmony Holiday

The feminine isn’t fragile, she’s voltage. The masculine’s job is to ground it or get burned.
– Sarah Westlid

Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the clout?
– Frank Herbert

The first night Dad didn’t come home he stayed in a tent. Close enough to the house that we could see the lantern shining through the green mesh tarp.
– L.J. Bowden, The Lack of Noise

Neurodivergent isn’t a dirty word.
– Wendy Brown

Learning the stories of the other religions and cultures is a secret weapon against prejudice.
– Kayla Love

One doesn’t recognize the really important moments in one’s life until it’s too late.
– Agatha Christie

Don’t write so that you can be understood, write so that you can’t be misunderstood.
– William Howard Taft

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.
– John Ruskin

My disability is not an open mic for your diet tips.
– Wendy Brown

I don’t know if this is true to you but for me
sometimes it gets so bad
that anything else
say like
looking at a bird on an overhead
power line
seems as great as a Beethoven symphony.
then you forget it and you’re back
again.
– Charles Bukowski

What if Galileo
Had been too afraid
Of rejection
To share his discovery
That reoriented
Our view
Of the universe?

What if Martin Luther King Jr.
Had feared his dream
Was too idealistic
To share?

What if Jesus or any
Of the great, persecuted
Spiritual teachers
Thought love might be
Too dangerous?

What if Rumi
Feared,
“My words might not make
Logical sense. Perhaps it’s best
To keep them quiet.”

What if Einstein concluded
Science
Was already complete?

What if DaVinci
Questioned his value,
Wondered if the Mona Lisa
Had already been done?

What if anyone
Brave enough to create change
Opted instead for silence,
For safety?

Leadership is a great confrontation
Of our perception
Of humanity’s limitations—

And many are not ready
For the light that comes with it.
Raise your torch anyway.

Leadership breaks the cage—
And many are not ready to be free.
Liberate possibility nonetheless.

Suffering is largely
Our silenced, aborted dreams,
Our harbored brilliance,
Our tethered truth
Our visionary veiling,
Our rejected revolution.

The new world, the new way
Lives within each of us.
Each of us is worthy
To do our part
In bringing it forth

And there is no greater
Or more marvelous

Risk.

– Chelan Harkin

I’ve decided that what I’m lacking in my life is a Leonard Cohen soundtrack.
– Meg Pokrass

For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.
– Jean Dubuffet

It is not that the centre will not hold. It is that one political party’s discourse and agenda have spun so far outside an empirically-based reality that there is no possibility of rational debate or conversation .
– Clifton Lee

WHILE FLIPPING PAGES

While flipping pages
out of the old green Rand McNally,
pressed between North Dakota and Ohio
fell a handful of faded rose petals,
once yellow, now brown.
Brittle and strangely flat,
they hardly resemble the flowers
they were when they came to me
in an exuberant bouquet.
The petals are dried past pretty,
pale and dead, and still
there is something lovely about them,
the symmetry of the darkened veins,
how smooth they are, like skin.
I, too, am more fragile,
twenty winters older since
I slipped these petals into
the weight of the atlas,
and part of me shakes my head
at that naïve girl who so wanted
to try to save something beautiful.
And part of me thanks her.
She could not then have known
how on an late summer night
I would discover them again,
and, surprised, take a sniff and find,
could it be? a faint sweet scent.
Some nights, even the tiniest bit of beauty
is enough to shake us wildly awake,
reminding us there is so much
yet to bloom, so much we still long
to give to the world.

– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

YOUR SIGNATURE SELF

After years of thinking you have to be perfect, you finally come to the art of acceptance. You realize that the practice is really about being more as you are and who you are. I like to think of this as embracing your “signature self.” Your signature self is totally unique and full of all kinds of quirks and idiosyncrasies. Each of us is a patchwork, hodgepodge, polymorphous thing. No one is normal. In today’s parlance we are each “neurodivergent.” Your signature personality is full of oddities just as your body is full of twists and torques. It is never straight and far from perfect.

The writer Ann Lamott put it this way, “We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.” The “becoming who you were born to be” has a nice ring to it. But what about the wonky and messy side? It takes years to give yourself the green light to accept your own failings and foibles. How many years have you spent trying to get the gold star, trying to fit in, be liked and be good? How many sessions on the mat, trying to perfectly balance your hips or be the Buddha? As Mary Oliver put it, each of us has traveled 100 miles through the desert on our hands and knees trying in vain to become someone other than ourselves.

Now when you grow up with someone or have been married a long time your original self becomes all too obvious. In family, you get to know the signature self of your sister, your brother, your spouse and your cat and they come to know yours. And if it is a loving relationship, then you feel at ease. You don’t have to try to be anyone special. But when you sit down to meditate, you may tear into yourself, critiquing, blaming, condemning. As strange as it may sound, it takes a long to be as you are with no embellishments, no airs.

This is the practice of Radical Acceptance. I like to think of this as “namaste practice.” Try this. Whatever arises in your meditation, whether it be sorrow or delight, attraction or aversion, greet it by bringing your two hands together. Immediately. Admit, acknowledge and affirm neither rejecting nor clinging. This is the practice of loving kindness, the very source of empathy and compassion. And it starts at home, inside of you. In this way you can learn, as W.H. Auden once said, to “love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart.”

– Tias Little

The things which the child loves remains in the domain of the heart until old age. The most beautiful thing in life is that our souls remain hovering over the places where we once enjoyed ourselves. I am one of those who remember those places regardless of time and place.

– Kahlil Gibran

You should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you.
– Martha C. Nussbaum

Anger is about status injury.
– Martha Nussbaum

She tapped her chest with her fingertips. “We are born with everything in here; everything we need to be happy and complete. But as soon as things start frightening us, we give away pieces of ourselves to make the fear go away. That’s the deal: you want it to stop scaring you, so you give it a part of yourself. You give away your pride, your dignity, or your courage. When all you feel is fear, you do not need dignity. So you do not mind giving it away– at that moment. But you will later. You will need all those pieces later. By then though they are gone; you cannot ask them for help.”

– Jonathan Carroll

Everything is hard—making money is hard, watching your body change is hard. You can take these problems when you’re young—something’s difficult for a while, but you’re confident. If it doesn’t work out, you’ll do something else.
– Louise Glück

To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
– Kurt Vonnegut

As Jacob Boehme puts it, “I am a string in the concert of God’s joy.”… We need to experience our own personal aliveness as part of that greater cosmic aliveness…When I become “a string in the concert of God’s joy,” I am “sounded through” by the music, and in that sounding, in harmonic resonance with all the other instruments, is revealed both my irreplaceable uniqueness and my inescapable belonging.

– Cynthia Bourgeault

I think Oscar Wilde is right when he defines love in De Profundis as giving what one does have and receiving that over which one has no power. To love is to commit oneself to another not without the guarantee that love will be returned, but with the hope that it might be. Love takes place in the subjunctive mood: it may be, it might be, would that it were the case. The logic of love is akin to the logic of grace.
– Simon Critchley

My intuition—it is nothing more than that—is that music, common, shared, everyday music, low or high or somewhere in between, is able, at its best, to describe how we feel and to allow us to feel something more.
– Simon Critchley

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

You must be ready to accept the possibility that there is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them.
– Bardo Thodol

What I hide by my language, my body utters
– Roland Barthes

Another day, in the rain, we’re waiting for the boat at the lake; from happiness, this time, the same outburst of annihilation sweeps through me. This is how it happens sometimes, misery or joy engulfs me, without any particular tumult ensuing: nor any pathos: I am dissolved, not dismembered; I fall, I flow, I melt. Such thoughts grazed, touched, tested (the way you test the water with your foot)-can recur. Nothing solemn about them. This is exactly what gentleness is.
– Roland Barthes

when i think of us i think of the lakewater
near longtown, what might not technically
constitute a lake but i prefer that word for
the open mouth of its vowel, how it called
us to its throat & held us there, in the sun,
the high points of our faces slick with light
& its arc around our shoulders, the soft
gathering of flesh around our knees,
the lone chair we found near the shore
where we took turns posing, jutting out
an eloquent hip, cackling in the bright language
of flowers for whom i downloaded an app
& learned their names: beautyberry, yarrow,
cornus florida, black-eyed susan, & you,
& you, my bright hibiscus, my every color

– Safia Elhillo

Feel with the brain, think with the heart, act practically.
– A. R. Orage

Even now, after centuries of reductionist propaganda, the world is still intricate and vast, as dark as it is light, a place of mystery, where we cannot do one thing without doing many things, or put two things together without putting many things together.
– Wendell Berry

“Boxing’s not that straightforward,” said Eldric. “You can practice and practice, but the real experience will always be different. Lots of things are like that, actually.”
– Franny Billingsley

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance – by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.
– Robert Hayden

Many of us resist transition because we fear the journey found in the liminal space, where there is no clear direction forward. But in order to arrive at a new beginning, we must go through it. Much like the chrysalis of a butterfly or the gestational period in the womb, the liminal stage is marked by a period of waiting in the dark.

– Kristen Roderick

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
– George Orwell

Like so many other pathological personalities in positions of power a million years ago, he might do almost anything on impulse, feeling nothing much. The logical explanations for his actions, invented at leisure, always came afterwards.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Like everyone else I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of ancestral promptings and urgings; a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, all of which I am the sum total.
– Charlie Chaplin

Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.
– Carl Jung

Cultivating loyalty is no small thing. George Orwell, for example, considered preferential loyalty to be the “essence of being human.” Critiquing Gandhi’s recommendation — that we must have no close friendships or exclusive loves because these will introduce loyalty and favoritism, preventing us from loving everyone equally — Orwell retorted that “the essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty … and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.
– The Myth of Universal Love – NYTimes.com

I believe in the power of laughter and tears as an antidote to hatred and terror.
– Charles Chaplin

September 1892

The sea refreshes our imagination because it does
not make us think of human life; yet it rejoices the
soul, because, like the soul, it is an infinite and
impotent striving, a strength that is ceaselessly
broken by falls, an eternal and exquisite lament.
The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike
language, never bears the traces of things, never
tells us anything about human beings, but imitates
the stirrings of the soul. Sweeping up with the
waves of those movements, plunging back with
them, the heart thus forgets its own failures and
finds solace in an intimate harmony between its
own sadness and the sea’s sadness, which merges
the sea’s destiny with the destinies of all things.

– Marcel Proust, The Sea

Because
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

So I can’t save the world—
can’t save even myself,
can’t wrap my arms around
every frightened child, can’t
foster peace among nations,
can’t bring love to all who
feel unlovable.
So I practice opening my heart
right here in this room and being gentle
with my insufficiency. I practice
walking down the street heart first.
And if it is insufficient to share love,
I will practice loving anyway.
I want to converse about truth,
about trust. I want to invite compassion
into every interaction.
One willing heart can’t stop a war.
One willing heart can’t feed all the hungry.
And sometimes, daunted by a task too big,
I tell myself what’s the use of trying?
But today, the invitation is clear:
to be ridiculously courageous in love.
To open the heart like a lilac in May,
knowing freeze is possible
and opening anyway.
To take love seriously.
To give love wildly.
To race up to the world
as if I were a puppy,
adoring and unjaded,
stumbling on my own exuberance.
To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.

No one can claim to be immune to the spirit of
his own epoch or to possess anything like a
complete knowledge of it. Regardless of our
conscious convictions, we are all without
exception, in so far as we are particles in the
mass, gnawed at and undermined by the spirit
that runs through the masses. Our freedom
extends only as far as our consciousness
reaches.

– Carl G. Jung

I believe history has a habit of repeating itself, that’s for sure, but one of things I’m critical of my country on is that we don’t seem to take note of the lessons that history teaches us. My country is pretty prone to everything wanting to be black and white, or red, white and blue. And in my experience of life, nothing was ever that simple. No one was dealing with the grey areas. So I decided to become a filmmaker so I could deal with that.
– Robert Redford

Riprap

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

– Gary Snyder

What makes the ego grow, according to Jung, is what he calls “collisions.” In other words, conflict, trouble, anguish, sorrow, suffering. These are what lead the ego to develop.
– Murray Stein

A writer is an explorer. She knows she wants to get somewhere, but she doesn’t know if the somewhere even exists yet. It is still to be created. Don’t sit around looking inward… You have to propel yourself outward, young writer.
– Colum McCann

You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.
– G.K. Chesterton

The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction.
– Brion Gysin

The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
– Carl Sagan

The older you get…the deeper the love you need.
– Leonard Cohen

CONTINUITY

If we believe in the continuity of mind, then love inconspicuously connects us to the ones we love with continuous positive energy, so that even tangible separations between people who love each other do not reduce the intangible power of love.

If we believe that mind is continuous, our love for others becomes continuous.

– Thinley Norbu Rinpoche

Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.
– David Abram

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

The older I get, the more I find that you can only live with beings who liberate you, who love you with an affection that is as light to bear as it is strong to feel. Life today is too hard, too bitter, too debilitating for us to suffer new bondages, new captivities from those whom we love. This is how I am your friend: I love your happiness, your freedom, your adventure, in a word – and I would like to be, for you, a companion you can be sure of, always.
– Albert Camus

Man finds himself on the earth whether he likes it or not, with nowhere else to go. What then is to become of him? Obviously we can’t stand still or we shall be destroyed. Then if there is no room for us on the outside we shall, in spite of ourselves, have to go in: into the cell, the atom, the poetic line, for our discoveries. We have to break the old apart to make room for ourselves, whatever may be our tragedy and however we may fear it.
– William Carlos Williams

This day of torment, of craziness, of foolishness—only love can make it end in happiness and joy.
– W. A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte

The reason I have begun to shy away from the Divine Feminine and the Sacred Masculine is their unfortunate identification with gender and, more importantly, their overidentification with humans and their myopic classifications generally.

Animacy is plushier. Springier. More mosslike. It seems a soft spot to rest on while I try to understand and explain how very sentient the world is to me these days. I am attracted to the constellations of meaning that sparkle like distant stars inside the word anima: breath, spirit, soul. And animate: to give vigor or life, to ensoul. I enjoy the animal itself, furred, horned, hoofed, clawed, scaled, and indeterminate, that bucks and bays and howls inside the word. I enjoy how philosophers try to clip it grammatically, like a twitchy nerve, and it keeps flinching away. It is a term I think most closely related to the original meaning of the word spell: the performative utterance. To summon magic. To myth. To story. To make happen.

Animacy is the degree to which the referent of a noun is sentient. It is the “soul” that invigorates syntax with something very much beyond language. Ultimately, I am a poet, and my choices often originate from a darker soil than common sense. Animacy, to my poet self, seems the “everything” of my actual lived ecosystem. The bright-blue darning needles weaving through thimbleweed and clover. The vultures wheeling through a hazy sky. The microbes in my gut, keeping me alive and nourished. The mycelium below my feet, holding the soil together.

The opposite of anthropocentrism is not any Divine Gender. The opposite of anthropocentrism is Everything. And what a tender beautiful thing it is to walk outside on a bright spring morning. Swathes of clementine light wash the pollen from the bricks of a nearby building. The robin’s song is like the key turning in a lock. A handful of doves float down from the red-green cloud of a newly foliated maple tree. What a relief to realize that, unlike Adam and Eve, we haven’t been severed from the Garden. The Everything still includes us. The Everything is us, but it needs something in return. It needs us to melt our ideas of sentience as a purely human property. Or as a purely animal property. Or as a purely individual property. Relationships are sentient. Anima is the inhalation, carrying molecules and spores and pheromones into our bodies from the landscape. And then we exhale, sharing cells that have clung to our deepest cells, slept inside the pith of our blood. With every exhalation we decant ourselves back into the world.

How could we be one, or two, or three? We are more gerund than cold, hard noun. More animacy than strictly animal. We ensoul the world and are ensouled in return. Our myths about individuation and linearity no longer hold all the trouble. And all the love. We need to stop sticking out our two hands like it proves everything comes in oppositional dualisms. How many hands does the tree have? The peony? The pileated woodpecker? How many hands is the mycelium using to crochet intimacy from plant to tree to plant through the soil?

Divine Feminine just isn’t big enough for all the relationships holding and constituting me these days. She thins my language into a one-toone relationship. Even if she includes saints and “mother earth” and all women, it’s easy to slip into the language of the singular. One mother. One relationship. One sacred gender expression. One temporality. One thinking animal. One species. I’m not throwing her out, the Divine Feminine. I’m throwing her in. Melting her down. Mixing her into the messier, polytemporal animacy of everything I touch, change, and become.

The animate earth is a verb. An assemblage of verbs. A mycorrhizal system sewing together a whole forest. A shared breath. A midsummer celebration where everyone is invited.

– Sophie Strand

The mystical life is often expressed as a journey, an itinerary, that takes us from a condition of dereliction and woe to a state of weal and even deification, becoming God-like. It offers a path from sin to salvation, from restlessness to rest, from misery to joy. It is a form of elevation or healing that does not have to culminate in union with the divine, but which is intensely focused on the presence of God as experienced by the consciousness of the mystic.

We can draw closer to mysticism if we think obliquely, autobiographically, vernacularly, performatively, practically, erotically, and ascetically. Mysticism is a singular form of floating attention—what I call passive activity or active passivity. It is necessary to mobilize simultaneously all seven adverbs if we are to glean mysticism’s meaning, its core, its magma: love.

– Simon Critchley

We find an almost unconscious, quasi-involuntary remembering and reiteration of mystical themes and figures: desert, darkness, annihilation, fire, nothingness, poverty. God is experienced as both far and near, as what the Brabant mystic Hadewijch of Antwerp (active circa 1250) calls “the ravishing far-near.” There is an ever-repeated emphasis upon the experience of wounding, pain, distress, and dereliction. But also, as a countermovement, upon rapture, sweetness, birthing the word or logos in the soul, and the possibility of deification. Love is felt as a wound and what might heal that wound. It is illuminating to sit and read McGinn for eight minutes or eight hours with a kind of sustained, but floating and non-linear, attention. When it comes to approaching mysticism, it is often better to think of circles rather than lines and see the movement of reflection as a form of repeated looping, sampling, and delving.

[..]

But this is simply not how mystical texts, sometimes anonymous or pseudonymous, were disseminated. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, texts were copied, duplicated, and transmitted in smaller and smaller pieces. These compilations should not be seen as the distortions of some pure original text, but as forms of production and reproduction with a consistency and legitimacy of their own. They use a variety of languages, with shifts from Latin to the vernacular and sometimes back again. In other words, there is no reason to give priority to the Book or book learning within mysticism. Texts were on many occasions read aloud. Marguerite Porete (d. 1310) talks about “hearers” in her book. To approach mysticism sympathetically, it is more helpful to think of texts as performed for a certain effect. This is an affective effect, with a theological and political impact on a community of listeners, participants, or celebrants rather than silent individual readers. In this regard, a fragment or extract may have more significance than a whole book.

[..]

What is at stake in mysticism is a different kind of rigor. This is not the rigor mortis of academic philosophy, with its fantasies of neatly ordered historical subdivisions and its lists of great books. Reading mystical texts is lateral, associative, cumulative, and synthetic, rather than linear, progressive, parsimonious, and analytic. I find this intrinsically interesting as a way of reading, and I also wonder whether it may not present a useful analogy to the way in which culture functions. I’m thinking in particular of how we stream music.

– Simon Critchley

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name ‘em, I ate ‘em.
– Ray Bradbury

Men hate those to whom they have to lie.

Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use.

Knowing exactly how much of the future can be introduced into the present is the secret of great government.

Humankind’s wounds, those huge sores that litter the world, do not stop at the blue and red lines drawn on maps.

– Victor Hugo

The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost.

– Jorge Luis Borges

As one goes through it, one sees that the gate one went through was the self that went through it.
– R. D. Laing

Our mental cosmos teems with a thicker texture of invisibles than ever before. Living with invisible forces used to mean spirits, ghosts, gods, angels, and ancestors. Our view of nature now supplies different familiar ghosts, including all the wispy tangles, tinctures, and driblets of a working body being revealed to us as never before through technology and nanotechnology. We take for granted the vast invisible worlds surrounding and inside of us. It’s a sort of high-tech shamanism (the belief that spirits inhabit all things, living or nonliving). Some entities may hide in the holly bush at the front door; others float light-years away.
– Diane Ackerman

A nation is a story that a people chooses to tell about itself, and at its heart is a stumbling but deep-felt need for those people to be connected to the place they live and to each other. Humans in all times and places have needed ancestors, history, a place to be and a sense of who they are as a collective, and modernity and rationalism have not abolished these needs [for belonging]. […] If we want to see what a world without belonging would look like, we have only to look around. If an identity is an alliance between people and places, then airport-lounge modernity means taking the places out of the picture. All that is left is people who could be anywhere: citizens of nowhere, consumers of objects and experiences, connected by their little screens […].

[The word] parochial denotes the small and the particular and the specific. It can also mean insular and narrow-minded, but it doesn’t have to, any more than ‘cosmopolitan’ has to mean snobbish and rootless. This negative meaning has attached itself to the word because contemporary globalized culture is resolutely anti-parochial. It sets out to destroy local particularity and our attachment to it, because if we remain attached to it we may not buy into the placeless nowhere civilization that is being built around the globe in the name of money.

– Paul Kingsnorth

The World I Live In
I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway,
what’s wrong with Maybe?
You wouldn’t believe what once or
twice I have seen. I’ll just
tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
ever, possibly, see one.

– Mary Oliver

What is this darkness? What is its name? Call it: an aptitude for sensitivity. Call it: a rich sensitivity which will make you whole. Call it: your potential for vulnerability.
– Meister Eckhart

Where there is danger, that which will save us also grows.
– Iain McGilchrist

Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle — for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.
– Virginia Woolf

Don’t let your life be governed by what disturbs you.
– Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri

In the mirror of this night I come across my eternal face, unknown to me. The circle is about to close. I wait for it to happen.
– Jorge Luis Borges

WHAT WILL YOU MISS ABOUT THE EARTH?
—after Bhanu Kapil

That it spun.
That everything was a portrait of gravity.

The smell of a new body, newly close,
ready to love.

– Megan Fernandes

Not Trying to Win No Prize

When I listen to rain, I give up,
especially the early, acoustic stuff.
I ain’t no monkey but I got a bell on my bike.
How do you mend a broken etcetera?
That’s me giving up.
Still the great pulse of pointlessness
drives me forward although I don’t know
what qualifies as forward. A flower?
Death? There’s a waterfall between us
that can drown out almost any scream
all to the good. I don’t know if you’re ready
to be confronted with the small black screw
that fell out of you in the library
but who is? Now I want to say something
about giraffes, their long blue tongues
and what was thought of until recently
as their total silence.

– Dean Young

A major health cheat code is living in a place that’s walkable. Walking to get coffee, hike, go to the gym, or even grab a meal is one of the best silent health luxuries no one talks about.
– Dan Go

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!
– Psalm 133:1

Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union. Loneliness is small, solitude is large.
– Kent Nerburn

Few men are so humble as not to be proud of their abilities, and nothing will abase them more than this: what hast thou, but what thou hast received? Come, give an account of thy stewardship.

– Anne Bradstreet

We are frightened of losing everything we have gained, understood and gathered. We are frightened of not being. We are frightened of the unknown.
– Krishnamurti

Do not be frightened or seduced by the projections of your own mind, but recognize the Buddha.
– Kenneth Folk

HUMAN ACHIEVEMENTS

this morning I woke up, and I only wanted to tell the truth. like, last night was a total error in judgement; I am mismanaging my life. I’d hire a replacement if one should apply. there are two girls inside me that have been killed. nonviolently snuffed out by persistent doubt and reckless influence. I am taking my lap- top into the tub, I am going to write a letter. to my father, I will say, forget the medals, I went for medals. this letter becomes a book titled Continual Failure and Disappointment; my editor will rename it, Human Achievements. my father will say, the gold, the gold, but really delights in the calculated leap. I stay quiet and swing low. swing low until the sun sets, and I feel free.

– Lauren Hunter

Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.
– Thomas Szasz

first day of school
a wave of nervousness
floods the hallway
– Nitu Yumnam

It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us.

– Jane Austen

On a gangrened planet, we should abstain from making plans, but we make them still, optimism being, as we know, a dying man’s reflex.
– Emil Cioran

Water mixed with night is an old remorse that will not sleep
– Bachelard

In low theologies, hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell.
– George MacDonald

Churchill said that when one find’s oneself lost in a dark wood, keep walking. Jung said that at the bottom of every depression & there is always a bottom there, one will find a task, the addressing of which will take one’s life in a new direction.
– James Hollis

If you think that this world is real because it appears, then conclude that mirage-water also is real, because it also appears.
– Ramana Maharshi

What amazes me is that there’ve been great, acclaimed novels for at least eighty years that’ve described in grim detail the dangers of biometric security and surveillance as part of systems of containment and control, and yet such things still can be so casually introduced.
– Bernard T. Joy

When you’re lacking motivation, remind yourself: discipline now, freedom later. The labor will pass, and the rewards will last.
– Ryan Holiday

The fact is that all writers create their precursors.
Their work modifies our conception of the past,
just as it is bound to modify the future.
– Jorge Luis Borges

People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.
– Nietzsche

Even when I am
alone, I have real good
company – dreams
and imaginations and
pretendings.

– L.M. Montgomery

The world says: You have needs – satisfy
them. You have as much right as the rich and
the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your
needs; indeed, expand your needs and
demand more. This is the worldly doctrine of
today. And they believe that this is freedom.
The result for the rich is isolation and
suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.
– Dostoevsky

Suffering is the
privilege of those who
feel.
– Clarice Lispector

You’re only making a mess by trying to put things straight.

You’re trying to straighten out a wiggly world
and no wonder you’re in trouble.

– Alan Watts

this pine tree that
witnessed the age of the gods
embracing the autumn

– Basho

Be quiet in your mind, quiet in your senses, and also quiet in your body. Then, when all these are quiet, don’t do anything. In that state, truth will reveal itself to you.

– Kabir

Poetry has more in common with worship than with philosophy and theology.
– Helen Gardner

How kindly will thy gentle heart
Kiss the sweetly-killing dart!
And close in his embraces keep
Those delicious wounds, that weep
Balsam to heal themselves with.
– Richard Crashaw

Sleep is the shadow of death, but not only that.
Sleep is a hint of lovely oblivion.
When I am gone, completely lapsed and gone
and healed from all this ache of being.

– D.H. Lawrence

Phantom Pains

Only when I laugh.
Only when I hear a clock
ticking in a snowman’s chest.
When I hear about people having sex
with robots. The secrets of my afterlife
debated by lunatics while I try
to feed the ducks. Any story involving
a tangerine or I think of California
or California thinks of me.
When the lights flick on and off,
each time brighter, each time dark.
The world is six-sided like a snowflake.
Like the mind. Whenever I pass a red dress
in a window or reflection or pretty much
any red flutter. Whenever I catch myself
with too many peaches in my cart.
Whenever I hear a train and it rains
and the rain is fire and the world’s
an opal and my heart a twig.

– Dean Young

Till this moment I never knew myself.
– Jane Austen

If you work hard, you will make your way to the inner circle of knowledge. That is the end goal of mastery: an inside-out understanding.
– Robert Greene

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.
– Frank O’Hara

We have always needed trees, and trees have always held our stories for us, even before we could assign them human nomenclature.
– Shivanee Ramlochan

The universe is bigger than your view of the universe. There’s always room for a new idea.
– Prof. Feynman

God does not want you to get back to heaven; God wants you to know that you are in heaven now. God wants you to know that you never left the Kingdom of God.
– Neale Donald Walsch

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
– Søren Kierkegaard

at the tavern
the autumn night
is forgotten

– Issa

For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.
– Hebrews 13:14

so does anyone know how to end mass religious psychosis or is it just a thing now until we slowly die off from climate induced disasters?
– @buggirl

At this point I hope we have realized we should be fearing fitting in rather than standing out in this realm.
– @Bay17d__

The life of a Christian is nothing but a perpetual struggle against self; there is no flowering of the soul to the beauty of its perfection except at the price of pain.
– Padre Pio

Indeed, does not a word surpass a good gift? Both are to be found in a gracious man.
– Sirach 18:17

Remember that this is not something we do just once or twice. Interrupting our destructive habits and awakening our heart is the work of a lifetime.
– Pema Chodron

We’re all always trying to return to the vibration of heaven and the universe around us is actively helping us get there.
– Nika Solé

As long as you believe you’re enjoying the world and your life as a human being, you cannot awaken.

– Robert Adams

See how you can be of maximum use to the people around you – then you will naturally act appropriately.
– Sadhguru

He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.
– C.S. Lewis

The vast bulk of men are not pure individuals, and never will be, for the pure individual is a rarity, almost a kind of freak. The vast bulk of men need to belong to a self-governing group, a tribe, a nation, an empire. It is a necessity like the necessity to eat food.
– D.H. Lawrence

Now, when my work expresses loss or failure, I no longer say, get rid of that.
– Mei Mei Berssenbrugge

This is not where you stop or get defeated. This is where you lean in with the full weight of the energy you have invested in your own becoming. This is where you shake the ground. This is where you rise up.
– Nika Solé

Although it is so dark
I know her practised step.

– John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, Night Rain

Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles, lest the Lord see it and be displeased, and turn away his anger from him.
– Proverbs 24:17-18

You may have brilliant ideas, the kind that could revolutionize the world, but unless you can express them effectively, they will have no force, no power to enter people’s minds in a deep and lasting way.
– Robert Greene

We have the power either of withstanding the spring, and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going on into those ‘high mid-summer pomps’ in which our leader, the Son of man, already dwells, and to which He is calling us.

– C.S. Lewis, The Grand Miracle

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.
– Walter Benjamin

Accept with equanimity whatever happens.
For pleasure and pain are mere mental modes.

– Sri Ramana Maharshi

Forth now, and fear no darkness!

– Théoden (Tolkien, The Return of the King)

The degradation of culture abets the degradation of politics.
– @AdamsOrArdor

Each time I read Shakespeare it seems to me that I cut to shreds the brain of a jaguar.

– Lautreamont

Learn to sell, learn to build, if you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
– @naval

Karma
by Sarah Crossan

If I were back in Gdańsk, I wouldn’t be friends
With a new girl either.
If I still had Magdalena
To copy homework from
And sit with at lunch,
I’d ignore a new girl too,
Like we snubbed Alexandra who stood
Far enough away
To be discreet.
Close enough to be invited.

We just ignored her.

We played tennis, pretended not to notice
She was holding a racket and
Wearing shorts with pockets.
Why did we do that?

But we weren’t mean to her.
We didn’t whisper and laugh,
Avoid touching her in case we caught something.

We simply ignored her.

Two members of your family next to an azalea bush in a polaroid, misfocused.
– Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

they made you into
a weapon and told you to find
peace.
– unfinished poems iii |/ s.z

Realize that now, in this moment of time, you are creating. You are creating your next moment based on what you are feeling and thinking. That is what’s real.
– Doc Childre

The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.
– Charles Simic

If you love them more than the fight, end the fight. An apology loses its warmth if it waits too long. Do it now, before the years turn cold.
– James Clear

We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair;
– 2 Corinthians 4:8

The dream of life is really an illusion, and everybody lives in the reality he or she creates – a virtual reality that is only true for the one who creates it.
– Miguel Ruiz

The role of every comedian is to say something that people can’t say.
– Lenny Bruce

I lie on my bunk in the moonlit night
on my stomach and contemplate
the bottomless horror of
the world…
– Jack Kerouac

I’m here for the
same reason you are
– equal rights for all.
Like you, I believe
there’s no place in
our world for
discrimination.
None. I think it is
un-American.
– Robert Redford

Read something that makes your brain and your heart sizzle and then please aspire to that.
– Brooke Warner

“For every moment I miss,” he said, “there are unexpected grace moments that I’m not expecting that occur as well.”
– Jonathan Foust

Whenever an answer, a solution, or a creative idea is needed, stop thinking for a moment by focusing your attention on your inner energy field. Become aware of the stillness.
– Eckhart Tolle

to be eternal one must be ruinous
– Anna de Noailles

You weren’t too much.
You were alive in a system that punished expression.
So you shrank. You hid. You turned your power into silence.
Now that you’re waking up again, don’t confuse
their discomfort for your wrongness.
– Dr. Gabriel Barsawme, LSW

ever since
we met
i’ve no sky
other than you
– @lostvalley0

No one is capable of making you upset without your consent, so if you begin practicing the intention to be authentic and peaceful with everyone, you connect to peace itself.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer

The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.
– C.S. Lewis, Learning in Wartime

Be careful around people who tell you what they think you want to hear, but leave an alarm going off in your stomach.
– Nate Postlethwait

The moment that you rest, thinking that you have attained the level you desire, a part of your mind enters a phase of decay.
– Robert Greene

Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life.

To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

– Alan Watts

Open up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

– Terrance McKenna

A man who needs the unusual to make him “wonder” shows that he has lost the capacity to find the true answer to the wonder of being.
– Josef Pieper

…the desolation was now filled with birds and blossoms in spring and fruit and feasting in autumn…and there was friendship in those parts between elves and dwarves and men.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

The classics can console. But not enough.
– Derek Walcott

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

The truest way to decline is just to say, “it doesn’t feel right to me.”

No explanation is necessary.

– @naval

The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.
– Jack Kornfield

People who equate exercise with therapy confuse feeling better with getting better.
– unknown

The best way to avenge yourself is not to become as they are.
– Marcus Aurelius

He that hath knowledge spareth his words: and a man of understanding is of an excellent spirit.
– Proverbs 17:27

Doubt is a homage paid to hope. It is not a voluntary homage. Hope would not consent to be merely a homage.

– Lautreamont

Every thought we think is creating our future.
– Louise L. Hay

Being disliked by the wrong people is a good sign.
– Nithya Shri

And the Divine Nature can change the past. Nothing is yet in its true form.
– C.S. Lewis

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
– Albert Camus

You won’t have inner peace until you give up your war against the world.
– @naval

I remember walking into the museum lobby and seeing that Frank had a big yellow pad and was writing in this gigantic hand a poem called ‘It’s the Blue.’
– James Schuyler, On Frank O’Hara

Shifting how we talk to ourselves so that we consciously, purposefully refuse to echo how our bullies & abusers talked to us is a daily discipline that we’re not going to be great at at first– & that we get better at w/ time & practice.

Just keep trying. It’s all practice.

– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle

The spiritual impulse is to grow out of self-image.
– Adyashanti

The high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.
– Albert Einstein

Inspiration is perishable – act on it immediately.
– @naval

It’s really strange that we
still call it a computer.
– Andy Perrin

Democracy depends on a fearless and free press.

Corporations or ultra-wealthy individuals with many other business interests should not be allowed to control our media.

They cannot be trusted to prioritize the public’s right to know over their own financial interests.

– Robert Reich

Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.
– Marcus Aurelius

We are the dance of life, said the rock with teeth. We are a synthesis of hearts and minds. Wonders of the world!
– Voima Oy

Sedentary professional people are the first to take up any fantastic illusion which comes their way.
– Kierkegaard, The Present Age

…but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!

“Thank goodness!” said Bilbo laughing.

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

On the subject of love / I have only a single observation— / if you love a grapefruit, you cut it open // and eat its flesh.

– Ben Mirov

Since they hated knowledge and did not choose to reverence I AM, they will eat the fruit of their ways and be filled with the fruits of their schemes
– Proverbs 1:29,31

The folks who know the truth aren’t talking…The ones who don’t have a clue, you can’t shut them up!
– Tom Waits

Giving and receiving is the economy of our souls. This will fill you, and if you are not careful it will radicalize you.
– Anne Lamott

The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
– Maximilien Robespierre

For when we say of created things that A rules B this must mean that God rules B through A.
– C.S. Lewis

Truly caring about art and literature is a form of resistance. It doesn’t lead to earning lots of money or into high society or to any of what we are told to want. Yet it gives us empathy and a love of beauty, and thus makes us richer than all the wealth in the world could.
– @iconawrites

Morals themselves remain subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we are without that clue and supreme norm by which to appraise them correctly.
– Immanuel Kant

Art is irreversibly corrupted the moment someone mistakes price for worth.
– Dr. Hartnett

I’m seventeen and I’m crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.
– Ray Bradbury

When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.
– Umberto Eco

The citizens of a free state suffer themselves to be oppressed merely in proportion as, hurried on by a blind ambition, and looking rather below than above them, they come to love authority more than independence.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.
– J. M. Coetzee

Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.
– Winston Churchill

In the long run, men only hit what they aim at.
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn’t mean anything. You’ve become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.
– Cormac McCarthy

You will have to change, but it is because the world must change too. You change by becoming more aware of the self and the world, and by doing so, you begin to improve both through the creative effort of compassion.
– Suli Qyre

Art is this intense form of individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public have always, and in every age, been badly brought up.
– Oscar Wilde

When I say poetry heals, I don’t mean it makes things sweet or nice. I mean it makes things visible. What’s visible can be moved.
– Yrsa Daley-Ward

If you don’t retain your rights, if you don’t fight back, they’re going to be even harder to claw back.
– Maria Ressa

I must remain a nuisance to my enemies
– June Jordan

Though I aspire to pacifism, it’s not my first impulse. / My first impulse involves the phrase ‘bring it.’
– Heather Madden

“Stop calling us fascists or we’ll throw you all in jail,” is exactly as stupidly ironic as I have come to expect from this era in American history.
– @literallyneil

Thoughts are not a problem. None of us would want to be thoughtless individuals. None of us would want to lose the capacity to use our minds wisely. But are you using your mind wisely or are you caught in habitual patterns?
– Shaila Catherine

God wasn’t using Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk was using God.
There’s a very big difference.
– Andrea Thompson

I could believe that in an earlier incarnation Le Guin was a seabird, if seabirds wrote poetry.
– Harold Bloom on Ursula K. Le Guin

I wish I were supernaturally strong so I could put right everything that is wrong.
– Greta Garbo

That’s what I’m interested in: the space in between, the moment of imagining what is possible and yet not knowing what that is.
– Julie Mehretu

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
– Samuel Johnson

Authoritarians are the threat to comedy, to art, to music, to thought, to poetry, to progress…
– Jon Stewart

Liberation is neither the result
of some method skillfully applied,
nor of circumstances.

It is beyond the Causal process.

Nothing can compel it.
Nothing can prevent it.

– Nisargadatta

When you’re writing historical fiction, you are always looking for the untold story. You’re looking for what has been repressed politically, or repressed psychologically. You are working in the crypt.
– Hilary Mantel

We write poetry to hurt and we write poetry to heal. He knew that—it was his center.
– Frederick Phoenix

I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.
– Frederick Douglass

A year after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the white backlash had become an emotional electoral issue in California, Maryland and elsewhere. In several Southern states men long regarded as political clowns had become governors or only narrowly missed election, their magic achieved with a “witches’” brew of bigotry, prejudice, half-truths and whole lies.
– Martin Luther King Jr.

Every time I have had a problem, I have confronted it with the ax of art.
– Yayoi Kusama

Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.
– Ruth Bader Ginsburg

No need to say how gladly we are pledged to lost and loved.
How still the field is, now the crop is in.
How blue the sky, now Heaven is foregone.
– John Burnside

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common: a need to create an alternative world.
– John Fowles

Billionaires own the media.
Billionaires own the homes.
Billionaires own the food.
Billionaires own the water.
Billionaires own the power.
Billionaires own the politicians.
Billionaires are the problem.
– Jeff Rauseo

Rule your mind or it will rule you.
– Horace

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
– G. K. Chesterton

We have to laugh. Because laughter, we already know, is the first evidence of freedom.
– Rosario Castellanos

With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.
– Jean-Luc Picard

Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do—something people who take showers discover on occasion.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

…rhetoric really solves no problem, and ultimately the only thing that thwarts evil is the application of good against it.
– James Lee Burke

There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they may solve only in part.
– Bram Stoker

I’m smart enough to know that I’m dumb.
– Richard Feynman

The goal is not to be the smartest person in the room.
It’s to make the room smarter.
– Adam Grant

I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.
– Baudelaire

Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.
– Neal Stephenson

Healthy minds are being made unwell; unwell minds are being driven over the edge.
– Blake Crouch

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.
– Henry Ward Beecher

To be human is to break and to mend, over and over. Grace lives in the in-between.
– Christopher Morrison

Just trust your own voice. And keep exploring the things that are interesting to you.
– Nikki Giovanni

In English, we say: “I was never enough for you.” But in poetry, we say: “I offered you the whole sky, but you still left chasing storms beyond my horizon.”
– 1905soliloquy.poetry

Poetry rises from the place where all the fundamentalisms die.
– unknown

Do you know what happens when you hurt people? When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
– Arundhati Roy, God of Small Things

That he wrote it with his hand and folded the paper and slipped it into the envelope and sealed it with his tongue and pressed it closed so I might open it with my fingers. That he brought it to the box and slipped it through the slot so that it might be carried through time and weather to where I waited on the front-porch step.
– Marie Howe

Every record destroyed or falsified, book rewritten, picture repainted, statue, and street building renamed, every date altered…day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
– George Orwell, 1984

We should all start to live before we get too old. Fear is stupid. So are regrets.
– Marilyn Monroe

A lot of people who want ‘free speech’ actually want to be one in charge of which speech is free.
– Hank Green

But are there not many fascists in your country?

There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.

– Ernest Hemingway

For all the horrible chaos of the contemporary political scene this world is full of kindness.
– Dervla Murphy

Be informed without being inundated.
– Don Lemon

The more I see the world, the more I am dissatisfied with it.
– Jane Austen

Isaac Asimov said there were only 3 types of science fiction plots. “What if”, “If Only” and “If this goes on”. Unfortunately, we are at the dark end of, “If this goes on”. The line that when we crossed it, we were supposed to all rise up? That’s way, way behind us.
– Patton Oswalt

Violence is counter-productive and produces changes of a sort you do not want. It is a very dangerous instrument and can destroy those who wield it.
– John Gardner

In order for art to imitate life, you have to have a life.
– Whitney Cummings

No man knows how bad he is till he
has tried very hard to be good.
– C.S. Lewis.

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
– George Orwell, 1984

It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves.
– Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why

Leonard came to see me. His words were, “I can’t sing, I can’t play the guitar and I don’t know if this is a song.” Then he sang me “Suzanne.”
– Judy Collins

You can’t have pleasure in life without skill.
– Alan Watts, Being Far Out

The survival of humanity will depend on our ecological literacy – our ability to understand the basic principles of ecology and to live accordingly.
– Fritjof Capra

I’m always amazed how the seventh wave always seems bigger than the ones before it. No wonder Jesus told us to forgive seventy times seven. Let’s make sweet rule #7 the practice of gentle self-forgiveness. We are always secretly hard on ourselves.
– Gunilla Norris

The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. … Those with access to these resources—students, librarians, scientists—you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not—indeed, morally, you cannot—keep this privilege for yourselves.
– Aaron Swartz

If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; your own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward, and ugly. Your sense of inner beauty has to remain a very private thing. The secret and the sacred are sisters. Our times suffer from such a loss of the sacred because our respect for the secret has completely vanished. Our modern technology of information is one of the great destroyers of privacy. We need to shelter that which is deep and reserved within us. This is why there is such hunger in modern life for the language of the soul. The soul is a shy presence. The hunger for the language of the soul shows that the soul has been forced to recede to private areas; only there can it mind its own texture and rhythm. The modern world, by trumpeting the doctrine of self-sufficiency, has denied the soul and forced it to eke out its existence on the margins.
– John O’Donohue

If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.
– Louis Armstrong

The defining features of the human condition can all be traced to our ability to stand back from the world, from our selves and from the immediacy of experience. This enables us to plan, to think flexibly and inventively, and, in brief, to take control of the world around us rather than simply respond to it passively.
– Iain McGilchrist

Tragedy shows what is perishable, what is fragile, and what is slow moving about us. In a world defined by relentless speed and the unending acceleration of information flows that cultivate
– Simon Critchley

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
– Theodore Roosevelt

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
– Douglas Adams

I, who manufacture the future like a diligent spider. And the best of me is when I know nothing and manufacture whatever.
– Clarice Lispector

We actually contain a built-in ability to rise above restriction, incapacity, or limitation and, as a result of this ability, possess a vital adaptive spirit that we have not yet fully accessed. While this ability can lead us to transcendence, paradoxically it can lead also to violence; our longing for transcendence arises from our intuitive sensing of this adaptive potential and our violence arises from our failure to develop it.
– Joseph Chilton Pearce

Find a part of yourself hidden in the twilight.
– Fennel Hudson

The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.
– Iain McGilchrist

CLEAR BEING

I honor those who try
to rid themselves of any lying,
who empty the self
and have only clear being there.

– Rumi

The Romans were an atheistic and idolatrous people; not idolatrous with regard to images made of stone or bronze, but idolatrous with regard to themselves. It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism.
– Simone Weil

Today I don’t feel even slightly alone. I hear the babble of people as they chatter, on and on. I’m amazed at our impulse to express ourselves, explain ourselves, tell stories to one another. The simple sandwich I always get amazes me, too. As I eat it, as my body bakes in the sun that pours down on my neighborhood, each bite, feeling sacred, reminds me that I’m not forsaken.
– Jhumpa Lahiri

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.
– Rollo May

People always ask, ‘Who’s your ideal reader?’ Mine is somebody who reads a few pages and then falls asleep and has a fantastic dream.
– Eliot Weinberger

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
– Milan Kundera

Everyone is trying to sell me something. The night spins a boardroom of salesmen like wool— They pitch me an alternate route to myself.
– Ali Nasir

Jon Stewart’s face on my tv in the dark living room gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
– Layla Jones

We have no fixed identity because we are constantly under construction, year by year, day by day, really moment by moment. The Buddhists would have it, then, that if you can dream it, you can be it.
– Robert E. Buswell Jr.

Order is the perception of things as they are, and as you are, not my conclusion of what you are.
– Krishnamurti

The best place to be is in your own mind, even if it’s a little crazy.
– Katherine Paterson

I think people have a hope and a prayer that if they toss in a bunch of quotes, or—and I certainly did not invent the numbered form—add numbers to a piece, it will all magically hang together.
– Maggie Nelson

The first, clear faith, arises when we see the wonderful qualities of the Buddha in a teacher or in any person we admire. More broadly, it blooms when we recognize in another the possibility of living a free, happy, peaceful life, and this recognition compels us to look for a way to get there ourselves.
– Vanessa Zuisei Goddard

There is no single answer that
will solve our future problems.
There are thousands of answers —
at least.
– Octavia E. Butler

This is what power really is: the privilege of ignoring anything you might find distasteful.
– Oksana Zabuzhko

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
– G.K. Chesterton

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.
– Zora Neale Hurston

You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.
– Seneca

The wise man wants nothing yet needs many things. On the other hand, nothing is needed by the fool, for he does not understand how to use anything, but he is in want of everything…The wise man is self-sufficient, yet he has needs of friends – not that he may live happily, but that he may live nobly.
– Seneca

In my town, the best way to insult someone was to call them rich and smart, which, looking back, was maybe a little shortsighted of us.
– Amy Poehler

Our listening creates a sanctuary for the homeless parts in another person.
– Rachel Naomi Remen

Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they’ll behave.
– Carl Sagan

One cannot be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.
– Paulo Freire

I will not let your bad love make a museum out of me.
– J. Theewriter

I was writing about you because your retinas captured everything I cared about; and effortlessly so. You were the one for me.
– Frederick Phoenix

She was my favorite bard. For only her words could make me crumble & diminish. I danced to her rhyme. I made love to her existence.
– J. Theewriter

You can have your rights as long as you don’t use them. [Like a gym membership].
– Stephen Colbert

It is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your emotions than to have them inflicted upon you by mechanical glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever… The future exists first in imagination, then in will, then in reality.
– Robert Anton Wilson

There aren’t enough poems in the world to carry her etherealness. So I sit down and write until countless lamps die out.
– Frederick Phoenix

What would it look like if we looked like what we’ve been though?
– Chase Sampy

This is not a time of rising and growth. It is not a time of confidence and ease. No. We are hunkered down. 𝘋𝘰𝘸𝘯 being the operative word. From the perspective of soul, down is holy ground.
– Francis Weller

I found that I liked noises even more than I liked intervals.
– John Cage, Lecture on Nothing

Shall we for this vain bubble’s shadow pay?
– John Donne, Love’s Alchemy

It’s still day one. We have still learned only a fraction of what it is possible to know.
– Ryan Holiday

Poem For Dan’s Departure
by Kate Farrell

So much do we love
Talking to people we love
About ideas we love
That thinking becomes a conversation
With people we love about ideas we love.

Being your mother
Became a conversation
Where your quiet ideas furthered
The attachment first fastened
In the far configurations
Of destiny.

I am honored that the universe
Loaned your childhood to me,
Adding such a bright star
To the constellation of conversations
That I am becoming,
For, however far apart we are,
Your considerate voice stays with me,
Enlightening my thinking.

I wish I could give you
A small package of whatever I know
That is worth knowing
To take with you wherever you go.

I wish you would call me from time to time
And tell the part of me that is you
Where your part of the conversation
Is going.

New Mexican Mountain
by Robinson Jeffers

I watch the Indians dancing to help the young corn at Taos Pueblo.

The old men squat in a ring
And make the song, the young women with fat bare arms, and a
few shame-faces young men shuffle the dance.

The lean-muscled young men are naked to the narrow loins, their
breasts and backs daubed with white clay,
Two eagle-feathers plume the black heads. They dance with
reluctance, they are growing civilized; the old men persuade them.

Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed, the
beating heart, the simplest of rhythms,
It thinks the world has not changed at all; it is only a dreamer, a
branchless heart, the drum has no eyes.

These tourists have eyes, the hundred watching the dance, white
Americans, hungrily too, with reverence, not laughter;
Pilgrims from civilization, anxiously seeking beauty, religion, poetry;
pilgrims from the vacuum.

People from cities, anxious to be human again. Poor show how they
suck you empty! The Indians are emptied,
And certainly there was never religion enough, nor beauty nor
poetry here… to fill Americans.

Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed.
Apparently only myself and the strong
Tribal drum, and the rockhead of Taos mountain, remember that
civilization is a transient sickness.

When I hear the phrase “defend our democracy” I feel weary, because I think it misses the entire nature and scale of the task that lies before us.

The truth is that the U.S. has never truly been a democracy. Anti-democratic systems and structures were baked-in from the get-go, and it’s taken enormous effort and generations of lives to get small amounts of justice and access from this system.

What I think lies before us as a task is to create something that has never existed before.

More egalitarian, more just societies that have existed in history have benefitted from being indigenous, meaning a similar people, with similar values, rooted in a geography and a history.

What we have is an enormous scale, over many geographies, with many different peoples, most of whom have very little connection to their indigenous roots (we all have them, we all came from *somewhere*), and almost all of whom are traumatized to some extent, with real-life trauma reactions.

We also have the accumulation of enormous wealth on a scale that is inhuman and profoundly evil because of what that wealth withholds from others.

We also have a richness that comes from diversity and cross-polination of many peoples. We have a richness and depth from the intersection of so many different identities and traditions and spiritual understandings.

We are not “defending a democracy,” we are not trying to return to something that never was.

We are barely a “we” and yet we are trying to craft, create, birth, weave, imagine, dream, labor something new into being, which I can’t begin to name what it is, what the collective is bringing in.

Embracing this humbles me, and helps me focus, surprisingly, because it can never be done from one idea, one leader, one person, one perspective, one place, or one center.

This is a weaving, and the humility and sincerity and depth and surrender and love needed is tremendous.

And each of us have it. Let’s continue to weave this so we can see what it is.

– Mark Silver

He found me crying.
He crew too.
We both crode.

– Aliza Grace

If you’re going to read Arthur Sze’s poetry you need to slow down and take your time. And they are, worth your time.
– Red Pine

Music is the only thing keeping the planet together.

– John Francis Anthony Pastorius III

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed…These things are so ancient within us…that they’re ground into each separate cell of our bodies…It’s as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.
– Frank Herbert

The brain’s genius is its gift for reflection. What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death. That monologue often seems like a barrier between us and our neighbors and loved ones, but actually it unites us at a fundamental level, as nothing else can.
– Diane Ackerman

The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
– Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila

The word blessing evokes a sense of warmth and protection; it suggests that no life is alone or unreachable. Each life is clothed in raiment of spirit that secretly links it to everything else.
– John O’Donohue

Since the beginning, the people have gone outdoors at dawn to pray. The morning light, adinídíín, represents knowledge and mental awareness. With the dawn come the holy ones who bring blessings and daily gifts, because they are grateful when we remember them.
– Sáanii Dahataa The Women Are Singing by Luci Tapahonso

The more important point is that the impulse to escape our lives is universal, and hardly worth vilifying. Inhabiting any life always involves reckoning with the urge to abandon it—through daydreaming; through storytelling; through the ecstasies of art and music, hard drugs, adultery, a smartphone screen. These forms of “leaving” aren’t the opposite of authentic presence. They are simply one of its symptoms—the way love contains conflict, intimacy contains distance, and faith contains doubt.
– Leslie Jamison

Here’s what happens: you cross the open water and enter the channel and you follow it as it winds through the grass past the hammocks and woodland domes, the swampy islands upon which various animals live their animal lives; you go on through the buggy days and the long buzzing nights and you don’t let mischance or false pathways deter you, you keep right on with your goodwill about life and your stubbornness, leaving each lived day behind you, the husk of it drifting in the shallows of the past; you stay with the trail, pushing on and riding the slow current of boggy water draining down the sleeve of the continent– keep on no matter what– until one day, some sunny day, you come to the blue waters of the Gulf.
– Charlie Smith

You will be shown the way when your wagon is overturned.
– Babylonian Proverb

Never could the eye have seen the sun without having become sun-like, and never will the soul see beauty without first becoming beautiful.
– Plotinus

we might have to revise the superior assumption that we understand the world better than our ancestors, and adopt a more realistic view that we just see it differently – and may indeed be seeing less than they did.
– Iain McGilchrist

Reconciliation is not an end point of practice. It is a beginning place for continuing to free your heart.
– Phillip Moffitt

It might then be that the division of the human brain is also the result of the need to bring to bear two incompatible types of attention on the world at the same time, one narrow, focussed, and directed by our needs, and the other broad, open, and directed towards whatever else is going on in the world apart from ourselves.
– Iain McGilchrist

Where the left hemisphere’s relationship with the world is one of reaching out to grasp, and therefore to use, it, the right hemisphere’s appears to be one of reaching out – just that. Without purpose.
– Iain McGilchrist

I want to be the one store that’s open all night
and has nothing but necessities.
Something to get a fire going
and something to put one out.
A place where things stay frozen
and a place where they are sweet…
I want to hum just a little with my own emptiness
at 4 a.m. To have little bells above my door.
To have a door.

– Christian Wiman, I Don’t Want to be a Spice Store

Blue here is a shell for you
Inside you’ll hear a sigh
A foggy lullaby
There is your song from me
– Joni Mitchell

The capitalist worldview is the only one most of us have ever known. We see reality, experiences, events, other people, and things—in fact, everything—as objects for our personal consumption. Even religion, Scripture, sacraments, worship services, and meritorious deeds become ways to advance ourselves—not necessarily ways to love God or neighbor.

The nature of the capitalist mind is that things (and often people!) are there for me. Finally, even God becomes an object for my consumption. Religion looks good on my résumé, and anything deemed “spiritual” is a check on my private worthiness list. Some call it spiritual consumerism. It is not the Gospel.

– Richard Rohr

Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty, all embarrassment into laughter. In biblical faith, brokenness is never celebrated as an end in itself.
– Belden C. Lane

Michael Ventura: Just around when he was turning thirteen my kid came home one night, after dark, sat on the couch, and in a kind of fury suddenly burst out with, “It’s fucked, it’s so fucked, man, the whole thing is fucking fucked. What do you do in this world, man?” What could I say to him, that things are gonna be all right, when they’re not? That it’ll be okay when he grows up and gets a job, when it won’t? I got a little crazy and impassioned and I said something like this:

That we are living in a Dark Age. And we are not going to see the end of it, nor are our children, nor probably our children’s children. And our job, every single one of us, is to cherish whatever in the human heritage we love and to feed it and keep it going and pass it on, because this Dark Age isn’t going to go on forever, and when it stops those people are gonna need the pieces that we pass on. They’re not going to be able to build a new world without us passing on whatever we can—ideas, art, knowledge, skills, or just plain old fragile love, how we treat people, how we help people: that’s something to be passed on…

And all of this passing things on, in all its forms, may not cure the world now—curing the world now may not be a human possibility—but it keeps the great things alive. And we have to do this because, as Laing said, who are we to decide that it is hopeless? And I said to my son, if you wanted to volunteer for fascinating, dangerous, necessary work, this would be a great job to volunteer for—trying to be a wide-awake human during a Dark Age and keeping alive what you think is beautiful and important.

– James Hillman and Michael Ventura

…I’m now at an age where I hear a song from the past~~from a good or a bad time~~and I become an emotional wreck. I am back in the time~~good or bad~~and I now have the perspective to understand what really happened, what things really meant. A dog runs to me and offers me affection and I am both overwhelmed and satisfied. A kind word at the market comes my way, and I think of crying. I think I may be grown up now. I think I understand things~~their worth and their meaning. Old age isn’t entirely bad.
– John Gielgud

And in this city a man will go mad with paresis, another with terror, a third will drown himself and the newspapers will report death from cancer and cerebral hemorrhage among our leading citizens, and there will casual mention of various epidemics, of lust murders, of famine and starvation, and the decline of Utilities on the New York Exchange. But all that’s forgotten tonight, God’s asleep. And if you have any questions to ask about the chaotic conditions on this little spherical toy of his, you’ll have to refer them to his secretary, who will send you form letter No. X99 explaining that accidents will happen and that of course God’s ways are necessarily rather obscure to man.
– Tennessee Williams

There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.
– Robert Oppenheimer

The most interesting thing about the world is its fantastic and unpsychoanalyzed character, its wretched and gallant personality, its horrible idiocy and its magnificent intelligence, its unbelievable cruelty and its equally unbelievable kindness, its gorilla stupor, its canary cheerfulness, its thundering divinity, and its whimpering commonness.
– William Saroyan

Rise up, then. Mend your ways,
start seeing what you are
instead of calculating what you
should become.

– Franz Kafka

Projection means that some unconscious factor is unintentionally seen in the outer world whilst it actually belongs to our own unconscious. If the novice venerates his teacher like a God it simply means that he has not yet found that divine image in himself.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

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

In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Remember how long you have been putting off these things, and how many times the gods have given you days of grace, and yet you do not use them.
– Marcus Aurelius

Putrescent light, obscurity wouldn’t be the worst condition.
– René Char (translated by Paul Mann)

Not appreciating what we have now, robs us of our abundance even when it exists.
– Marshall Sylver

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

a mosquito
in the autumn wind
its life divinely protected

– Issa

We have to spend our time one way or another. To spend it on dharma, is in my view, and stated by Buddha and all the masters from that time onward, the most well spent time of your life.
– Dzigar Kongtrul

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.
– Emil Cioran

As for us, we become part of the forest, we insert ourselves into it, you see.
– Duras

The biggest competition you will ever have in this world, is the competition between your disciplined mind and undisciplined mind.
– James Arthur Ray

Your mind is nowhere close to its full potential if you don’t walk at least 7000 steps a day.
– Dan Go

lotus flowers
pure in heart
unstained by the mind

– Ogawa

Ignore the mind the way you disregard the crowd you encounter in the streets.
– Nisargadatta

We made in those days
tiny identical rooms inside our bodies
which the men who uncover our graves
will find in a thousand years,
shining and whole.
– Donald Hall

a little butterfly
in the autumn wind
trusting in Buddha

– Issa

Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.
– Hannah Arendt

Self mastery is controlling the foods that go into your mouth.
– Dan Go

It’s intellectually lazy to hinge yourself to only your viewpoint and disregard all others. An open mind feeds everyone.
– Nika Solé

The whole modern world is at war with reason; and the tower already reels.
– G.K. Chesterton

Fear was the first thing on Earth to create gods.
– Lucretius

Man on his pyre of contradictions. Not even crucified any more. Broiled. You were right, my dear.

Man on his sidewalk as though on burning sheet metal, unable to unstick his big feet.

– Francis Ponge on Giacometti

Belief creates its own experience; therefore, such an experience is not true.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

In a sense, the text is the writer’s skin—the outermost delineation of his sensi- bility, his way of expressing, remembering and furiously rendering what he believes to be the exactitude of his feelings. As the pages pile up they are numbered and renumbered, typed and retyped, they are inserted in folders, placed in binders, set on desk tops, placed in desk drawers and carried around in plastic briefcases and mailed in manila envelopes. These pages are an extension of the writer’s nervous system, and his fingerprints on the pages testify to this nervous proximity, this incestuous intimacy to the text or, to be
more precise, to the text-to-be.

But why write?

The writer-to-be lives under the impression that everything, literally every- thing he experiences can be accurately transferred onto paper (the allusion to photography is intentional) and, what is more, elucidated and enriched. He still believes that for everything under the sun there is a corresponding sign or word, and that the intensity of his ardor, his passion for life, will impress upon the pages the determination of his new commitment. If for the present the words with which he attempts to depict the preciseness of his vision continue to elude him, can he not expect that with time, with a certain practice, this will
be rectified.

Is what I write really true?

The writer-to-be lives in a dream-like state, and remains content as long as this buoyant state of expectation is not directly threatened, thwarted or shattered;

– Walter Abish

Certainly when one person in a room is more conscious, it changes the consciousness of everyone in that room.

And in a family, if one person is coming into consciousness, everyone in the household is going to be changed.

– Marion Woodman

Tolkien loved the power latent in language – that ‘mythological grammar’ by which humanity can, through perception and subcreation, bring into being a Secondary World.

– Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light

There are many small ways to enlarge your world. A love of books is one of them.
– Jacqueline Kennedy

Today must not be a souvenir of yesterday, and so the struggle is everlasting. That struggle is to find in each new day, all over again the beauty of self; the beauty of nature, the beauty of the immediate.
– Robert Henri

The opals hiding your lids
as you sleep, as you ride ponies
mysteriously, spring to bloom
like the blue flowers of autumn
each nine o’clock.

– Frank O’Hara

The century of the power of man became that of his despair. Since then, everyone feels in his body and his soul that we are living in a more atrocious age than any other, an age of the most horrible savagery.
– Francis Ponge

…massive social surgery is needed to insert new technology into the group mind…
– McLuhan

What does God look like,
when he wants to look like something?
He looks like you without ego.

– Mooji

Nine-tenths of our happiness depends on our health alone.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

If it is true that time changes everything, the changeable, then it is also true that time reveals who it was who did not change.
– Kierkegaard

Vulnerability is a guardian of integrity.
– Anne Truitt

If a person hasn’t ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is.
– Banana Yoshimoto

So many men are deprived of grace. How can one live without grace? One has to try it and do what Christianity never did: be concerned with the damned.
– Albert Camus

Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths. But in our hearts’ daily practice, whatever schools we went to, we all lived as if tomorrow would be a clone of now.
– Richard Powers

In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.
– Horace

It is through sincere reflection and our inner ethical commitments that we purify our intentions and grow to trust ourselves.
– Shaila Catherine

Jung said the truth of the matter is that the shadow is ninety percent pure gold. Whatever has been repressed holds a tremendous amount of energy, with a great positive potential. So the shadow, no matter how troublesome it may be, is not intrinsically evil. The ego, in its refusal of insight and its refusal to accept the entire personality, contributes much more to evil than the shadow.
– John Sanford

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Uncertainty is unnerving because it’s unpredictable but also because it demands a lot of us. If the future does not yet exist and we are creating the future in the present, then we have tremendous responsibility to actually engage.
– Rebecca Solnit

And the question for me was ‘invisible to whom?’ Not to me.
– Toni Morrison

Accept who you are; and revel in it.
– Mitch Albom

In a way, prophets are mystics who turn the contemplative gaze outward. Not simply peeling away layers of inner myth, they reject social myths that enslave the people. In this, they are apocalyptic and always unsettling.
– Mark Van Steenwyk

Strength does not make one capable of rule; it makes one capable of service.
– Brandon Sanderson

Be careful how you interpret the world: it is like that.
– Erich Heller

Solitude is the furnace of transformation.
– Henri Nouwen

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
– Virginia Woolf

The nationalist has a broad hatred and a narrow love.
– André Gide

What is the history of your hidden wizard?
– Mark Nepo

Don’t compare her to sunshine and roses when she’s clearly orchids and moonlight.
– Melody Lee

Know all the theories, master all the techniques. But as you touch a humans Soul, be just a human Soul.
– Carl Jung

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
– James Baldwin

Thus we may say the Divine does not speak in words. It speaks in synchronicities.
– Carl G. Jung

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
– John Lubbock

There is so much
stubborn hope
in the human heart.
– Albert Camus

Remove the ‘I want you to like me’ sticker from your forehead and place it on the mirror, where it belongs.
– Susan Jeffers

You can tell someone the truth a thousand times, but they only learn it when they discover it themselves. Real wisdom is self-found.
– Paulo Coelho

I declare peace as the greatest work of Art.
Human rights are an artwork.
– Wolf Vostell

What would you write if you weren’t afraid?
– Mary Karr

There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.
– André Gide

It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love you – and perhaps this is how the whole enormous world, shining all over, can be created – out of five vowels and three consonants.
– Vladimir Nabokov

Emotions are like anchors deep into a character. Changing them frequently, in tandem with changes in the plot, keeps a story vital and moving.
– Elizabeth Lyon

A Divine spark is trapped inside each and every person waiting to wake up.
– Philip K Dick

She’s out west, she doesn’t know what time it is.
– Nancy Rosenbaum

Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else.
– Sara Blakely

Forgiving is not forgetting; its actually remembering — remembering and not using your right to hit back. Its a second chance for a new beginning. And the remembering part is particularly important. Especially if you don’t want to repeat what happened.
– Desmond Tutu

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

torn paper
in the wastebasket
broken words
how often I stop
before the heart speaks

– Nitu Yumnam

When did we become so small and so apologetic? Why do we apologize for our humanity? Love what you love, and make no apologies. This is your identity. The most horrendous suspensions of freedom are self-imposed. We imprison ourselves daily, hourly.

We have one life, one shot at all the glorious things of life, and we walk about constricted, apologetic, afraid. We have so little time; we have so little space upon which to spread our love and our talents and our kindness. Run toward life fulsomely and freely.

It runs from us so quickly, like a frightened dog or youth or daylight. Chase it and care for it.

Of course art should be about something big. Something terribly big must be at stake. I don’t see this anymore. Our art is becoming terribly polite and apologetic, much like us. It slinks away like a sagging breast, empty of milk or promise or comfort.

We need to get very fervent again. We need to get jacked up.

– Tennessee Williams

Civilized man knows of hardly any other way of understanding things. Everybody, everything, has to have its label, its number, certificate, registration, classification. What is not classified is irregular, unpredictable, and dangerous. Without passport, birth certificate, or membership in some nation, one’s existence is not recognized.

– Alan Watts

Wherever you are, be there. Take up space. Occupy the full dimension. Unfold the map of your body. Celebrate its topographical wonder, its unpredictable weather. Make a pool of your movements, then swim through the ripples, parting the room with your footsteps. Make no apology for the squeak of your soles, how your jacket swishes at your thighs, that the dust is making you sneeze. Consider it all a kind of orchestra, you tuning the keys, you lifting the horn of your whole self to the air. Let the notes of you blast out, at a register and speed that won’t leave you hungry or empty. Let anyone hear, as they walk by with their shoulders up, pretending not to listen. Wherever you are, remember why you are here: to sing.

– Maya Stein

A poem is an interruption of silence, whereas prose is a continuation of noise,” the poet Billy Collins once said. Poets and lyrically minded prose writers see the written word rather as Quaker worship sees the spoken word: they think it more powerful if it emerges out of and is separated by silence. Writing and reading online, we struggle to find this silence out of which words can materialise and be contemplated. There is too much speaking and reacting, and not enough listening and reflecting.
– Joe Moran

Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you—even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition. Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world. So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Never a word of it is literally true.
– Neil Gaiman

Every thing that purports to be the truth is, according to Heidegger, inevitably an approximation and true things, things that really are, rather than as we may apprehend them, are in themselves ineffable, ungraspable.
– Iain McGilchrist

Now the temple doors are closed, now it is evening and the high, wild woods of poetry are darkened, no man of today can find the magic path to the inner sanctuary. Quiet had descended and quietly we poets disappeared into the sober land for which great Pan had died.
– Hermann Hesse

If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like. Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grown to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible; deem that you too are immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and science; find your home in the haunts of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven; think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all of this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God.

But if you shut up your soul in your body, and abase yourself, and say “I know nothing, I can do nothing; I am afraid of earth and sea, I cannot mount to heaven; I know not what I was, nor what I shall be,” then what have you to do with God?

– Hermes Trismegistu

May the world enjoy a year that is free of hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, drought, and political speeches, which produce the most wind of all.
– Dov Peretz Elkins

Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality — there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth — actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested… True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.

– David Foster Wallace

My stories run up and bite me in the leg – I respond by writing them down – everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

– Ray Bradbury

Dangerously close. Beautifully close. And uncomfortably close is exactly where we need to be if we want to transform this culture of scarcity and fundamental distrust. Distance is a liar. It distorts the way we see ourselves and the way we understand each other… I have learned that the best way to find light in the darkness is not by pushing people away but by falling straight into them.
– Brené Brown

the amorous subject wonders, not whether he should declare his love to the loved being,…, but to what degree he should conceal the turbulences of his passion, his desires, his distresses: in short, his excesses.
– Roland Barthes

THOSE OTHERS

We lived at the end of an empire.

Sometimes we gathered in huge auditoriums
and tried to understand.
Our shame did not save us,
nor our sadness redeem us,
as we came to understand
how others, far into the future,
would look back at us,
shaking their heads: we hoped
in sorrow; more likely, anger.

– Jim Moore

I think there’s an evil in us, in humankind. Trust denies it. Leaps across it. Leaps the chasm. But it’s there. Anything we do finally serves evil, because that’s what we are. Greed and cruelty. I look at the world, at the forests and the mountain here, the sky, and it’s all right, as it should be. But we aren’t. People aren’t. We’re wrong. We do wrong. No animal does wrong. How could they? But we can, and we do. And we never stop.

– Ursula K. Le Guin

I tell you, Mr. Bowles, it is a Suffering to have a sea— no care how Blue— between your Soul, and you.

– Emily Dickinson in a letter to Samuel Bowles

You don’t measure knowledge by how much you know, but by how much more you’re willing to learn.
– Prof. Feynman

Remember the universe is your friend. It’s on your side, there’s nothing against you. The only thing against you are your thoughts. If you learn to quiet your mind you’ll have no problems.
– Robert Adams

Someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey.
– Leonard Cohen

Vocation

…I was saying I am terrified of swallowing
an avocado pit, of having this big world growing
inside me, of giving birth to a vocalization that
would eat me, of choking on my own words that,
once uttered, would commend me to the compost,
hence my silence, even as I speak, so nothing grows.

– Mary Ruefle

Perhaps it’s not too late, the Librarian said. We are more resilient than we think.
– Voima Oy

Those who let their eyes adjust can see in the darkness.
– Susan Cain

ALWAYS HOME

My sails are full and
the one thing I’m sure of
is that letting go will
bring the best result.
Maps and plans are like
so much spray from
breaking waves,
while allowing the
journey to unfold in
its own wild way
will always bring
me home.

– Danna Faulds

It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.
– Eric Hoffer

Each person is the missing piece in this wacky world.
– John Conway

Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.

But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking….

What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?

– Ursula Le Guin

Human beings must involve themselves in the anguish of other human beings. This, I submit to you, is not a political thesis at all. It is simply an expression of what I would hope might be ultimately a simple humanity for humanity’s sake.
– Rod Serling

If you must quote me, remember
I said that love heals from inside.

– Yusef Komunyakaa

Cigar Box Banjo
by Kim Addonizio

Blind Willie Johnson could coax
music from a single string. God plucked a rib
and found a woman. Concert aria
in the gypsy song, long groan
of orgasm in the first kiss, plastic bag
of heroin ripening in the poppy fields.
Right now, in a deep pocket of a politician’s brain,
a bad idea is traveling along an axon
to make sure the future resembles a cobra
rather than an ocarina.
Still there’s hope in every cartoon bib
above which a tiny unfinished skull in
its beneficence dispenses a drooling grin.
The heart may be a trashy organ,
but when it plucks its shiny banjo
I see blue wings in the rain.

Weaving the soul
back into the body,
in the ongoing proposition
of a waking life

There are two of us here,
quite effortlessly
proving the world

– Anselm Hollo

September is When It Began
by Carla Sarett

Steinway pianos fall out of tune, and rusted cars
languish under the Golden Gate Bridge. Drugstores hawk
pills for every sort of gloom, like D.O.A. and Failed Detour
or when in stock, Dawn Sorrow. Coffee turns
Midwestern bitter. Hotels advertise, “No Suicides Here.”
No one is safe with Weldon Kees at large in San Francisco
with Vertigo newly restored. I am soaking in watery Madeleine-
her sublime white coat, her phosphorescent Hitchcock hair.
Then Weldon leans over and says, the writers stole her name
from Poe, and can I put him up, he knows I’ve had more
than my share of dead men. But he reeks of his wife’s musty
nightgowns and seaweed, and face it, I should stop writing noir.
Well, he sighs and looks around for an emergency exit.
So I pull Weldon close, and I say, don’t you dare.

Whereas the average individual has no soul of his own, because the group and its canon of values tell him what he may or may not be psychically, the hero is one who can call his soul his own because he has fought for it and won it.
– Erich Neumann

Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me . . . It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what Belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together.
– Virginia Woolf

I am not romantic, you know. I never was. I ask only a comfortable home.
– Jane Austen

She receives the letter before it arrives. How does she do it? What is this might?
– Jacques Derrida on Hélène Cixous

Most complexity is unnecessary, but we manage it instead of removing it because deletion requires courage that addition doesn’t.
– Shane Parrish

I believe that a scientist looking at non-scientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
– Prof. Feynman

his red screwdriver
still latching the old barn door—
small inheritance

– @ruralitalics

Sixty years ago I knew everything.
Now I know nothing. Education is a
progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

– Will Durant

my hometown
on the edge of that cloud
autumn dusk

– Issa

You can build yourself brick by brick into the most elevated and expanded version of you, and someone who hasn’t done any of that work will want you to come back down to accommodate their smallness. And I just can’t do that.
– Nika Solé

What is a poet to do as this conflicted culture advances away from democratic values, questioning the very idea of who is a citizen and how?
– Patricia Spears Jones

When people overtly display some trait, such as confidence or hypermasculinity, they are most often concealing the contrary reality.
– Robert Greene

the first night
of the star festival
autumn has set in

– Basho

There are places in the world made for looking up at, not down from.
– GK Chesterton

If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
– Viktor E. Frankl

If the Universe isn’t fixing the situation, it is using the situation to fix you
– @Vicky

a rainy day
in an autumn world
of a country village

– Basho

Forget the Tylenol. Find out what Trump’s mother was taking and avoid that shit at all costs.
– Marlene Robertson

A crucial verb for writers is revise. Which means, of course, to re-see.
– Allan Gurganus

This is the second time I have seen that girl here.

– Laura Riding Jackson, In A Cafe

O pale perimeter of grace, anointed
For that hypnotic glide impinged on might,
Who forged you on the anvil of the stars
And set you turning to the laws of light?

How cryptic is the calm, the intricate
Unindolence of power that knows its place,
So gravely balanced between pole and pole,
So local in the mystery of space.

– Hildegarde Flanner

Public opinion reigns in society because stupidity reigns amongst the stupid.
– Nicolas Chamfort

I fell. You fell.
In hell we will tell of it.
Form’s accidents, we move back-
wards to love . . .

– Robert Creeley

A Place of Healing: Finding the Right
Words In an Unright Moment

I begin my decompression on Thursday afternoons.

By then, the COVID-19 vaccine messages have been written, approved, sent. The NIH grant messages have been written, approved, sent. The Medicaid funding speculation messages have been written, approved, sent. My own writing – my personal projects – have not been written. There is nothing to approve. Nothing to send.

But now it is Thursday afternoon, delicious Thursday afternoon, and I am ready to reclaim my time when I receive a call from my manager about another urgent message that needs to be written, approved, sent.

Social media is riding a punitive crescendo. Individuals, brimming with rage and grief, are shaming other individuals for their posts, their opinions. My employer is being tagged on Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn (how many platforms must there be?). Our employees are individuals with opinions and boy are they expressing them.

I am told the message must be empathetic. It must not patronize or lecture. It must acknowledge that we are entitled to our personal opinions.

I am nodding on the phone to my boss. She has spent her day talking to news outlets seeking a quote. She has spent her day rewriting one sentence, ten words, over and over, trying to capture the right message with the right tone for this unright moment.

I start.

I write, “We are a place of healing.”

I look out my window. The squirrel has been busy stuffing his peanut shells into my planter. From where does he get them? The planter is empty, save a weed, because I never got around to filling the barren containers on my patio this year. The birds are feeling themselves; the robins and finches and black-capped chickadees can’t stop chatting with one another. It gives me great comfort to think that they have no idea what is going on. That the humans are evolving so poorly.

I once read about a man in rural Iowa who stopped reading the news. He insulated his life beyond his small town’s happenings. Townspeople knew not to say to him, “hey Bob, did you hear?” I can’t remember what year he did this, but I imagine the news events he might have missed; 9/11, the Iraq war, that baby who fell down the well. Did he fill the gap of breaking news with literature? Bird song?

“We are a place of healing.”

When I started working here, I was so humbled. I’d been in business for so long, peddling products people didn’t need. Now I work with people who see trauma daily, who see the loss of life, who save lives. I support them but I do it from the comfort of my home. I haven’t seen a gunshot victim rolled into the ER, nor witnessed blood streaking the floor. The closest experience I have to witnessing healthcare workers in action is watching the HBO series “Pitt” from my couch.

“We are a place of healing.”

As I wait for the words to come, I know that any message will be unsatisfactory. That after I hit send, responses will flood the inbox. Some will ask why a message wasn’t sent when politicians in Minnesota were assassinated on the thresholds of their homes. Some will say the message attacks free speech. Others will say the message is not nearly strong enough, that politics don’t belong in the workplace. They want to be like the Iowa man; head in the sand.

I understand.

“We are a place of healing. We do not condone violence.”

I add a link to our social media policy. The part people need to read is buried so deep on the site, no one will ever read it. I don’t blame them. They’re busy re-starting hearts, stopping bleeds, and problem-solving life or death – issues larger than dense policy PDFs and word choice.

“We are a place of healing. We do not condone violence.”

When I upload the document to SharePoint and turn on track changes, I sit back – the birds are still chattering among themselves, the squirrel is still prepping for the future. I watch as the lawyers descend upon the message. Words are struck, others are added. The empathetic tone is lost. My message looks as if written by an angry father, hands on hips.

Each reviewer’s changes are captured in a unique color. The screen I watch becomes a rainbow of opinions.

We are a place of healing.

I really want to heal.

– Rachel Greenley

Literature has no obligation to be responsive to the times.
– Kathryn Schulz

The Shire had seldom seen so fair a summer, or so rich an autumn: the trees were laden with apples, honey was dripping in the combs, and the corn was tall and full.

– Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.
– Anthony Trollope

Do not compare, do not measure.
No other way is like yours.
All other ways deceive and tempt you.
You must fulfill the way that is in you.

– Carl Jung

But I have the autumn wanderlust upon me, and would fain be off with a knapsack on my back and no particular destination, other than a series of quiet inns.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

If you don’t know what to do, you do nothing, don’t you? Absolutely nothing. Then inwardly you are completely silent. Do you understand what that means? It means that you are not seeking, not wanting, not pursuing; there is no center at all. Then there is love.
– J. Krishnamurti

I keep walking
the spider lilies
keep blooming
– Santoka

Party in the USA
by Patricia Lockwood

After a while English departs and you
Find yourself in a realm. Like the Wild Boy
Reaching for a potato in the mirror.
Someone was holding it behind his head.
He never stopped to let it cool but made
Little cries to indicate it was burning him.
Still, it was his favorite food. After an hour
Of reading out loud your carefulness
Is mere sound, the city you have built
Whistles. Between chapters I wrapped up
And shivered, did not eat, so I could go on
Speaking what seemed the whole language
At once: tongue twisters, all observation.
“Party in the U.S.A.” was recorded in that booth,
Her platinum record hung on the wall.
Active shooter in my building, Mary texted,
Just as we broke to stretch. Fucking America,
We said, and settled in to read the father
Chapter. The Wild Boy would be cared for
By a priest, later, but first, a school
Gardener. Scenery on the way to Paris
Did not impress him, he caught a light
Case of smallpox, and insisted on having
His potato next to him at all times.
There are feats that seem impossible
Just before and after: 8,000 signatures,
Being alive. You cannot think about page
Numbers, your hunger, or Baby Peck,
Hysterical, trying to climb into your sister’s
Desk with a bottle of bourbon, to hide.
They are locked down, quiet, texting.
Why had it felt so urgent to be heard?
Hold on, baby, I said, and Paul:
“I once had an RPG shot at me
While dancing to ‘Party in the U.S.A.’ ”
We waited for word: OK, they got him.
And waited for word: I hate it here.
“The boy had grown quite fat now,
Loved to be tickled, laughed easily,
And apparently dreamed while asleep.”
They were saddened that he cared only
For his own survival, nourishment.
You could not die with your potato
Next to you, a potato meant one more day.
Little clouds breathed out—cry cry!—
And there were jagged peaks.
Oh, it was all painful, mealy, wonderful.
How it contained—hot hot!—all
Custom, rivers of butter, green chives
Of trees, a gardener who had promised
Him a new home if he ever needed one.

Stop thinking and end your problems.
– Lao Tzu

Thinking is so tiresome, requiring so much energy solely for the purpose of reinforcing the notion of a thinker. What a waste! Stop thinking and merely watch everything being done without your interference.
– Wu Hsin

The technological innovation greater than the internet was word processing. Inertia is a great force for writers. Until word processing, I would just give up, because I’m a two-fingered typist.
– Eliot Weinberger

There are no safe paths in this part of the world. Remember you are over the Edge of the Wild now, and in for all sorts of fun wherever you go.
– Gandalf (Tolkien, The Hobbit)

Loss of control held new possibilities for me, as though it were itself a kind of freedom.
– Rachel Cusk

Bereave matter of all its intelligible qualities, both primary and secondary, you in a manner annihilate it, and leave only a certain unknown, inexplicable something, as the cause of our perceptions; a notion so imperfect, that no sceptic will think it worth while to contend against it.
– David Hume

Not causing harm requires staying awake. Part of being awake is slowing down enough to notice what we say and do. The more we witness our emotional chain reactions and understand how they work, the easier it is to refrain. It becomes a way of life to stay awake, slow down, and notice.
– Pema Chödrön

To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead – either you are, or you are not.
– Joyce Carol Oates

There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.
– Charles Yu

How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies! — and such reverence is a bridge to love. — For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor!
– Friedrich Nietzsche

It is a bourgeois prejudice to suppose that for something to have worth, there must be a practical application. The ancient Greeks knew that pure understanding for its own sake was, even just in terms of the quest, the highest value or activity of a man: Homo sapiens: man who knows.
– Philip K. Dick

All that’s happened is inconsequential; it cannot hurt us anymore; there’s only music, which lives within us and beyond us, needing us to express it but capable of surviving forever between expressions.
– William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

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

I used to think that the way writing worked was that I would suddenly be filled with the burning passion to tell a story, a story that was already fully formed in my brain, zero gestation, and that it would come flowing out of me, no typos, no rewrites, no stops and starts, no hems and haws. Sure, this happens occasionally, but it’s only occasionally, and it’s not a sustainable approach to a career. I wish someone had told me this sooner.
– Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.
– Bruce Springsteen

Revolutions are not improvised. They are not made at will by individuals. They come through the force of circumstances, and are independent of any deliberate will or conspiracy. They can be foreseen, but their explosion can never be accelerated.
– Mikhail Bakunin

There are people who spend every day immersed in these considerations … following the trajectories detailed in these books, doing things to become happier, to become better versions of themselves. These women had so many choices, and so many temptations, so many layers of coincidences and incidents, and the choices they made would change the color of their lives. They were surrounded by possibility.
– Mieko Kawakami

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.
– George Eliot

We can say ‘God,’ we can say ‘dhamma,’ we can say nothing at all—but if we are trapped in the symbol, we will never enter into relationship with what the symbol points to.
– Primoz Korelc

Aristotle’s arguments in defense of art do not really challenge Plato’s view that all art is an elaborate trompe l’oeil, and therefore a lie. But he does dispute Plato’s idea that art is useless. Lie or no, art has a certain value according to Aristotle because it is a form of therapy. Art is useful, after all, Aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions.
– Susan Sontag

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?
– Virginia Woolf

It’s a strange thing, but I think I love you.
– Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

Wisdom comes only when you stop looking for it and start living the life the Creator intended.
– Hopi Proverb

We keep searching and searching, when everything is already within us. There is no truth to find.
– The Four Agreements

I am strangely tired, not from having talked so much but at the mere thought of what I still have to say.
– Albert Camus

By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger.
– C.S. Lewis

Someone who only knows their own side of a case, knows little of that, and that important ideas must be fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed to remain living truths.
– John Stewart Mills

Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don’t have answers.
– Bruce Springsteen

Borders mark maps, not souls. If you are freedom first, humanity first… you belong anywhere mercy is honored.
– Joe Garvey

A human existence is considered to be incomparably precious because intention is so important and choice so consequential.
– Joanna Macy

It is a question no longer of a problem to be solved but simply of an enemy to be beaten.
– Marx

So I had this problem–work or starve. So I thought I’d combine the two and decided to become a writer.
– Robert Bloch

Remember upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.
– Alexander the Great

The past always looks better than it was. It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.
– Finley Peter Dunne

Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.
– Walter Lippmann

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
– H. L. Mencken

We are in a time of deconstruction. But we also have to remember that every deconstruction is an opportunity for reconstruction.
– Larry Ward

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
– George Santayana

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

A very widespread ailment of our time is the fatigue of living: Reality seems to us to be too complex, burdensome, difficult to face.
– Pope Leo XIV

Try to be wrong every once in a while, it’ll do your ego good.
– Keanu Reeves

I don’t need to believe in God. I know.
– Carl Jung

Lojong is particularly treasured because of its practical nature, because it doesn’t require one to be an erudite scholar or really to know that much about buddhadharma. It just requires one to have some diligence in the practices.
– Scott Tusa

Dwelling on other people’s perception of you is the road to complete madness.
– Kate Beckinsale

I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.
– Sylvia Plath

Your private relationship with yourself is a spring that will feed every other factor.
– Ashley Judd

Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look there.
– Marcus Aurelius

A good laugh is sunshine in the house.
– William Makepeace Thackeray

You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.
– Arundhati Roy

It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick façades glowed pink, and everything got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get?
– Elif Batuman

One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.
– Simone de Beauvoir

The truth is lived, not taught.
– Hermann Hesse

I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning.
– C.S. Lewis

You must find the place
in yourself where nothing is
impossible.

– Deepak Chopra

It is not too late. You are not too old. You are right on time, and you are better than you know.
– Marianne Williamson

A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.
– Mark Twain

Nothing haunts us like the things we don’t say.
– Mitch Albom

An escalator can never break down. It can only become stairs. You’ll never see an escalator out of order sign. Just escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.
– Mitch Hedberg

In the Buddhist version of the Rapture you stay where you are and get restored to factory settings.
– Paul Bassett Davies

If I could
have done it all again,
I would have loved you better.
But I could not
have loved you more.

– Sue Zhao

Marriage is the union of two divinities that a third might be born on earth. It is the union of two souls in a strong love for the abolishment of separateness. It is that higher unity which fuses the separate unities within the two spirits. It is the golden ring in a chain whose beginning is a glance, and whose ending is Eternity. It is the pure rain that falls from an unblemished sky to fructify and bless the fields of divine Nature.
– Khalil Gibran

The appreciation of the natural scene should not be limited only to the grandeurs; the intimate details and qualities of our immediate environment can be revealed and appreciated. To protect these qualities will require a new planning approach of the highest order of sensitivity and effectiveness. We are prone to think of natural beauty—parks, reserves, ‘dedicated areas,’ etc.—in terms of locations on maps, restricted by borders and boundaries and viewed ‘vertically.’ This pseudo-aerial view can be misleading; our vision is usually projected horizontally and the vistas of the world are as important as the actual contact with rock and soil and growing things. Hence, the prospects, the glades, the lines of the hills, and the vast expanses of shore and ocean, these too must be preserved….

We must take ALL resources under consideration; all resources, because they relate fatefully to our life on earth, reflect certain grandeurs, and deserve not only our attention, but our reverence.

– Ansel Adam

Sometimes I simply remind patients that sooner or later they will have to relinquish the goal of having a better past.
– Irvin D. Yalom

When you’re highly intuitive, people are always gonna wonder how you know what you know. And you’re just gonna have to let them wonder.
– Nika Solé

I’ve found I wrote less about my life when I was young because I was looking far ahead, I was imagining. But now that I am old I find myself looking back and trying to get down what I never said.
– Sean Thomas Dougherty

The notion of enlightenment means “not bound”. Not bound to what? Not bound to one’s own mind in ordinary ways; not bound in confusion to all the suffering that one’s mind has produced and is experiencing. So the notion of enlightenment is not something outside of one’s own mind.
– Dzigar Kongtrul

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
– Aldous Huxley

We can read its name and a train goes there. It doesn’t matter if we don’t get off. We know the country is there, we have a further reason for living.
– Marcel Proust

i regret to inform you that personal growth rarely comes from acquiring new knowledge and always from periods of intense humility (i.e. your ego finally relenting)
– @bluewmist

The sum of things is ever being renewed, and mortals live dependent one upon another. Some nations increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners pass on the torch of life.
– Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

Most anxiety isn’t about the future. It’s your nervous system worried to repeat the past.
– Kimia Nora

Recordings deal with concepts through which the past is reevaluated, and they concern notions about the future which will question even the validity of evaluation.

– Glenn Gould

What the ideological left & right have in common is intolerance of real psychotherapy aimed at self-examination and self-awareness

Both want to erase it/substitute something created in their own image

Because ideology rarely survives honest self-reflection & deep self-knowledge

– Jonathan Shedler

Moon: reckless heart in heaven
Why do you row toward the west
in that cup filled with blue wine
whose hull is defeated and sad?

– Cesar Vallejo, (tr. James Wright)

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

I am not intentionally trying to change people’s hearts. I do, however, want to remind people to question whether the idea that traditional techniques are always the best still holds true today.
– Kosen Ohtsubo

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
– G. K. Chesterton

Today’s lovely weather has somewhat revived me again.
– Franz Kafka

Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.
– Jonathan Swift

Racial or religious bigotry must be recognized for what it is: satanism, blasphemy.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel

Power

A poet is sentenced to death
and brought before the Leader.
Between them is a map of the world.
Can’t you see? the Leader asks. You’re powerless.
Name one power you have that I do not.

Very slowly, the poet lowers his head
and lays his ear on the map.
I know, he whispers, I know,
as if he is comforting someone,
as if he is hearing the voices of children.

When the guards take the prisoner away
and begin to beat him,
the Leader is alone in his chamber.
He looks out the curtains, straightens his necktie.
Very slowly, he lowers his ear to the map
and closes his eyes, and listens.
Silence. Silence and paper.

– Joseph Fasano

If ever the lid gets off my head
And lets the brain away
The fellow will go where he belonged –
Without a hint from me,

And the world – if the world be looking on –
Will see how far from home
It is possible for sense to live
The soul there – all the time.

– Emily Dickinson

You have made me endless,
Such is your pleasure.
This frail vessel you empty again and again,
And fill it ever with fresh life.
This little flute of a reed you have carried
Over hills and dales and
Have breathed through it melodies eternally new.
At the immortal touch of your hands,
My little heart loses its limits in joy
And gives birth to utterance ineffable.
Your infinite gifts come to me
Only on these very small hands of mine.
Ages pass, and still you pour,
And still there is room to fill.

– Rabindranath Tagore

Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America. When America consists of one leader and 158 million followers, it will no longer be America. Truly American leadership is not of any one man. It is of multitudes of men—and women.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

I Want the World
by Brenda Shaughnessy

You never know, when you say goodbye, if it’s the last time. Last time for who? For what?

Every time is the last—for that particular goodbye, wearing those clothes, at that airport. Me in my black dress—nightgown, fifties housecoat, funeral uniform. It passes for anything.

My daughter in her fuchsia track shorts and faded green t-shirt almost as soft as her luscious little arms. She was complaining, as usual. She was hungry. She was tired of traveling.

Her complaints were especially unpleasant since they only pointed up how innocent she was of how bad everything could get. The Legos are boring? Imagine no toys of any kind.

The chicken nuggets are too hot? Just wait. They’ll cool and by then, I hope she can learn to like lizard blood and shoelace chewing gum, because that’s what’s coming.

A fierce zip of pride bites my heart. She demands more because she knows there’s more in the world and she believes she should have it all. She knows what she wants: what she wants.

She believes the world is coming to her, not veering definitively away. She still thinks we can choose between ice cream flavors, bless her that she has so many possible flavors in mind.

Between stuffed animals and dolls. Which color lunch box you want for the whole school year. What school year? I think. Will first grade exist this coming fall?

She still thinks that what she thinks will affect what she gets. She still believes tantrums might get her her way. She doesn’t know yet that nobody gets her way.
We’re all lucky if we get anything at all, come dinnertime, come night, the next morning and the next hot morning, the next endangered livingspace if we get to stay there. We can’t carry all that stuff. But she doesn’t think of it as stuff.

She thinks of it as what she wants. Life’s been consistent—me resisting her demands, me in my black dress, cutting my hair to make her paintbrushes. If something happens to me, who will help her believe her beliefs?

She believes her desires—as erratic and irrational as a six-year-old’s desires can be—nevertheless have intrinsic value. A thread of hope wound, inextricable, all around and through her very person. I believe that, too.

One of these mornings I’ll say goodbye, a routine goodbye when I go to the FedPlex warehouse to work or pick my rations, and in my absence she will lose that thread, come to fully understand what she wants is impossible in our world.
All of it, any of it, the tiniest thing, impossible.

I won’t have known but I’ll be walking away from my daughter for the last time, coming home (wherever home is) to someone new, someone broken off from my old girl, six years old.

Here, I tell her, providing a pencil with a pristine, unsharpened end, chew on this. Nobody’s touched it yet. It’s all yours, darling.

Somewhere I’ll find a blade to sharpen it, and we’ll find a scrap for drawing, a bit of napkin or a smooth, light stone. For now, you can chew on it. Soon you’ll be able to draw whatever you want.

Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.
– John Berger

In the province of the mind what one believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits. These limits are to be found experimentally and experientially. When so found these limits turn out to be further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind there are no limits.
– John C. Lilly

The individualism which finds its expression in the abuse of physical force is checked very early in the growth of civilization, and we of to-day should in our turn strive to shackle or destroy that individualism which triumphs by greed and
cunning, which exploits the weak by craft instead of ruling them by brutality.
– Theodore Roosevelt, Citizenship in a Republic

The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think…The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali–it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.

– David Foster Wallace

The more focal attention is narrowed, the more it takes its object out of the realm of time, space, the body and emotion.
– Iain McGilchrist

Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.
– Kurt Vonnegut

In the course of doing this work, I discovered what’s wrong with the Shannon-Weaver model of communication. What they call ‘NOISE,’ I call the medium—that is all the side-effects, all the unintended patterns and changes.
– McLuhan to Agel

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
– David Foster Wallace

Our attention is responsive to the world, but the world is responsive to our attention.
– Iain McGilchrist

The people want in! How much longer will they tolerate the network of illusions and vacuous rhetoric? What people want is simple. They want an America as good as its promise. They don’t want to be outsiders… The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport.
– Barbara Jordan

Now ordinary people are born forwards in Time, if you understand what I mean, and nearly everything in the world goes forward too. This makes it quite easy for the ordinary people to live, just as it would be easy to join those five dots into a W if you were allowed to look at them forwards, instead of backwards and inside out. But I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of Time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind. Some people call it having second sight.
– T. H. White

You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.
– John Green

The core function of the memory system could in fact be to imagine the future (…) The system is not designed to perfectly replay past events. (…) It is designed to flexibly construct future scenarios in our minds. As a result, memory also ends up being a reconstructive process, and occasionally, details are deleted and others inserted.
– Tali Sharot

You cannot put a Fire out –
A Thing that can ignite
Can go, itself, without a Fan –
Opon the slowest night –

You cannot fold a Flood –
And put it in a Drawer –
Because the Winds would find it out –
And tell your Cedar Floor –

– Emily Dickinson

I am both a poet and one of the ‘everybodies’ of my country.
I live with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism huddling together on the faultline of an empire.
I hope never to idealise poetry – it has suffered enough from that.
– Adrienne Rich

If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will
be good.
– Thornton Wilder

Circle Poems
by Lew Welch

Whenever I have a day off, I write a new poem.
Does this mean you shouldn’t work, or that you
write best on your day off?
For example, this is the poem I wrote today.

When he was 20, he understood some of the secrets of
life, and undertook to write them down so simply that
even an idiot could understand.
“For,” he reasoned, “if I can’t do that, I don’t
understand it myself.”
He proved himself right.
When he was 50, he didn’t understand it himself.

“Why is it,” he said, “that no matter what you say,
a woman always takes it personally?”
“I never do,” she said.

John said, “Then I met that short fat guy with the
neat little beard, with a name like dawn.”
“You mean George Abend?”
“Yeah.”
“Abend means evening.”

Visualize this thing you
want. See it, feel it, believe
in it. Make your mental
blueprint and begin.
– Robert Collier

100% of employees
are people.

100% of customers
are people.

100% of investors
are people.

If you don’t understand people,
you don’t understand
business.

– Simon Sinek

Background Hum

Always in the background now
like music I never switched on,
this fear for my country’s future
carting off every good thought,
all the crumbs of beauty I have
stored up over the past few years.
Even when I lean in to breathe
the sweet scent of Joe Pye weed
growing wild beside the forest path,
even as I close my eyes to receive
its perfume like a sacrament, letting
fuzzy pink petals tickle the tip
of my nose—I don’t forget the hum
of worry alive beneath the skin,
though sometimes it grows almost
too quiet to hear, like a field mouse
trembling under fallen leaves
as he waits for me to pass.

– James Crews

the last one

to reach

the summit

was sunset

– Alec Finlay

When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the system to a higher order.
– Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine

Health is the tectonic plate on which experiences lie.
– Luke Belmar

We worry more about the purity of dogma than about the integrity of love.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel

Sometimes I wonder why words can’t actually make us bleed.
– Swati Avasthi

Do you really think God would design your heart to hold oceans,

And not create someone who knows how to swim in them?

– @art_books_poetry

You have a library of knowledge and wisdom within yourself open it
– @the.innerworks

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
– D.H. Lawrence

“How did you go bankrupt?” Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

– Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Life is not a random series of events. It is a highly intelligent unfolding.
– Mary O’Malley

If we never tried anything that might make us look ridiculous, we’d still be in caves.
– Roger Von Oech

The best way to be thankful is to use the goods the gods provide you.
– Anthony Trollope

How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently?
– Amy Tan

Once you are aware of ‘what is’, however reluctantly, and deny it because of your commitments, deep contradiction is set going.
– Krishnamurti

The most sophisticated people I know – inside they are all children.
– Jim Henson

In English, we say: “You walked away like it was nothing.”

But in poetry, we say: “You closed the book, while I was still memorizing every page.”

– @1905soliloquy.poetry

In truth, all language is referential and therefore indexical because, like the finger pointing at the moon, our words denote a reality that’s always becoming.
– Vanessa Zuisei Goddard

…world is irritatingly un-mathematical; it is full of violence and uncertainty. So Greeek thought declared that the real world is unimportant, an illusion. Reality lies in the world of ideas. Before a carpenter can make a chair, he must have an idea of a chair; consequently, the idea must be more important than the actual chair. One can destroy the chair, and it is easy enough to make another; but if the idea is were destroyed no chairs could be made.

– Colin Wilson, Beyond the Outsider

He who is most slow in making a promise is the most faithful in performance of it.
– Jean Jacques Rousseau

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
– William Wordsworth

Here is the work, here is the abyss, here is the crater, here is the material in which I have to work!
– Honoré de Balzac

But I doubt there are good examples of creativity that don’t involve divergent thinking, at least at key stages.
– Bessel van der Kolk MD

A small act is worth a million thoughts.
– Ai Weiwei

I don’t agonize about writing. I totally enjoy the act of writing, and I think of myself more like a furniture-maker, somebody who sits there sanding the table and staining and waxing it.
– Eliot Weinberger

If you wait a day to mold your clay, the clay hardens and becomes less malleable.
– @unyieldinghope

In my opinion, the modern conception of Progress or Evolution (as popularly imagined) is simply a myth, supported by no evidence whatever.
– C.S. Lewis

Writing: People are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen.
– John Steinbeck

The things that make me different are the things that make me.
– A. A. Milne

I’ve always tried to present a positive view of the world in my work. It’s so much easier to be negative and cynical and predict doom for the world than it is to try and figure out how to make things better. We have an obligation to do the latter.
– Jim Henson

Confine yourself to the present.
– Marcus Aurelius

When we truly care for ourselves, it becomes possible to care far more profoundly about other people. The more alert and sensitive we are to our own needs, the more loving and generous we can be toward others.
– Eda LeShan

Do we perhaps need so much energy and effort for ordinary and common things because for an authentic human being nothing is more out of the ordinary — nothing more uncommon than wretched ordinariness.
– Novalis, Miscellaneous Observations

These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

the poet dogen said: “handle even a single leaf of green in such a way that it manifests the body of the buddha. this in turn allows the buddha to manifest through the leaf”. in other words, we actualize our awakening in our relationship with the ten thousand things. this is similar to what the kotzker rebbe said: “god is there where we let him in”. that is to say, we come to the presence of god in the relationship with the neighbor. irrespective of how each of these poets has chosen to name the essence of being, be that buddha or god, both dogen and the kotzker agree on the essential dialogical nature of the liberated life. dogen added: “the color of the mountains is buddha’s body; the sound of running water is his great speech.” the poet is saying that the world itself, and all its beings, when celebrated as a thou, becomes the presence and the body. as martin buber said, “all real life is meeting”. we can say that all real meeting is dharma. the beauty of being is enacted in the relationship, for we go toward the within by going toward the between.
– hune margulies

You hope you can be like the river and the music. You want motion to take you to a new place and want even more for the place you just were to be left far behind.
– Brent King

This tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.
– Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

The instinct of conventionality, horror of uncertainty, and vested interests, all militate against the acceptance of a new idea.
– Bertrand Russell, Political Ideals

We die, at last, only from an accumulation of death tolerated for innumerable days and nights. The great rupture of our time is that the negation of life has begun to negate itself – that desire, discovering itself before and above all other things, is discovering that it has a world to create. The revolution of the living is now; it stands alone, and if death haunts it and persists in hiding it, we now know that we have it within ourselves to revoke that death and that around us there is a growing passion to desire endlessly.

Raoul Vaneigem, Address to the Living (1989)“…one can conceive of very ancient myths, but there are no eternal ones; for it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and the death of mythical language. Ancient or not, mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history…”

– Roland Barthes

Mass culture is a machine for showing desire; here is what must interest you, it says, as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire themselves.
– Roland Barthes

Myth, on the contrary, is a language which does not want to die: it wrests from the meanings which give it its sustenance an insidious, degraded survival, it provokes in them an artificial reprieve in which it settles comfortably, it turns them into speaking corpses.
– Roland Barthes

He loved, that is, the process of coming to know… In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown… It is an erotic space. When the mind reaches out to know, the space of desire opens.
– Anne Carson

Children make you see distances. What do you mean “distances”? Lazer paused and picked an olive from the plate. He spun it slowly on the toothpick. Well for example this morning I was sitting at my desk at home looking out on the acacia trees that grow beside the balcony beautiful trees very tall and my daughter was there she likes to stand beside me and draw pictures while I write in my journal. It was very bright this morning unexpectedly clear like a summer day and I looked up and saw a shadow of a bird go flashing across the leaves of the acacia as if on a screen projected and it seemed to me that I was standing on a hill. I have labored up to the top of this hill, here I am it has taken about half my life to get here and on the other side the hill slopes down. Behind me somewhere if I turned around I could see my daughter beginning to climb hand over hand like a little gold animal in the morning sun. That is who we are. Creatures moving on a hill. At different distances, said Geryon.
– Anne Carson

Night, to ancient people, was not an ‘absence of light’ or a negative darkness, but a powerful source of energy and inspiration. At night the cosmos reveals herself in her vastness, the earth opens to moisture and germination under moonlight, and the magnetic serpentine current stirs itself in the underground waters–just as the thick, snakey spray of stars, the Milky Way, winds across the night sky. Moon phases are a part of the great cosmic dance in which everything participates: the movement of the celestial bodies, the pulse of tides, the circulation of blood and sap in animals and plants. Observation of the night sky, of the stars, and especially of the moon, was the beginning of mathematics and science.
– Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor

[Disinformation] is noise driving out signal. But it is noise posing as signal so you do not even recognize it as noise…If you float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone’s contact with reality, probably your own included.
– Philip K. Dick

Through great good fortune in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

He saw the lightning in the east and longed for the east, but if it had flashed in the west he would have longed for the west. My desire is for the lightning and its gleam, not for the places and the earth.
– Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi

Somebody has remarked, “Everything without tells the individual that they are nothing, while everything within persuades them that they are everything.” This is a remarkable saying, for it is the feeling everyone of us has when they sit quietly and deeply looks into the inmost chamber of their being. Something is moving there and would whisper to them in a still small voice that they are not born in vain. I read somewhere again: “You are tried alone; alone you pass into the desert; alone you are sifted by the world.” But let a person once look within in all sincerity and they will then realize that they are not lonely, forlorn, and deserted; there is within a person, a certain feeling of a royally magnificent aloneness, standing all by themselves and yet not separated from the rest of existence.
– D.T. Suzuki

Recalling Buddha’s Fire Sermon: “Bhikkhus, all is burning … burning with the fire of greed, with the fire of aversion, with the fire of delusion.” We are seeing burning in all quarters.

– Joan Halifax

An impression of oneself is an organic phenomenon that is not at all intellectual. How is it that at one moment I don’t vibrate and at another, I do? How is it that I receive or do not receive a current of energy, allow it to feed me or not to feed me? How do I sing with it, or resonate with it like a musical instrument? Life keeps hitting us, producing only a dull sound. Yet suddenly, there is a pure, crystalline sound. How does that come about?

– Michel Conge, Inner Octaves

It was more than dignity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved. The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.

– Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

The idea of liberation through the suppression of desire is the greatest foolishness ever conceived by the human mind.
– Emil Cioran

The temptation is to stay inside; to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighborhood children regard with derision and little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and let my hair lengthens and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism. I prefer to be upright and contained – an urn in daylight.
– Margaret Atwood

The devil follows me day and night because he is afraid to be alone.
– Francis Picabia

The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.
– Truman Capote

One of the most wicked destructive forces, psychologically speaking, is unused creative power… If someone has a creative gift and out of laziness, or for some other reason, doesn’t use it, the psychic energy turns to sheer poison. That’s why we often diagnose neuroses and psychotic diseases as not-lived higher possibilities.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

I am listening now with all of my senses, as if the whole universe might exist just to teach me more about love.
– Adrienne Maree Brown

Maybe in your life you have pressed your forehead against another’s forehead. And maybe in that moment, you were not mother or father or child or sister or brother or friend or lover. Maybe in that moment, you were two skulls, two moons, hidden behind a thin cloud of forehead, behind a thin mist of eyelid, two skull moons glowing against each other, skull curve surface touching, eye sockets cratering, and the increasing complexity of truth collecting in the dark and infinite space that pooled in the shadowed place at the backs of your heads. The shadowed half of the moon is where the dream visions collect before they’re sent to the pond to be dreamed and forgotten.
– Nina MacLaughlin

Exceptional men do not hold their experiences to be out of the ordinary or of interest to anyone else. Unlike the trodden fungus-men, they are not so ignorantly and presumptuously self-absorbed. They are nobody and they know it. They shun notice. They are exceedingly rare.
– Nick Tosches

Have you been to the source of a river? It’s a very mystic place. You get dizzy when you stay for a while. An especially big river has several sources, and the real source, the farthest point which turns to the major stream, is moist and misty, with some kind of ancient smell, and you feel cold. You feel, “This isn’t the place to go in.” There is no springing water, so you don’t know where the source is. Actually, such a place exists in everyone; the center of us is like that. From such a place, the ancient call appears, “Why don’t you know me? Living so many years with me, why can’t you call my real name?”

The more your understanding of life becomes clearer and more exact and painfully joyful, the more you feel, “I’m so bad.” The one that appears and says, “No, you are not bad at all,” that is the way to go, that is your teacher.

Don’t misunderstand, this teacher is not always a person. It can embrace you like morning dew in a field, and you get a strange feeling, “Oh, this is it, my teacher is this field.”

– Kobun Chino

This is one superpower of being old: You know that things are probably going to work out without your tense, controlling input. Maybe you won’t get your way, which I hate, but the roiled ponds of misunderstanding and hurt will settle. Older age gives us the knowledge of how powerless we are — not helpless so much but with little control over life’s results. I don’t love this. You come to forks in the road where you think, I can’t bear this, I can’t do this, I can’t fix this; I see no reason for hope.

Plus, what if Iran gets involved, and what if there’s a nuclear exchange, and what if this is the end? But then, if you are old, you remember countless other falling-outs, other miserable patches with people you love, where peace was restored. I believe in the resiliency of relationships, even if I struggle not to be initially devastated every time I disappoint someone. This is the main advice I give younger people who get troubled and stuck. I say, “Yes, it sounds really awful. Just do one good thing, and then another, and breathe. You’re going to be okay.” I tell them what John Lennon said: “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”

– Anne Lamott

We actually contain a built-in ability to rise above restriction, incapacity, or limitation and, as a result of this ability, possess a vital adaptive spirit that we have not yet fully accessed. While this ability can lead us to transcendence, paradoxically it can lead also to violence; our longing for transcendence arises from our intuitive sensing of this adaptive potential and our violence arises from our failure to develop it.
– Joseph Chilton Pearce

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

Amo: volo ut sis. (I love you: I want you to be.)
– Martin Heidegger, quoting Augustine, in a letter to Hannah Arendt, 1925

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

That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.
– Kurt Vonnegut

I would like to describe a light
which is being born in me
but I know it does not resemble
any star for it is not so bright
not so pure
and is uncertain
– Zbigniew Herbert

We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.
– David Foster Wallace

America’s entire power structure has been taken over by the very same sort of dumbasses who have been yelling at all of us on the internet for years. Perhaps this was all foreordained from the very first day that email and message boards were invented. I don’t know. What I do know is that there is no need to look upon the dull, vindictive, racist monsters running our government as a new or inexplicable sort of villain. I see in them a much more familiar identity: internet commenters.
– Source: hamiltonnolan.com

If you love yourself you love others, if you hate yourself you hate others, because in relationship with others it is only you mirrored.
– Osho

We rarely think people have good sense
unless they agree with us.
– La Rochefoucauld

We must break away from the world of imitation and conformity if we are to find a totally different world. This means a fundamental change in our lives.
– Krishnamurti

Life will put you through what feels like a humiliation ritual, right before it levels you up heavily. Many see this as an initiation of sorts. A becoming.
– Nika Solé

At some point you give up on ever looking much better than you do. Somehow, you get a little older, a little fatter, and you end up going a little easier on yourself. Or a lot easier.
– Anne Lamott

When you get defensive about feedback, you fail twice. You fail to learn today, and you fail to encourage people to keep teaching you tomorrow.

If you can’t handle the truth, people stop telling you the truth.

A key to growth is showing that you’re coachable.

– Adam Grant

It’s hard to build momentum if you keep dividing your attention.
– James Clear

It’s becoming easier and easier to be social, but exceptional people are built in solitude.
– @naval

All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labors with vast power and perpetual success – in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

You can discover Truth only if you are willing to give your whole mind and heart to it, not a few moments of your easily spared time. If we are earnest, we will find Truth; but this earnestness cannot depend on stimulation of any kind.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

I still remember the relief I felt when I saw you at the station in a beautiful traveling coat –
finally without fur – and how you seemed freer, purer, and brighter than ever.

– Franz Kafka

when the gods reach out a hand to you, you’re free to refuse

every time you do, they’re less likely to reach out again

– River Kenna

I want to be the fifth wheel of the juggernaut
Thunderstorm
Noon at fourteen o’clock
Nothing and everywhere.

– Blaise Cendrars (translated by John Dos Passos)

It always amazes me that people can go their entire lives and not spend one single minute self reflecting. So woefully inept that they will do absolutely anything but look at themselves. Incredible.
– Nika Solé

One of C.S. Lewis’s brutal criticisms of “modern intellectuals” in The Abolition of Man:

“Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.”

The alchemist doesn’t fear hardship or run from chaos. They realize the value in all of it. They know there’s magic to be made from chaos and power to be built from pain. That they will come out of the other side of anything life brings them, transformed into more.
– Nika Solé

Only good, moral people
can be trusted with
democracy.
This is why we are
crumbling.

– Andy Perrin

We say normally: “I came into this world”. Why don’t we say much more correctly: “I came out of it”? Because, you see, a human being is a symptom of the universe in exactly the same way that an apple is a symptom of an apple tree.
– Alan Watts

Shall we ask him why a man of sense and education, and who has lived in the world, is ill qualified to recommend himself to strangers?
– Jane Austen

In one another we will never be lacking.
– Hélène Cixous

To be taught Blake by Frye was to have a baffled hunger satisfied by daily bread.
– Helen Vendler

Behold, you are to them like a lustful song by one who has a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument; for they hear your words but they do not do them.
– Ezekiel 33:32

Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil.
– C.S. Lewis

vines of ivy
the feeling of the ancient past
in the autumn foliage

– Basho

There is nothing more touching to me than a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best, but you can see what a mess they all really are.
– Anne Lamott

Parasites come in many forms. They can live in your physical body, but they can also be spiritual, emotional, and energetic. The matrix is a parasite. Freedom is spiritual.
– Nika Solé

There’s no cleverness in silence
– Andrey Platonov

So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.
– Harry Crews

What if the streams of contemplation and nonviolent resistance merged? What if our movements toward personal healing were also movements toward systemic transformation?
– Paul Engler

the bluest sky
when evening comes
autumn wind

– Issa

Part of falling in love fast and hard is that at some point you hit the bitter, the chasm where you realize you’re two different people.
– Maggie Nelson

How does the body
fail us by mixing
the signals of
sorrow & hunger
& desire &
need?

– Allison Titus

Everybody has a bigger aura when they’re doing something they love or something they’re good at. The real ones keep that same energy no matter what they’re doing. Aura on a hundred.
– Nika Solé

Can we take a rest?
Maybe die for a few
months or years
and wake up when the poem
is complete,
when the flowers in our garden
start to grow,
their scent luring
the sparrows into visiting
our house,
our house that’s now
a small forest of rubble.

– Mosab Abu Toha

I have always disliked myself at any given moment; the total of such moments is my life.
– Cyril Connolly

My love for you, is like the circle; and our happiness, dwells with numbers.

Footprints, in the rainy sand; our twilight stroll, between the storms.

Potential, and evanescence; what do these words mean, to the truth?

– @AmericanSijo

Free yourself from the
psychological structure of society.

– Jiddu Krishnamurti

I begin to think that for us to meet on Wednesdays is a duty: there seem to be so many obstacles and fiendish devices to prevent it.
– J.R.R. Tolkien to C.S. Lewis

Such a deep silence surrounds me, that I think I hear moonbeams striking on the windows.
– Lucian Blaga

If you could only keep quiet, clear of memories and expectations, you would be able to discern the beautiful pattern of events. It’s your restlessness that causes chaos.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

I am not born for one corner, the whole world is my native land.
– Seneca

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

The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars.
– Ursula Le Guin

There are people who can have full blown mystical awakening experiences, know exactly what to do to dig deeper into them,,

And just go “ah never mind, let’s not.”

And I… cannot understand them at all

– River Kenna

Just as light destroys darkness by its very presence, so does the absolute destroy imagination. To see that all knowledge is a form of ignorance is itself a movement of reality.

– Nisargadatta

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
– John Updike

Enjoy the company of people of understanding. What you say will be rewarded with applause; what you hear, with learning.
– Baltasar Gracián

The people with the best vibe maintain a mindset of gratitude and they don’t hesitate to spread kindness.
– yung pueblo

Listen, every object’s in flux. The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith, justice, evil — they’re all fluid and in transition. They don’t stay in one form or in one place forever.
– Haruki Murakami

At the altar, she studies a small devotional painting hung above the lighted candles in a votive stand. The Madonna and Child, specked with wax, paint flaking off the canvas, the gilded frame has been gnawed by flames. A lost cause if ever there was one.
– Emily Russell, Restorations

Modern man, instead of attempting to raise himself to truth, seeks to drag truth down to his own level.
– René Guénon

The kernel, the center of poetry, is to be found in mythology and the mysteries of antiquity. Satiate the feeling of life with the idea of infinity, and you will understand both the ancients and poetry.
– Friedrich Schlegel

One of the most frequent uses of places in dreams is to show you whose “turf” you are on, whose influence you are under. So a good way to understand the significance of a place is to ask who it belongs to.
– Robert A. Johnson

It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and colored with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.
– Doris Lessing

The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order to completely assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one’s own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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

Fear is a strong thing. It can make you do things you wouldn’t otherwise.
– John Steinbeck

A single stick may smoke, but it will not burn.
– African Proverb

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter.
– Allen Ginsberg

Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall.
– Joseph Campbell

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
– Leonardo da Vinci

You know you’ve reached middle age when you’re cautioned to slow down by your doctor, instead of by the police.
– Joan Rivers

The hate that fuels white supremacy is the same hate that fuels homophobia, a conscientious society realizes it’s at war with both.
– Raquel Willis

No black woman writer in this culture can write “too much.” Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’…No woman has ever written enough.
– bell hooks

Middle age is when work is a lot less fun, and fun is a lot more work.
– Laurence J. Peter

Our wildness is perfect as it is, and we don’t have to tame it. What the dharma gives us is a larger space in which to hold that animal body.
– Willa Baker

I’ve never shown a manuscript to anybody in my whole life. The first person to read a manuscript has always been the person who, presumably, was going to publish it.
– Eliot Weinberger

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
– Rebecca West

A bell should bring bread or a neighbor’s smile, Not chains for words nor iron trial. Give the North back, let peace be one. Not fragments broken, but whole begun.
– Joe Garvey

To be suspicious is not a fault. To be suspicious all the time without coming to a conclusion is the defect.
– Lu Xun

Free speech rarely vanishes in a single blow. It erodes until silence feels normal.
– Li Yuan

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.
– John Barrymore

Most things don’t work out as expected, but what happens instead often turns out to be the good stuff.
– Judi Dench

If the whole Earth becomes paper and all the branches of the trees become pens, and if all the seas become ink, even then the merits of the Guru cannot be written.
– Kabir

In the face of adversity, hope often comes in the form of a friend who reaches out to us.
– Christopher Reeve

A gentle word, a kind look, a good-natured smile can work wonders and accomplish miracles.
– William Hazlitt

I love showing up to a place thinking it’s going to be one way and having all sorts of stupid preconceptions… and then in even a painful and embarrassing way, being proved wrong. If you can get a little smarter about the world every day, it’s a win.

– Anthony Bourdain

Because the truth is, I believe that creativity is a force of enchantment—not entirely human in its origins.
– Elizabeth Gilbert

Nothing in life is so hard that you can’t make it easier by the way you take it.
– Ellen Glasgow

Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
– Alain de Botton

not quiet enough to be easy,
not wild enough to be forgiven.
– Lisa Liebetrau

The stars didn’t give up.
The trees didn’t give up.
And you, somehow, are cut from the same cloth.
Think about what that means for what’s possible.
– @thetinyjoyproject

Lead from the back, and let others believe they are in front.
– Nelson Mandela

The point is this: in all kinds of knowledge I perceive that my views are insufficient, and my judgement imperfect. In experiments I come to conclusions which, if partly right, are sure to be in part wrong; if I correct by other experiments, I advance a step, my old error is in part diminished, but it is always left with a tinge of humanity, evidenced by its imperfection.
– Michael Faraday

It’s a learning process, and mistakes made in one year often contribute to competence and success in succeeding years.
– Warren Buffett

You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it.
– George Orwell

Don’t become too preoccupied with what is happening around you. Pay attention to what is happening within you.
– Mary-Frances Winters

I used to envy the sunrise—
it reached her before I did.
Now I just thank it
for giving me one more chance
to try again.
– EAC

The desire to fix another is the active avoidance of the neglected self.
– Vedaji

Writing doesn’t mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.
– Umberto Eco

it’s funny how maturing as a poet means I am moving away from writing about trauma and into writing about this one good strawberry
– todd dillard

If you spend your life devoted to noticing and to looking, your sense of self begins to dissolve.

When you’re looking outward, you recognize that things are looking back at you.

There’s the whole idea that birds notice us way before we notice them. They’ve been looking at us this whole time, and then we go, ‘Oh look, a bird.’

I feel like recognizing that comes so naturally once you really start to pay attention. As a poet, that’s our job: to look, to notice, to witness, and to find language for it—and to recognize where language fails.

– Ada Limón

The Inner Fire By Brenda Ueland

Van Gogh and Chekhov and all great people have known inwardly that they were something. They have had a passionate conviction of their importance, of the life, the fire, the god in them. But they were never sure that others would necessarily see it in them, or that recognition would ever come.

But this is the point: everybody in the world has the same conviction of inner importance, fire, of the god within. The tragedy is that either they stifle their fire by not believing in it and using it; or they try to prove to the world and themselves that they have it, not inwardly and greatly, but externally and egotistically, by some second-rate thing like money or power or more publicity. Therefore all should work.

First because it is impossible that you have no creative gift. Second: the only way to make it live and increase is to use it. Third: you cannot be sure that it is not a great gift.

‘The strongest fish is the one that swims upstream.’ Rejection’s gift is that it gives us something to push against, a necessary pressure that can help a writer sharpen focus, define vision, and accept (and perhaps even relish) the discomforts required to make work better.
– Grant Faulkner

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

…art has always had a balancing effect on your mind; it is a reminder that you are more than a body and its accompanying grief.
– Carmen Maria Machado

not yet become a buddha,
this ancient pine tree,
dreaming.
– kobayashi issa

God’s song is the song of calmness. Nervousness is the static; calmness is the voice of God speaking to you through the radio of your soul.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

It isn’t just knowledge that has increased. The unknown also, in proportion.
All light surrounds the space it illuminates with the shadow it produces.
– Pascal Quignard (translated by Chris Turner)

Christianity teaches us that the terrible task has already in some sense been accomplished for us – that a master’s hand is holding ours as we attempt to trace the difficult letters and that our script need only be a ‘copy’, not an original.
– C.S. Lewis

Your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.
– Prof. Feynman

We cultivate the intellect and acquire knowledge of innumerable things, but we remain inwardly the same: ambitious, cruel, violent, envious, burdened.
– Krishnamurti

Whatever I do, I do with greatest love that I have in me. Try this, and you will see that you do not become fatigued at all. Love is one of the greatest stimulants to the will. Under the influence of love the will can do almost anything.

– Paramahansa Yogananda

What is wrong with our civilization can be said with one word — unreality. We are in no danger either from the vices or the virtues of vikings; we are in danger of forgetting all facts, good and bad, in a haze of high-minded phraseology.
– G. K. Chesterton

What I wish I had not lost is the time, or the inventory of the lost things, or the consciousness of all the things that are not lost.
– Renata Adler

Mr. Grumpledump’s Song
by Shel Silverstein

Everything’s wrong,
Days are too long,
Sunshine’s too hot,
Wind is too strong.
Clouds are too fluffy,
Grass is too green,
Ground is too dusty,
Sheets are too clean.
Stars are too twinkly,
Moon is too high,
Water’s too drippy,
Sand is too dry.
Rocks are too heavy,
Feathers too light,
Kids are too noisy,
Shoes are too tight.
Folks are too happy,
Singin’ their songs.
Why can’t they see it?
Everything’s wrong!

The business of the poet and novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

– Thomas Hardy

hillside maples
even the sunset wind
changes color

– Laryalee Fraser

I wrote tons. I don’t know, it was the nineties, man. Rubber cement and collages and real typewriters. I had five typewriters. I had an italics typewriter!
– Maggie Nelson

Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart.
– Proverbs 3:3

Actually, the only freedom you have
is to not react to conditions
and to turn within to see the Truth.

– Robert Adams

You can do it. I would love to see every person here do something to improve his mind.
– Manly P. Hall

Sing and do not stop. March and do not stop. Work and do not stop. Write your story across the sky and don’t despair because despair is the most powerful weapon of the dominant.
– Luis Alberto Urrea

This…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

In these times we are navigating the repressive, hateful, dismantling of our democracy. Democracy in this country was influenced by Iroquoian and Muskogean forms of bilateral government in which all sides could come together to speak and work together. Everyone was equal and had a voice. We listened because we looked for pathways to restore everyone, which includes all living beings. Everyday we are seeing cruel and violent behavior unfolding with the goal to silence anyone who is not extreme right. I am starting to get fearful even of some relatives because they are backing people who hate us, the earth, and anyone whom they perceive is not them in skin color culture, or belief system. I keep trying to figure out how to make connection, how we could all sit together in a round house, long house or other gathering place meant to bring people together with food, song, dance, stories, and gestures of goodwill to make relatives. Yet we are in that place. We are under the same sky, are warmed by the same sun, tell stories by the same moon. We will need courage and need to remember always kindness and fierce love.
– Joy Harjo

Aspen Alley, Fall

push, pull
of tires and road
the strong line of your shoulders
a secondary horizon
beyond,
pale wrists and glowing
cowl
of aspens,
a message written across
the mountain
in a secret
language
Skree strewn
like monstrous reliquaries
Pine-speak
wind leaning with the weight
of horses,
a wall of sound
washed light, glassine
on clean, hot rocks
the scent of sleep
the road pulls us
through grasping
hands and tongue of crosswinds
that reach inside us with
mineral chill
lucent blue sky
a cloud-thread mirror
of the mountains
with their thin, cracked snow
Autumn, this gift
we cannot keep,
tenuous,
crusted with beauty
and portent,
ephemeral.

– Lori Howe

There is no time in nature. There is rhythm in nature, yes. There is motion in nature. But the clock as a measure of motion is a human artifact. The world, as it spins on its axis, doesn’t tick.
– Alan Watts

People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two loves, but this, too, was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel — before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from chairs and bed-sheets. After a few years, Levi arrived; space was made for him; it was as if he had always been. Looking at them both now, Jerome found himself in their finger joints and neat conch ears, in their long legs and wild curls. He heard himself in their partial lisps caused by puffy tongues vibrating against slightly noticeable buckteeth. He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
– Zadie Smith

A Witness to Creation
If you could have that one day back, the one that
you have kept a secret in your soul, what day would it be?
What? One among the many? Well, let me make you this offering:
It would be the day on which I stood on the rim of Monument Valley and beheld
those ineffable monoliths for the first time. I was young, you see, like a fledgling
who leaves the nest and flies out over the earth. I saw beyond time, into
timelessness. It was the first and holiest of all days. On such a day—
on that original day—did the First Man behold the First World. It filled
him with wonder and humility. Then and there, looking for one enchanted
moment into eternity, I was the First Man. I was present at Creation!
– N. Scott Momaday

I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive.
– Anne Carson

Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm… What rhythm is…goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.
– Virginia Woolf

The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

A Sad Child
by Margaret Atwood

You’re sad because you’re sad.
It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical.
Go see a shrink or take a pill,
or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll
you need to sleep.

Well, all children are sad
but some get over it.
Count your blessings. Better than that,
buy a hat. Buy a coat or pet.
Take up dancing to forget.

Forget what?
Your sadness, your shadow,
whatever it was that was done to you
the day of the lawn party
when you came inside flushed with the sun,
your mouth sulky with sugar,
in your new dress with the ribbon
and the ice-cream smear,
and said to yourself in the bathroom,
I am not the favorite child.

My darling, when it comes
right down to it
and the light fails and the fog rolls in
and you’re trapped in your overturned body
under a blanket or burning car,

and the red flame is seeping out of you
and igniting the tarmac beside you head
or else the floor, or else the pillow,
none of us is;
or else we all are.

Anyway—because we are readers, we don’t have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis—at any time of night or day.
– Kurt Vonnegut

A STORY
Now I will tell Meader’s story; I have a moral in view.
He was pestered by a grizzly so bold and malicious
That he used to snatch carbou meat trom the eaves of the cabin.
Not only that. He ignored men and was unafraid of fire.
One night he started battering the door
And broke the window with his paw, so they curled up
With their shotguns beside them, and waited for the dawn.
He came back in the evening, and Meader shot him at close range,
Under the left shoulder blade. Then it was jump and run,
A real storm of a run: a grizzly, Meader says,
Even when he’s been hit in the heart, will keep running
Until he falls down. Later, Meader found him
By following the trail-and then he understood
What lay behind the bear’s odd behavior:
Half of the beast’s jaw was eaten away by an abscess, and caries.
Toothache, for years. An ache without comprehensible reason,
Which often drives us to senseless action
And gives us blind courage. We have nothing to lose,
We come out of the forest, and not always with the hope
That we will be cured by some dentist from heaven.
– Czesław Miłosz

A society that mocks virtue prepares its own
collapse.
– Plato

Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought. In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends. To keep to the social level, our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities. This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary: nation, security, capitalism, communism, fascism, order, authority, property, democracy. We never use them in phrases such as: There is democracy to the extent that… or: There is capitalism in so far as… The use of expressions like ‘to the extent that’ is beyond our intellectual capacity. Each of these words seems to represent for us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean, successively or simultaneously, anything whatsoever. Our lives are lived, in actual fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits.
– Simone Weil

The basis of neurosis, or even physical discomfort and pain, is mind and body not joining together.
– Chögyam Trungpa

After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.
– Han Kang

At times, the heart
must shatter so
that the soul
can breathe again.

– Matt Licata

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

Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man: preserve me from the violent man; which imagine mischiefs in their heart; continually are they gathered together for war. They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent; adders’ poison is under their lips. Selah.

– Psalm 140:1-3

Unless we fundamentally change, do what we will – create the most extraordinary legislative order, bring about a welfare state which guarantees everyone’s social well-being – inwardly we shall always remain poor.
– Krishnamurti

To study soul, we must go deep, and when we go deep, soul becomes involved. The logos of the soul, psychology, implies the act of traveling the soul’s labyrinth in which we can never go deep enough.
– James Hillman

Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.
– Stendhal (as quoted by Andrei Tarkovsky in his diaries)

Since the past is unreal and the future is unreal,
all your thoughts are about nothing.
– Byron Katie

If you’re an artist, I think that the university world is not good. I think the real world is better. You have to be against the system in some way.
– Robert Frank

Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise.
– Cato

One must read Paradise Lost out loud, not only to hear its incomparable music, but to feel the process of articulating that music.

One might begin with a single line: “And on the washy ooze deep channels wore.” —Don’t you just love that?

– Bret van den Brink

A sin is a psychological mistake in which the orient of an image or a life situation is not meticulously obeyed.
– Yoram Kaufmann

The error lies not in dreaming that secret gardens exist, but in dreaming that they have doors.
– Nicolás Gómez Davila

When you examine a gift, look at the giver too.
– Seneca

The unaware man is obsessed with ascending,

The sage knows that grounding is superior.

– Zen masters

You can value spiritual wealth & still live a life of luxury. You can seek higher consciousness & still be integrated with your ego. You can create a higher timeline while still living in the material world. It’s not one or the other. It’s integrating all of it.
– Nika Solé

The role of intellectuals is to challenge authority, not serve it.
– Prof. Carl Sagan

To be aware of your breath reduces the amount of thinking you do. You take consciousness away from what it is usually absorbed by, which is the stream of thinking.
– Eckhart Tolle

When you are arguing against God you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.
– C.S. Lewis

Most anarchists believe the coming change can only come through a revolution, because the possessing class will not allow a peaceful change to take place; still we are willing to work for peace at any price, except at the price of liberty.
– Lucy Parsons

The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be.
– @naval

Wake up. Don’t let the calamity get the best of you. Know thyself. Don’t use your mind to react to conditions. Learn to be the observer.
– Robert Adams

You have to surrender, at least a little bit, to be the best version of yourself possible.

– @naval

Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.
– Opening line of The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy

If you see your nature, you don’t need to read sutras or invoke buddhas. Erudition and knowledge are not only useless but also cloud your awareness. Doctrines are only for pointing to the mind. Once you see your mind, why pay attention to doctrines?
– Bodhidharma

There is only one decision you need to make: you are either working at your freedom or you are accepting your bondage.
– Robert Adams

Was she the victim of some lurking sorrow, or the mistress of some clandestine joy?
– Henry James

People consume state propaganda like it is god’s popcorn, popped just for them by some divine arbiter of destiny who also defines nations and creates national heritage and urges wars fought to prop up abstractions like “national honor” and “hedge-funds.” We are a bonkers species.
– Alina Stefanescu

Childhood is the state of the soul inhabited by something to which no answer is ever given. It is led in its undertakings by an arrogant loyalty to this unknown guest to which it feels itself hostage.
– Lyotard

Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won’t last forever. We must take it or leave it.
– C.S. Lewis

The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.
– Robert Louis Stevenson

We need to know a character before we can feel bad they’re gone. And no, starting with their death and circling back doesn’t cut it.
– Allison K Williams

September came in with golden days and silver nights…
– J.R.R. Tolkien

We should know clearly before we discuss a matter; to guess is one thing, to know clearly another.
– Aeschylus

Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves.
– Byung-chul Han, The Burnout Society

Do you know how miserable condition i got into, Nastenka? Now i have to celebrate anniversaries of my former feelings.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

It is an eternal obligation towards the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has the chance of coming to his assistance.
– Simone Weil

Poetry is not a fancy way of giving you information; it’s an incantation. It is actually a magic spell. It changes things; it changes you.
– Philip Pullman

Other people’s views and troubles can be contagious. Don’t sabotage yourself by unwittingly adopting negative, unproductive attitudes through your associations with others.
– Epictetus

It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.
– Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigation

I believe that I’m one of a few Athenians … to take up the true political craft and practice the true politics. This is because the speeches I make on each occasion do not aim at gratification but at what’s best.
– Socrates

The philosopher Plotinus suggested that while the body favors a straight line, the soul hankers for the circle. This mythic, circular time, (which is really no kind of time at all) laughs at the straight line and the alarm clock.
– Dr. Martin Shaw

Knowing your latitude and longitude is not the same as knowing where you are.
– Jennifer Egan

Jung once observed that our neuroses were in fact our private religions, that is, where the bulk of our spirit is actually invested.
– James Hollis

Demanding yet denying the human condition makes for an explosive contradiction. And explode it does, as you and I know. … This is the age of the boomerang, the third stage of violence: it flies right back at us, it strikes us and, once again, we have no idea what hit us.
– Frantz Fanon

The right ending is an open door you can’t see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.
– Michael Ondaatje

It is paradoxical, but you can feel both gratitude and resentment toward the person who forces you to begin down your own path of growth.
– Robert A. Johnson

How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!”
– Samuel Adams

I was astonished by the sudden surge of loneliness and terror I felt when I realized how stranded I was in this hostile place, that I did not know how to speak to people and win them over to me, that the bank, the canteen, the supermarket, the dark streets seemed so intimidating, and that I could not return from where I came – that, as I then thought, I had lost everything.
– Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

She had entered him like he was water. Like he was a dictionary and she was a word he hadn’t known was in him. Or she had entered him more simply, like he was a door and she opened him, leaving him standing ajar as she walked straight in.
– Ali Smith

Liberty will not long survive the total extinction of morals.
– Samuel Adams

It is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice. For they cannot live in any country where virtue and knowledge prevail.
– Samuel Adams

Eavesdropping is a deplorable habit, but I have developed worse ones since.
– Patrick Rothfuss

Suffering is what gives a man strength, my boy, just as the steel most hammered turns out the hardest.
– Joe Abercrombie

Manners is what holds a society together. At bottom, propriety is concern for other people. When that goes out the window, the gates of hell are shortly opened and ignorance is made King.
– Jane Austen

Equanimity is characterized by an even-tempered contentment that arises when you feel okay about your life even though you don’t know what the future has in store.
– Toni Bernhard

Myth and legend give way to history, which gives way again to myth, like curtains parting and meeting again on either side of a performance.
– Amal el-Mothar

When a youth was giving himself airs in the Theatre and saying, ‘I am wise, for I have conversed with many wise men,’ Epictetus replied, ‘I too have conversed with many rich men, yet I am not rich!’.
– Epictetus

Do people who want us to end H1B visas understand that kids in other countries are learning Algebra in 5th grade while our 5th graders are being forcibly taught how to recite the Lord’s prayer?
– Nathan Jun

Except for my less than two years at Stony Brook, I’ve never been in any scene or community, ever. My self-education was that poetry was my gateway to knowledge.
– Eliot Weinberger

The strange thing is that they seem to be talking past each other. He hadn’t noticed this before, but now it seems obvious. He makes a point about something and then she makes an entirely different point about something else.
– Suli Qyre

Your memory is a monster. You forget. It doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you or hides things from you. And summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you.
– John Irving

If you took all of the knowledge that this world has ever produced, and compared it to the knowledge of an omniscient mind of a buddha, it would be like comparing a single drop of water to the entire ocean.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche

The goal of investigation should not be to advocate the simplest explanation but rather to enumerate all of the possible explanations, and then to devise tests to eliminate some of them.
– Edward O. Wilson

No doubt, delusions are commonplace to those who aspire to greatness without the requisite integrity, insight, & genius required for it.
– Joyce Carol Oates

Don’t try to be what you’re not. If you’re nervous, be nervous. If you’re shy, be shy. It’s cute.
– Adriana Lima

Neuroplasticity means the brain rewires with repetition. Every thought and habit leaves a trace.
– Gabriel Moraes

Hegel is – to use today’s terms – the ultimate thinker of autopoiesis, of the process of the emergence of necessary features out of chaotic contingency, the thinker of contingency’s gradual self-organisation, of the gradual rise of order out of chaos.
– Slavoj Žižek

It’s important to notice when the spark of magic or curiosity is there and what snuffs it out, and being around too many writers, for me, snuffs it out.
– Maggie Nelson

Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.
– Victor Klemperer

By tapping into your awareness of the present moment, you can do the same with your habits. Filling the space of addictions with healthier alternatives, such as mindfulness meditation, can be an auspicious inroad to a path of sobriety.
– Charlie Vázquez

My heart grows
confused
between your need for love
and your need for destruction.
– Audre Lorde

Survival is not victory.
It is stitching yourself shut
while knowing dawn
will split the seam wide again.
– Pelle Martens

Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life.
– Golda Meir

Before going back to college, i knew i didn’t want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.
– Assata Shakur

We could have a plague of virtuous people. You realize that? Any animal, considered in itself, is virtuous. It does its thing. But in crowds they’re awful-like a crowd of ants or locusts on the rampage. They’re all perfectly good animals, but it’s just too much. I could imagine a perfectly pestiferous mass of a million saints.
– Alan Watts

The heat is so scorching it hurts even to breathe. You have to take the air in sips.
– Zuzana Říhová

The rains flood this stretch once,
twice, who can count when it’s wet?
– Jennifer Martelli

I know I’ll always think
of you with something like
hurt and nostalgia 一and a
great deal of love.
– Sylvia Plath

The deliverance that comes from somebody else will not be much of a deliverance. Freedom has to be earned, it cannot be given. If it is given, it can be taken away. If it is given, it is not yours, it is not your growth. And anything that is given to you, remains only an accumulation on the outside. It never becomes part of your interiority.
– Osho

The deliverance that comes from somebody else will not be much of a deliverance. Freedom has to be earned, it cannot be given. If it is given, it can be taken away. If it is given, it is not yours, it is not your growth. And anything that is given to you, remains only an accumulation on the outside. It never becomes part of your interiority.
– Osho

We do not really want to let go of our problems, for what would we be without them?
– Krishnamurti

Love is contraband in Hell, cause love is an acid that eats away bars.
– Assata Shakur

We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.
– Nikki Giovanni

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words all being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
– V Nabokov

I can’t think of any better representation of beauty than someone who is unafraid to be herself.
– Emma Stone

Sometimes the best things are right in front of you; it just takes some time to see them.
– Gladys Knight

I will often accumulate sonic profiles for my characters—the songs and other media that inform their lives.
– Juan Fernando Villagómez

Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.
– G. K. Chesterton

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.
– Neil Gaiman

Never give up on what makes you smile.
– Heath Ledger

I believe that this earth was meant for tenderness and not terror.
– Assata Shakur

I write toward reciprocity, toward
connection, toward offering
something back to this wondrous
suffering planet. Writing is a way of
saying, Yes, I am here, but also we
are here together, all of us, how
rare, how miraculous, how awful,
how utterly strange.
– Ada Limón

You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
– Malcolm X

we need a r/evolution of the mind. we need a r/evolution of the heart. we need a r/evolution of the spirit. the power of the people is stronger than any weapon. a people’s r/evolution can’t be stopped. we need to be weapons of mass construction. weapons of mass love. it’s not enough just to change the system. we need to change ourselves.
– Assata Shakur

A country whose Constitution, government and laws are essentially – as it turns out – run on the honor system, cannot sustain when it’s run by those without honor.
– @regenfuturist

I find politicians so desperately boring. I don’t trust them and don’t believe in them.
– Ewan McGregor

Perhaps if you stopped pouring your depth into people too shallow to hold it, you would stop finding yourself in puddles on the floor.
– Simon Riley

We’ve allowed “Christian” to become synonymous with aggressive nationalism, anti-intellectualism, and performative outrage. This isn’t a witness to Christ; it’s blasphemy against Him. ​The world sees our fruit and recoils. They’re not rejecting Jesus; they’re rejecting what we’ve made Him.
– The Faithful Citizen Podcast

We offer our soldiers socialism to go abroad and defend capitalism.
– Jolly Good Ginger

I withdraw from people and places from time to time. I need space from a world that is filled with millions of mouths that talk too much, and never have anything to say.
– Kaitlin Foster

Chinquapins were once called “the poor person’s chestnut.” I call them “Appalachia’s comeback kids.”
– @thegoldberrygrove

Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for ten years.
– Warren Buffett

Before the leaves of autumn fall, we stack our wood against the cold.
– Robert Frost

I don’t know how I missed this before, but contemporaries under Oadoacer (ruler of Rome 476–493) and Theodoric the Great (493 to 526) didn’t consider Rome to have fallen. Oadoacer ruled only as king, backed by the Roman Senate nominally under Julius Nepos until his death and Eastern Roman Emperor Zeno. Theodoric received the Western imperial regalia from Constantinople in 497 and ruled in the name of the Roman Empire under Zeno and then Anastasius I. The social construct of the western empire having “fallen” really only took hold in the west under Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian (527 to 565) who conquered much of Italy and the old western empire, leading people to wonder why he had to conquer it if it was already Rome. So basically, Romans didn’t think they “fell” in 476, when Oadoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, but rather only a century later did Italians come to think of Rome as fallen.
– Jared Polis

To tramp long miles in wind and rain, to stand wet to the skin and hungry and footsore…such must have been the daily fate of many amongst the humbler minstrels at least.
– Sir Edwin Chambers

I refuse to be 45 & single,
riding around in a slingshot
blasting computer love.
– Alex Cooper

The world is fun and familiar, and healthful and unbelievably refreshing and lovely, and it is the theater of the spiritual, it is the multiform utterly obedient to a mystery.
– Mary Oliver

And though the questions that have assailed the day remain…
not a single answer has been found…
walking out now into the silence and the light under the trees,
and through the fields, feels like one.
– Mary Oliver

Civilization died when the blackboard was replaced by the whiteboard.
– Nicholas Pierotti

Most people think sequoias survive because they’re massive.
But that’s not even close to the real reason.
If you’ve ever had the privilege standing beside one of these giants, you’ll find it hard NOT to think of resilience.
These trees can live through droughts, fires, storms, and climate shifts that would kill almost anything else.
But as an engineer this is what I’m fixated on:
The tallest tree in the world has roots that only go 6-12 feet deep.
That should be impossible. A 300-foot tree with shallow roots makes no sense from an engineering perspective.
But… Sequoias don’t survive alone.
Their root systems spread 50-80 feet wide and interweave with every other sequoia around them.
They share nutrients, water, and structural support. When storms come in, they support each other.
The forest is the system: Not the individual trees.
I couldn’t stop thinking about this.
Most people try to build resilience by making themselves bigger, stronger, more independent. They stockpile resources, they build higher walls, they go it alone.
But the most resilient systems in nature are interconnected.
Maybe the question isn’t “how do I become more self-sufficient?” but “how do I become more meaningfully connected to the right systems?”

– Rob Avis

The country was big, and its appetite for prejudice and depredation limitless, how could they keep up with the host of injustices, big and small. This was just one place. A lunch counter in New Orleans, a public pool in Baltimore that they filled with concrete rather than allow black kids to dip a toe in it. This was one place, but if there was one, there were hundreds, hundreds of Nickels and White Houses scattered across the land like pain factories.
– Colson Whitehead

We sometimes talk as if ‘original research’ were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students. But all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking for.
– John Dewey, Democracy and Education

I love all or I love nothing. Hence it is that I love nothing.
– Albert Camus

If you read a novel to the end, then it’s over. I would never want to do something as wasteful as that. I’d much rather keep it here with me, safe and sound, forever.
– Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

In the chaos, there is opportunity. In the confusion, there is clarity.
– Mark Bowden

The key remains the same for everyone—complete sincerity. You must give your all. Holding on to nothing, you must become your practice.
– Tangen Harada Roshi

You have to live spherically – in many directions. Never lose your childish enthusiasm – and things will come your way.
– Frederico Fellini

With trust, something immense opens up. Then this life is no longer an ordinary life, it becomes full of God, overflowing. When the heart is innocent and the walls have disappeared, you are bridged with infinity.
– Osho

Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.
– Jacques Prévert

Better to sleep with a drunk cannibal than a sober Christian.
– Herman Melville

He who loves something, constantly mentions it.
– Imam Ali

In a lecture Suzuki said that Zen was nothing special, just sitting, sipping a cup of tea. Indeed, the practice at Sokoji was a testament to this.
– David Chadwick

I am used to men who mock and scorn the things beyond their comprehension .
– Goethe

It’s your ability to inspire and uplift other people that matters, not your ability to outdo them.
– Doug Larson

There was a hollow shell that dwelled
beneath the same roof as myself and
I became familiar with its presence
every time I gazed in the mirror

– Katrina R Lippolis

You cannot be intelligent merely by choosing your opinions. The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sound reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically.
– Bertrand Russell

“Bread and circuses.”
The Roman poet Juvenal coined this phrase to condemn a populace that had grown apathetic. He argued that the citizens of Rome had traded their political freedom and civic duty for free food (“bread”) and spectacular entertainment (“circuses”). The term remains a powerful critique of how governments can use trivial distractions to control the public.
– Juvenal

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
– Chinese Proverb

Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.
– Alice Walker

Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come.
– Tagore

How easy it is to judge rightly after one sees what evil comes from judging wrongly!
– Elizabeth Gaskell

Use your fear — it can take you to the place where you store your courage.
– Amelia Earhart

I’m all for unifying. I’m all for bridging gaps. But not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity.
– Ta-Nehisi Coates

No matter how much falls on us, we keep plowing ahead. That’s the only way to keep the roads clear.
– Greg Kincaid

They plunder, they butcher, they ravish, and call it by the lying name of empire. They make a desert and call it peace.
– Tacitus, Agricola

Most people act, not according to their meditations, and not according to their feelings, but as if hypnotized, based on some senseless repetition of patterns. You should be brave enough to use your own intellect, in life and in your education.
– Immanuel Kant

Kobayashi Issa

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

– Translated from the Japanese by Robert Hass

“Do you see yourself in this book?”
And I always think,
“No.”

“A book isn’t supposed to be a mirror.
It’s supposed to be a door!”

– Fran Lebowitz

The phoenix bird will stay away if you don’t plant phoenix trees.
– Mud and Water by Bassui Tokusho

Reality is inside the skull.
– George Orwell

This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Once you stop trying to prove points,
your life will be much more peaceful.
Let people say and think what they want.
It has nothing to do with you.
– Simon Riley

War anywhere is war everywhere,
there is no hiding from it.
It lives in our bodies,
our collective psyches, our dreams
– Amara Lissie

Shaking hands with the Queen of England was a long way from being forced to sit in the colored section of the bus going into downtown Wilmington, North Carolina.
– Althea Gibson

I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait ‘til the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.
– Issac Newton

Very subtly [Blake] suggests that trauma can be redemptive. Most certainly my own experience teaches me the reverse. But then, I am not William Blake.
– Harold Bloom

Anybody with artistic ambitions is always trying to reconnect with the way they saw things as a child.
– Tim Burton

Watching a sunset reduces cortisol, the stress hormone. It’s nature’s way of telling your brain: “The day is over, rest now.”
– Gabriel Moraes

She hums in colors the world has yet to see.
– @unspokentruthbysrishti

A most radical act might be to stop trying to prove your worth.
– Yrsa Daley Ward

dear capitalism:
i am not a machine with skin.
i am a constellation of moments,
most of them unproductive
all of them sacred.
– Alyssa Davis

And I never really thought I’d amount to anything. It was precisely what
I wanted the whole world to think; then I could sneak in, if that’s what
they wanted, and sneak out again, which I did.
– Jack Kerouac

The dreams of someone living today in New York or in Paris are the same as the dreams reported from people living some thousand years ago in Athens or in Jerusalem. The dreams of ancient and modern man are written in the same language as the myths whose authors lived in the dawn of history.
– Erich Fromm

In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run it is a weighing machine.
– Benjamin Graham

Sometimes I draw a certain comfort precisely from the terrible hopelessness of the situation. This is a peak; nothing, neither good nor evil, can remain in a state of superlatives…
– Victor Klemperer

There is far less freedom and arbitrariness in mental life than we are inclined to assume – there may even be none at all.
– Sigmund Freud

The most radical thing you can do today is slow down and unplug.
– Chase Hughes

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
– Madeleine L’Engle

We cannot make events. Our business is wisely to improve them.
– Samuel Adams

There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be, because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring.
– Evelyn Beatrice Hall

For my part, it was Greek to me.
– William Shakespeare

Leisure without study is death; it is a tomb for the living man.
– Seneca

If an innocent man doesn’t get angry, he’ll live a long while. A guilty man will get sick because of bad thoughts, a bad conscience.
– Traditional Hopi teaching

I would say, in general, that for anyone who wants to get out of time, any kind of art is useful. That’s what art is all about. That’s what it’s for, to get you out of time.
– William Burroughs

You can respect a mentor and still edit their advice.
The strongest students aren’t obedient.
They’re observant.
– Peter Abdaal

The literary man is potentially in control of the strategies needed in the new sensory environment.
– McLuhan

The problem in our country isn’t with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us – it’s all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. … You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
– Ray Bradbury

A life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking, brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness.
– Gary Snyder

When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.
– Rob Sheffield, Love is a Mix Tape

We are marching toward an uninsurable future in this country and across the globe; marching into the abyss.
– Mother Jones

The smart way to start over is to start a new chapter.
In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo never “starts over.” Every quest pushes him closer to getting the ring to Mordor.
Your goals in life don’t require you to erase the past. They require you to build on top of it.
– Taylin Simmonds

Patriarchy is basically just narcissistic abuse written into law, culture, and institutions.
– Nina Kolar

The reason you feel stuck is because you keep negotiating with habits that are killing you slowly.
– Daniel Barada

The Pharisees weren’t villains in their own story. They were convinced they were protecting holiness. That’s what makes religious pride so dangerous…it always thinks it’s serving God.
– Beau Stringer

While you’re overthinking and doubting yourself, someone is looking at you wondering how you do it all.
– Heather Morgan

And if I hear one more time
About a man’s right to his tools of rage
I’m gonna take all my friends
And move to Canada
And die of old age

– Ani Difranco

An educated man is one who has developed the faculties of his mind that he may acquire anything he wants without violating the rights of others.
– Napoleon Hill

There are a thousand excuses for failure but never a good reason.
– Mark Twain

You will never outperform the image you hold of yourself.
– F. Lim

The universe is always speaking to us… sending us little messages, causing coincidences and serendipities, reminding us to stop, to look around, to believe in something else, something more.
– Nancy Thayer

Do not watch yourself too closely. Do not draw over-rapid conclusions from what is happening to you. Simply let it happen.
– Rainer Rilke

Truth is so obscured nowadays and lies so well established that unless we love the truth we shall never recognize it.
– Blaise Pascal

Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

The bigger the monster, the more epic the hero.
– @hormozi

I’ve got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.
– Louisa May Alcott

She discovered what others know only too well in a cynical way, that people prefer to believe in and worship a god who is remote rather than live out the godlike nature which is their inherent being.
– Henry Miller

KNOWLEDGE

Sometimes everything is not wrong
and the autumn morning
blues into all that was ever meant –
the trees coppered by the water
and the geese ragged in the low sky.
There is no need to fear for time stands
still and mirrored in the loch’s clear sheen.

And we who are made of time
wait by windows and know
we have escaped into a place
where clocks and watches do not count
and a light that autumns always had
is ours alone.

– Kenneth C. Steven

The world doesn’t want to be saved. It wants to be loved. That’s how you save it.
– Richard Brendan

I don’t like ‘literary.’ That’s probably self-preservationist, but it feels bleak to have only that one talent and be in an environment that’s built around it.
– Maggie Nelson

Who wants to hear of brave deeds when he’s ashamed of his own, and who likes an open, honest tale from someone he’s deceiving?
– Fiver, Watership Down, Richard Adams

all things smiled
– John Milton, Paradise Lost

It is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: ‘This is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened.
– Virginia Woolf

It was September. In the last days
when things are getting sad for no
reason.
– Ray Bradbury

I don’t trust anyone who’s nice to me but rude to the waiter. Because they would treat me the same way if I were in that position.
– Muhammad Ali

The feeling of being “offended” is a warning indicator that is showing you where to look within yourself for unresolved issues.
– Bryant McGill

A good poet is someone who manages, in a life-time of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.
– Randall Jarrell

Knowledge is a skyscraper. You can take a shortcut with a fragile foundation of memorization, or build slowly upon a steel frame of understanding.
– @naval

Thinking about nothing. I remember my mother sitting like this. And I would ask,What is it mommy? And she would say, Oh nothing. And now I know what nothing is.
– Patti Smith

I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.

– Richard Wright

late-September
still a small harvest
of warm days

– @ruralitalics

Diversification is a hedge against a lack of knowledge.
– @naval

Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals
with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants,
– Frank O’Hara

By making an enemy of fire, we’ve made an enemy of the land
– Jordan Thomas

Do I not remember it! I never expected to survive; and the intense emotion of regret, the vivid (almost raw) perception of the young man who feels himself doomed to die before he has ‘said his word’, is with me still: a cloud, a patch of sun, a star, were often more than I could bear. I was, of course, a poet…but each man has his own modes.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

The thought that you exist
is the root of all noise.
– Wu Hsin

Something amazing happens when we surrender and just love. We melt into another world, a realm of power already within us. The world changes when we change. the world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love the world.
– Marianne Williamson

I don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments.

– @naval

divorced for years
alone in my room
I watch sunlight
sift slowly
into the sonless dark
– Chen-ou Liu

Nihilism (in the passive sense) manifests itself as soon as the ability to invent new fictions and interpret them is exhausted.
– Nietzsche

Negotiations are won by whoever cares less.
– @naval

To go through life effortlessly, children need an atmosphere that nurtures inner strength.
– Sadhguru

But there is no loophole left for anyone who seeks to be honest: Not even for a day, not even in the safest technical occupations can he avoid even a single one of the listed choices—to be made in favor of either truth or lies, in favor of spiritual independence or spiritual servility.

And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am a cattle, I am of the heard. I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill.

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When his mind has become serene,
By the practice of meditation,
He sees the Self through the self,
and rests in the Self, rejoicing…

– The Bhagavad Gita, Translation by Stephen Mitchell

Totalitarian regimes involve everyone in their cruelties, not for efficiency’s sake but to preempt accountability; shame is a potent inducement to amnesia.
– Catherine Nicholson, On King Lear

I recalled a young Russian worker from the country who still held the belief, when he came to Moscow, that the stars were the eyes of God and the eyes of the angels. They talked him out of it. They could not contradict it at all, but they could talk him out of it. And rightly so. For the stars are the eyes of human beings, which rise out of their closed lids and become bright and regain their strength. And that is why all the stars are above the country-side, where everyone is sleeping, and over the town there are only a few, because there are so many restless people there, weeping and reading, laughing and watching, who keep their eyes.
– Rilke, The Seventh Dream

Whatever profession is given to you,
do it with full consciousness and awareness.
Perform it as demanded of you.
– Papaji

Families are definitely the training ground for forgiveness. At some point you pardon the people in your family for being stuck together in all their weirdness, and when you can do that, you can learn to pardon anyone. Even yourself, eventually.
– Anne Lamott

Preemption, too, is always a too-much in regard to immediacy, to coping with whatever needs to be done. Instruments for possibilities must be much more extensive and subtle than instruments for a pressing reality.
– Hans Blumenberg

The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.

– Søren Kierkegaard

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search thereof when he is grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.
– Epicurus

Outside of math, physics, and chemistry, there isn’t much “settled science.” We’re still arguing over what the optimal diet is.
– @naval

It is not necessary that the same things should be ineffable in all languages. It is only necessary that in each language plenty of things should be so: unsayable, or, at the very least, unsaid.

It seems to me that a kind of speechlessness — the inability to say a quite significant number of things — is actually built into every language. But language itself is a self-transcending mechanism. It tries, and lets us try, to say what it can’t. The survival of poetry depends on the failure of language. The reason language exists, it seems to me, is that poetry — the resonance of being — needs it. If you live in a place that hasn’t been pillaged and ruined, the silence of language’s failure, and of poetry’s success, is present and vivid almost everywhere you listen, almost everywhere you look

– Robert Bringhurst

Your head is a living forest full of songbirds.
– E. E. Cummings

Instead of seeking to reform the individual, the wisdom of a nation should apply itself to reform the system.
– Thomas Paine

He spoke as a disappointed man, for whom perfection existed only as something remembered — and then regretted, because it was lost.
– Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

How much better to get wisdom than gold, to get insight rather than silver!
– Proverbs 16:16

Disabled people aren’t meant to prove our worth by pushing past pain or exhaustion. We’re meant to move at the pace of honoring flare days & slow mornings. We’re meant to soak in warm baths, stretch under soft blankets, savor soup, sunlight, silence. We’re meant to belong just as we are.
– Alyssa Davis

Taking a deep breath is a rebellion against chaos.
– @gardenz.of.grey

Conservatives are against abortions and homosexuals. Who has fewer abortions that homosexuals?
– George Carlin

The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell.
– Andre Malraux

In the first Trump term, it took a disease to destroy the economy. This time, he is the disease!
– Stephen Colbert

America has always been an enemy of the Wierld.
– Craig Feldpausch

The world we live in today is a result of a concerted effort of the demonization of liberal arts.
– Kay Isaac

White men are the problem. White men KNOW they’re the problem. That’s why they’re clinging so desperately to power.
– Eva Tybel

All that’s hidden leads us on and on —
The root and end of man are secret things.
But in this rocky heart of solitude
The fearful deep primeval silence brings
A misty answer to our WHITHER, WHENCE,
A whisper that can almost tell us WHY.
– Cid Ricketts Sumner

Over and above the various prejudices I acknowledge, the affinities I feel, the attractions I succumb to, the events which occur to me and to me alone- over and above a sum of movements I am conscious of making, of emotions I alone experience- I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from them. Is it not precisely to the degree I become conscious of this difference that I shall recognize what I alone have been put on this earth to do, what unique message I alone may bear, so that I alone can answer for its fate?
– André Breton

An Exquisite Truth
by Hsu Yun

This is an exquisite truth:
Saints and ordinary folks are the same from the start.
Inquiring about a difference
Is like asking to borrow string
when you’ve got a good strong rope.
Every Dharma is known in the heart.
After a rain, the mountain colors intensify.
Once you become familiar with the design of fate’s illusions
Your ink-well will contain all of life and death.

Poetry Chaikhana commentary:

I like what that opening statement says:

This is an exquisite truth:
Saints and ordinary folks are the same from the start.

Whether we’re talking about inspired reformers or shining examples of enlightenment, our instinct is to elevate great souls as unique phenomena. We assume they are somehow other than us. But the liberating and challenging truth is that saints are the same as everyone else. The only difference, if we want to call it a difference, is that they don’t cloak their nature as most of us have learned to do. We all have that same steady glow within us. A saint is simply someone who doesn’t damp it down.

Understood this way, the spiritual journey is not one of crushing effort to acquire virtues, to build wisdom, and to learn love. We already have all of that in abundance. The only work necessary is to let go of the assumptions that keep our true nature hidden.

Once you become familiar with the design of fate’s illusions
Your ink-well will contain all of life and death.

I think these are the lines I respond to most. I don’t know about you, but I spent so much of my life as a teenager and young adult feeling disappointed with where I found myself in the world. I wanted something profound, adventurous, bursting with meaning. Instead, I had a very ordinary lower middle-class American upbringing. I sabotaged my college education and decided to search for something deeper. Most of that search was a painful flailing about, but it did bring me adventures, both internal and external. I lived on Maui for several years. I lived high up in the Rocky Mountains. I’ve been homeless. I’ve had friends in wheelchairs, friends with wealth. I’ve known hippies and bikers and techies and farmers.

While all of that makes for good stories, that ache for something extraordinary just fell away the moment I first settled into a sense of spiritual opening. With that dawning of peace, I also found rest… and a profound sense of self-acceptance. It wasn’t that I had somehow changed into someone new and extraordinary. Instead, I felt profoundly myself for the first time, profoundly my ordinary self. And I can’t describe how blissful that recognition of ordinariness is. I no longer felt the constant need to struggle after the extraordinary; the simple and the plain stood revealed as a stunning work of art filling every day.

These lines by Hsu Yun about “fate’s illusions” remind me of how I spent the first three decades of my life struggling against my circumstances to find a fate with meaning, only to discover that the struggle was unnecessary. All I had to do was open my eyes. In every corner of the world, in every life, great and humble, the entire mystery of life and death can be found.

After a rain, the mountain colors intensify.

– Poetry Chaikhana

A New National Anthem
The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets
red glare” and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always, there is war and bombs.)
Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw
even the tenacious high school band off key.
But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call
to the field, something to get through before
the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps,
the truth is, every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can
love it again, until the song in your mouth feels
like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung
by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains,
the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left
unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,
that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,
that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving
into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit
in an endless cave, the song that says my bones
are your bones, and your bones are my bones,
and isn’t that enough?
– Ada Limón

Consciousness is to be found only in the streets, because history is to be found only in the streets—this is the edict.
– Albert Camus

Man is an animal, and his happiness depends upon his physiology more than he likes to think … Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.
– Bertrand Russell

The older I get, the more uncertain I am about the formulations of truth and morals I received in my youth. There was a time when I thought I knew everything and had the right slant on every issue. Now life is so subtle and complex that I stew in my reflections as people around me take sides.
– Thomas Moore, The Soul’s Religion

The Past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation.

The Past is, in many things, the foe of mankind; the Future is, in all things, our friend. In the Past is no hope; The Future is both hope and fruition. The Past is the text-book of tyrants; the Future is the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot’s wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.

– Herman Melville

We don’t, of course, write for worldly success; we write for the pleasure of being involved in a work of art, and discovering new things about our mind and the world.
– George Saunders

May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

And I walk out now,
in dead shoes, in the new light,
on the steppingstones
of someone else’s wandering…

– Galway Kinnell

Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, chinese operas, jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is as alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don’t have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.
– Salman Rushdie

But I cannot possibly penetrate to the core of the enigma of life by my own efforts. Nor can I willfully invent myths or rituals without their being trivial and empty. This is why we have traditions of art, philosophy and, above all, religion. The fetishisation of novelty and the repudiation of history are reflections of a capitalist culture that depends on dissatisfaction with what we have and the constant seeking after new ‘improvements’ in order to fuel demand. it is not only false but obviously immoral in a number of respects. A culture (and the point of religion is to embody the ethos of culture) is of critical importance for a society’s survival. Cultures are living; but precisely because of that can be killed. A plant can be flexibly trained, but it cannot be avulsed from its roots and still live. And if our culture dies, so will we who live in it.
– Iain McGilchrist

You graze the real world. Your sects, your clandestine religions, your phantoms, your fevers, your anguish, your disquiet, your crimes, and even your dread of Harlem’s beautiful dances, reveal your desire. And yet you are ashamed of it. You hide it. So you sniff out your desire in blurry spectacles that nourish you in secret. I saw you, Americans, leaving your seats at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, ashamed and fulfilled. I observed you out of the corner of my eye, seeing your women and your girls falling over backwards into the arms of the extraordinary actor Marlon Brando. I saw you searching for your pasture in front of the magnificent mortal sins of Picasso. I saw you, Americans, letting your masks fall and straightening them with machines, as one plays a record on a jukebox in your popular bars.

One day, if you accept this automatism, you will order food in one of these bars, you will pay for it, another will eat it for you, and you will be nourished, without having chewed the meat. This will be the end of your world—the end of ours—the end of the world that the centuries have tethered to nothingness. Human dignity is at stake.

Be what you are. A people who preserved its childhood. A people young and honest. A people in whom the lifeblood circulates. Disentangle yourselves. Question others less and question yourselves more. Confide in your friends. Don’t content yourself with those encounters where drinks are served but nothing is said. Don’t disorient yourselves with vain activities. Don’t surrender yourself to the lethal vertigo of radio and television. Television encourages the mind to stop chewing, to gulp down soft, predigested food. But the mind has robust teeth. Chew things with its robust teeth. Don’t let them only serve as the ornamental smiles of the stars.

– Cocteau

And that, against this: the king-types who would snatch the apple from your hand and claim to have grown it, even though what they had, had come to them intact, or been gained unfairly (the nature of that unfairness perhaps being just that they had been born stronger, more clever, more energetic than others), and who, having seized the apple, would eat it so proudly, they seemed to think that not only had they grown it, but had invented the very idea of fruit, too,
– George Saunders

When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
– William Least Heat-Moon

That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, ‘Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It’s just fun to think about.’ And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it–have slaves fight each other to death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Beware feeling you’re not good enough to deserve it
Beware the terror of not producing
Beware the urge to justify your decision.
Watch out for the kitchen sink and the plumbing and that painting that
always needed being done. But remember the body needs to create too.
Beware feeling you’re not good enough to deserve it
Beware feeling you’re too good to need it
Beware all the hatred you’ve stored up inside you,
and the locks on your tender places.

– Audre Lorde

I was back to feeling myself which, believe me, is no picnic.
– George Saunders

Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is the absence of unpleasant information.
– William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

The term “tsundoku,” in Japanese, refers to the habit of acquiring more and more books and allowing them to accumulate on shelves and pile up on the floor. This is not viewed as a manifestation of neglect, but rather one of hopefulness, perhaps a self-consciously naive, quaint one: some day, maybe still during this lifetime, in the fulness of the unknowable future, you will find the time to get to them, all those stories patiently awaiting to be discovered and explored.
– Mikhail Iossel

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Why sad? Don’t be sad. If sad, will make everyone sad.
– George Saunders

I had to call someone, so I picked on you-ou-ou,
– David Bowie

The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.
– David Bowie

I’ll paint you moments of gold, I’ll spin you Valentine evenings…
– David Bowie

Wrong as a squirrel with feathers, or a wolf with wooden teeth; not injustice, not unfairness—just a wrongness that, under the sky, could not exist.
– Theodore Sturgeon

Not using a phone taught me what a phone is really for. It’s not for communicating with other people, getting directions, reading articles, looking at pictures, shopping for products, or playing games. A phone is a device for muting the anxieties proper to being alive. This is what all its functions and features ultimately achieve: cameras deliver you from time, GPS abstracts you out of space, and an all-consuming screen that keeps you a constant safe distance from yourself. If there’s something you’re worried or upset about, you can simply hide behind your phone and it will all go away. One third of adults say they’re on their phones almost constantly. Their entire waking lives are spent filling time, plastering over the gaps, burning up one day after another, waiting for something to happen, and it never does.
– S. Kriss, How to live without your phone

Across centuries and the
void of a world, sleepless, I
seek you.

– Rafael Alberti, tr. by Ben Belitt

The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn’t let her.
“Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?” she asked me.
“The big show is inside my head,” I said.”
– Kurt Vonnegut

The magic cannot leave you when it is you.
– Unknown

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

– Richard Brautigan

No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s …

And?

No damn cat, and no damn cradle.

– Kurt Vonnegut

We cannot safely confine government programs to our own domestic progress and our own military power. We could be the wealthiest and the most mighty nation and still lose the battle of the world if we do not help our world neighbors protect their freedom and advance their social and economic progress. It is not the goal of the American people that the United States should be the richest nation in the graveyard of history.
– Dwight David Eisenhower

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There
is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments,
and the rest is dark.

– Jeanette Winterson

Perhaps, I myself am the enemy who needs to be loved.
– Jung

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

– Bill Knot

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that it’s on this territory—this no-man’s-land between what we desperately yearn for and what we know to be the limits of the possible that I most like to work as a writer.
– Kazuo Ishiguro

Small Blue Town

I built a small blue town
inside myself—

blue chapel, blue steeple,
blue houses, blue storefronts,
blue school. A scale model of

a place I’ve never lived
lives in me. Always

in shadow, the dark blue
of deep shade-
blue rooftops, blue windows,

blue doors. Inside,
you can see it: everything

so steeped in shade,
it’s soaked to the bone.
Blue streets, blue lawns,

blue barns in the blue hills
surrounding. The sun

never thinks to rise,
to rinse clear with its light
the small blue town.

– Maggie Smith

Man is a meeting-place for the interplay of forces from all quarters of the universe.
– Alan Watts

The root is certainly a more decisive factor than what is growing above ground. After all, it is the root that looks after the survival of an organism. It is the root that has withstood severe changes in climatic conditions. And it is the root that has regrown trunks time and time again. It is in the roots that centuries of experience are stored, and it is this experience that has allowed the tree’s survival to the present day.
– Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees

Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going on inside ourselves.
– Bessel van der Kolk

We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
– Henry James

Challenges are here to awaken you and even if your awakening life continuously gives you challenges… the awakening accelerates and deepens.
– Eckhart Tolle

Can the mind, without any form of compulsion, without a motive, bring about a transformation within itself?
– Krishnamurti

the moon along
the ocean road
lives again

– Basho

If we are unhappy, then we are unhappy. If we are happy, then we remember that the crown is not promised without the cross and tremble.
– C.S. Lewis

after a nap you will
understand my poem
autumn winds

– Basho

As long as you are
centered in the ‘me,’
you are at war with life.

– Jiddu Krishnamurti

If you spend time each day going within, you will never go without.
– Amit Sodha

Aren’t psychedelics, however, to only be used by those who don’t need them? Isn’t desperation for “express enlightenment” the most self-evident fact that one will experience a bad trip?
– @BlondB00

The thing about light is that it really isn’t yours; it’s what you gather and shine back. And it gets more power from reflectiveness; if you sit still and take it in, it fills your cup, and then you can give it off yourself.
– Anne Lamott

The habit of faith requires no more energy than the habit of fear.
– Manly P. Hall

Here it is – right now. Start thinking about it, and you miss it.

– Huang Po

The devil is not a person.

It is an energy that you carry.

– Zen wisdom

I believe you were unhappy in the past because of bad company; it was quite natural — in the shade one cannot sun oneself.
– Franz Kafka

Show me a sane man, and I will cure him for you.
– Carl Jung

Alchemy is what happens when defeat creeps in and you transform it into determination.
– Nika Solé

…I cannot through thought, suppose myself to be mad, since madness is irreconcilable with the exercise of doubt and with the reality of thought. Let us listen to this sentence, as we have here a decisive moment of Western thought.
– Maurice Blanchot

A millennium of warfare consolidated the West; a century of “psychology” has ripped it to tatters.
– Emil Cioran

Once you realize that most people have no desire to evolve or see through the illusion, you get a lot more comfortable being misunderstood in your desire to do so.
– Nika Solé

wildflowers
blooming in
the autumn shadows

– Akari

Love in vain wants to grasp what will cease to be. The impossibility of satisfaction in love is a guide to the accomplishing leap at the same time that in advance, it is the entombment of every possible illusion.
– Georges Bataille

Forty hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes – train and sprint, then rest and reassess.
– @naval

Along the evening’s passage
the clear water goes
olive-colored . . .
and touches the brief forgetful fire

– Giuseppe Ungaretti

your hand pressing all that
riotous black sleep into
the quiet form of daylight
– Frank O’Hara

And if my heart be scarred and burned,
The safer, I, for all I learned;
The calmer, I, to see it true
That ways of love are never new—

– Dorothy Parker

Even the lightest umbrella-to-umbrella contact can be erotic.
– Thomas Pynchon

In our mediocrity and distraction, we forget that we are privileged to live in a wondrous universe.
– John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

He did not belong, not quite, in the deadly properness around him. No, there was a whole aspect of his character that was an unmentioned half-brother to his civilized side: drunk and disorderly and primitive, closer to the woods than the city.
– Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer

Let’s celebrate those who are extravagantly chivalrous, absurdly romantic, and always striving for the unattainable.
– Carol Edgarian

Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted? If it were not for language, could we lie?
– Joyce Carol Oates

As soon as I speak, I express the universal, and if I do not do so, no one can understand me.
– Søren Kierkegaard

Man is not distinguished for his powers of discrimination. He sees solitude and four walls, and says: a study. He dreams of the market-place, where there is noise and jostling, physical bustle, and decides that there alone life is to be met. He is wrong as usual. In the market-place, among the crowd, do not men sleep their deadest sleep? And is not the keenest spiritual activity taking place in seclusion?
– Lev Shestov

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas … all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.
– Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real.
– John Green

According to the Buddha, our own sense of reason or logic is not to be trusted. The simple reason for this is that absolute reality, our ultimate nature, is beyond the dualism of the thinking mind.
– Pema Düddul

If an emotion can’t change the condition or the situation you’re dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion.
– Ryan Holiday

People aren’t poor because they’re bad with money. They’re poor because everything costs more than what they’re paid.
– Zellie Imani

Jung tells us that the image of each man’s wholeness and potential lies in his own unconscious and not in the minds of others.
– Russell Lockhart, Words as Eggs

Zen practice, and life, have to be understood through experience—like going in the ocean.
– Les Kaye

We must expend the effort ourselves, look inside and experience this nature of dhamma, understand it, and clearly comprehend the unfolding phenomena we find there. We can understand how things come to be—not because someone told us but because we see for ourselves.
– Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

We are looking for a way to feel more real, but we do not realize that to feel more real we have to push ourselves further into the unknown.
– Mark Epstein

The psychological dilemma plaguing most of humanity is that the archetypes live us instead of us living them.
– Eugene Pascal

Noncooperation with evil is as much of a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

We collect books because they are our anchors in a sea of change.
– Russell Lynes

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a beautiful crop.
– Ovid

Karl Marx: Predicted that capitalism would lead to growing inequality, alienation, and crises of overproduction. His critiques resonate with modern debates about wealth gaps, corporate power, and labor unrest in America.

Being “in the flow” is definitely worth striving for. I know when I’m there. I’m tapped into something that is far beyond my ability.
– Aleta Pippin

He that would live in peace & at ease, Must not speak all he knows or judge all he sees.
– Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1736

Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.
– Simone Weil

Now the key story for me about Buddhism concerns the sermon where the Buddha was seated, and there was a group around him and he just held up a flower. Just a flower. One in the group got what the Buddha was on about. For him, the flower itself was enough to spark enlightenment. The rest of the crowd were still in the dark, so to speak, so the Buddha delivered a sermon—the Flower Wreath Sūtra—to explain what he meant, which was this: there is nothing to say about life. It has no meaning. You make meaning. If you want a meaning in your life, find a meaning and bring it into your life, but life won’t give you a meaning. Meaning is a concept. It is a notion of an end toward which you are going. The point of Buddhism is This Is It.
– Joseph Campbell

And at the end of the day, there is nothing but the journey. Because destination is pure illusion.
– Mark Lawrence

According to research by Harvard neuroscientists Marc Bangert and Gottfried Schlaug, musicians whose playing involves intricate finger movements, such as pianists, develop an extra fold in the motor cortex of their brains, referred to as an Omega Sign. This feature, which looks like the Greek letter Omega, is particularly prominent in professional musicians who practice for many hours daily. The study found that pianists show Omega Signs on both sides of the brain, while violinists typically only show it on the right hemisphere, which controls the left hand’s finger movements. The research suggests that the Omega Sign is a result of nurture—developing from dedicated practice—rather than an innate brain feature.
– Kosmas Lapatas

We do not just come upon emotions; we produce them and test them and enter into varying degrees of ownership with them.
– Charles Altieri

my heart
like the autumn sky
a terrible shame

– Issa

it’s highly likely that i’ll overdose on schadenfreude when the artificial intelligence bubble pops.
– Jonathan Fine

family heirloom
dad’s tiny war journal
full of poems

– Kath Abela Wilson

Sometimes I want to be taken into nothingness. / I want to be burned with the gypsy moths and bindweed. / Run to exhaustion with the wildebeest. / I don’t want this phone, I want to kill God.
– Bianca Stone

All the time, I was getting closer to animals and nature, and as a result, closer to myself and more in tune with the spiritual power that I felt all around. For those who have experienced the joy of being alone with Nature, there is really little need to say more; for those who have not, no words of mine can ever describe the powerful, almost mystical knowledge of beauty and eternity that come, suddenly, and all unexpected.
– Jane Goodall

I NEED YOUR AUTUMN

Scatter your petals.
Wither down, uproot.
Become something hollow
for my breath to play.
An empty cruet
full of moonbeams.
The golden bellows
of a gourd.
Let the season subtract you.
What is Not
makes a dragonfly wing
more useful.
So frail it holds
all my starlight.
I need your Autumn
for my Spring.
Stop trying to write
your name on water.
Just be the water.

– Alfred K. LaMotte

Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,
to be filled with awe and contemplation,
to recognize that we are profoundly united
with every creature
as we journey towards your infinite light.

– Pope Francis, Laudato Si

Though it is not often that death is so clearly told to fuck off.
– Pynchon Thomas

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

– William Shakespeare

The educated citizen knows how much more there is to know. He knows that “knowledge is power,” more so today than ever before. He knows that only an educated and informed people will be a free people, that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all, and that if we can, as Jefferson put it, “enlighten the people generally … tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day.” And, therefore, the educated citizen has a special obligation to encourage the pursuit of learning, to promote exploration of the unknown, to preserve the freedom of inquiry, to support the advancement of research, and to assist at every level of government the improvement of education for all Americans, from grade school to graduate school.
– John F Kennedy

“I came,“ she said, “hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy.”
Cherish it!“ cried Hilarious, fiercely. “What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it’s little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”
– Thomas Pynchon

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up.
– George Saunders

That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb with fatigue, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.
– Mark Nepo

However apparently insignificant the event, whether it be the ring of tobacco ash surrounding the table, the direction from which the wild geese first appeared, or a series of seemingly meaningless human movements, he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off it and must note it all down, since only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day and fall a silent captive to the infernal arrangement whereby the world decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of self-construction.
– László Krasznahorkai, Satantango

Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.
– Thomas Pynchon

The landscape’s silent immensity—and the God to whom it points—is able to absorb all the grief one can give it.
– Belden C. Lane

It’s one thing to be brain-washed, quite another to be heart-washed. Our difficult, taboo, shunned emotions are where freedom, power, and wisdom reside. Yet, none of this brilliance is obvious to the naked eye. The dark emotions must be entered to enact and reveal their transformative light.
– Jack Adam Weber

In a world of Kristi Noems, be a Jane Goodall
– Andy Borowitz

Part of Me Wanting Everything to Live
by Linda Gregg

This New England kind of love reminds me
of the potted chrysanthemum my husband
gave me. I cared for it faithfully,
turning the pot a quarter turn each day
as it sat by the window until the blossoms
hung with broken necks on the dry stems.
Cut off the dead parts and watched
green leaves begin, new buds open.
Thinking the chrysanthemum would not die
unless I forced it to. The new flowers
were smaller and smaller, resembling
little eyes awake and alone in the dark.
I was offended by the lessening,
by the cheap renewal. By a going on
that gradually left the important behind.
But now it’s different. I want the large
and near, and endings more final. If it must
be winter, let it be absolutely winter.

Biologically, we’re all humans

But energetically, I think we’re a few dozen different species

– River Kenna

People do not realize just how much they are putting at risk when they don’t accept what life presents them with, the questions and tasks that life sets them. When they resolve to spare themselves the pain and suffering, they owe to their nature. In so doing, they refuse to pay life’s dues and for this very reason, life then often leads them astray. If we don’t accept our own destiny, a different kind of suffering takes its place: a neurosis develops, and I believe that that life which we have to live is not as bad as a neurosis. If I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality. A neurosis is a much greater curse! In general, a neurosis is a replacement for an evasion, an unconscious desire to cheat lite, to avoid something. One cannot do more than live what one really is. And we are all made up of opposites and conflicting tendencies. After much reflection, I have come to the conclusion that it is better to live what one really is and accept the difficulties that arise as a result-because avoidance is much worse.
– Carl Jung

We have never had less need of the State than now when we are most tyrannized by it. The ordinary citizen everywhere has a code of ethics far above that of the government to which he owes allegiance. The fiction that the State exists for our protection has been exploded a thousand times. However, as long as [individuals] lack self-assurance and self-reliance, the State will thrive…
– Henry Miller

It has been (and continues to be) a crushingly laborious year! So many things at once, each needing exclusive attention.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Encountering sufferings will definitely contribute to the elevation of your spiritual practice, provided you are able to transform calamity and misfortune into the path.
– Dalai Lama

Painting served the gods, poetry made them speak. For these powers were not of this world, and, reigning outside of time, they did not measure the value of services rendered them in terms of temporal effectiveness.

– Maurice Blanchot, (tr. Ann Smock)

No one else can feel what you feel. And no one else can shift it for you. Go within. That’s where the root is—and that’s where the release lives too.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer

That line is the horizon line.
The blue above it is divine.
The blue below it is marine.
Sometimes the blue below is green.

– John Updike

Smart people don’t wanna tell anyone what’s going on in their career or personal life, ever.
– Nithya Shri

Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth;
Keep the door of my lips.
– Psalm 141:3

Avoid the flourish. Do not be afraid to be weak. Do not be ashamed to be tired. You look good when you’re tired. You look like you could go on forever.
– Leonard Cohen

Part of me wants to say “new Paths are opening up”

But closer to the truth is “impossibly Old Paths are opening back up”

– River Kenna

The water of your eyes, forgiven water.
– Paul Celan

You don’t need to go monk mode.

You need to go MOVE MODE!

– @moveorperish

In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible.
– David Graeber

I wrote a great many poems. I used to send them about, but they were always returned.
– Thomas Hardy

It took me a long time to realize I was writing a book … I was just writing down things that seemed notable, interesting, annoying as they happened.
– Maggie Nelson

Many spiritual people are involved in a radical denial of what is happening. They want to transcend it, get rid of it, get out of it, get away from it. There’s nothing wrong with that feeling, but the approach doesn’t work because it’s escapism in spiritual clothing.

– Adyashanti

I don’t like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.
– Charles Bukowski

Listen! the wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves,
We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!
– Humbert Wolfe

I really, really hate writing that pulls its punches, stalls out in exposition that we don’t need.
– Maggie Nelson

It is the same with all their machines. Their labour-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent: their amusements bore them: their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving them have banished leisure from their country.
– C.S. Lewis

Everyone stays awake to the same clock

– Peter Pan reimagined by Emma Hine

I am a fire
that may go out at any moment
because of the wind.

– Luo Fu

We do not even understand our own response to our own work.
– Agnes Martin

To be liberated is to be able to see human life in the same way as you see all other life. And to do that you have to be able to live, as it were, on two levels: the level of involvement and the level of detachment.
– Alan Watts

For a while we talked about things I’ve forgotten now. Or maybe we were silent for a while, me sitting at the foot of his bed, him stretched out with his book, the two of us sneaking looks at each other, listening to the sound the elevator made, as if we were in a dark room or lost in the country at night, just listening to the sound of horses.
– Roberto Bolaño

One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.
– Jean-Paul Sartre

What am I after all but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own name? repeating it over and over; I stand apart to hear—it never tires me.
– Walt Whitman

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
– T. S. Eliot

Happiness is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of all action.
– Aristotle

We are the most intellectual species to walk the planet, but we’re not intelligent. If you’re intelligent you don’t destroy your only home.
– Dr. Jane Goodall

…the moon was the first poem, in the lyric sense, an entity complete in itself, recognizable at a glance, one that played upon the emotions so strongly that the context of time and place hardly seemed to matter.
– Mary Ruefle

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.
– J. M. Coetzee

There is a sadness deeper than grief: It is not knowing one is grieving. It is knowing that something is amiss, but the cause remains hidden or unconscious.
– Jerry Wright

Dissociation is not a sign of weakness. Your mind is overwhelmed in the aftermath of trauma.
– Brad Schipke

In Harlem in 1991, gold was the color of summer, and it peaked in the morning when the light was still stark and directional. Then everyone who lived there could forget for a while that the waters of the river were rising, people were dying, and the city hated them.
– A. T. Steel

It is painful but necessary to be critical of your own system, whatever it is.
– Richard Rohr

No man is more cheated than the selfish man.
– Henry Ward Beecher

What hath night to do with sleep?
– John Milton

The unreliability of perceptions in general means that the knowledge and vision that constitutes awakening can’t be mediated by perceptions.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu

The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.
– Sue Monk Kidd

The Little Ways That Encourage Good Fortune
by William Stafford

Wisdom is having things right in your life
and knowing why.
If you do not have things right in your life
you will be overwhelmed:
you may be heroic, but you will not be wise.
If you have things right in your life
but do not know why,
you are just lucky, and you will not move
in the little ways that encourage good fortune.

The saddest are those not right in their lives
who are acting to make things right for others:
They act only from the self—
and that self will never be right:
no luck, no help, no wisdom.

We should stop having children, if we don’t plan to fight for them and their future.
– Jane Goodall

In the autumn of 1985, a strong hurricane ripped across suburban Long Island, where I was then living as a student. For several days afterward much of the populace was without electricity; power lines were down, telephone lines broken, and the roads were strewn with toppled trees. People had to walk to their jobs, and to whatever shops were still open. We began encountering each other on the streets, “in person” instead of by telephone. In the absence of automobiles and their loud engines, the rhythms of crickets and birdsong became clearly audible. Flocks were migrating south for the winter, and many of us found ourselves simply listening, with new and childlike curiosity, to the ripples of song in the still-standing trees and the fields.

And at night the sky was studded with stars! Many children, their eyes no longer blocked by the glare of houselights and street-lamps, saw the Milky Way for the first time, and were astonished. For those few days and nights our town became a community aware of its place in an encompassing cosmos. Even our noses seemed to come awake, the fresh smells from the ocean somehow more vibrant and salty. The breakdown of our technologies had forced a return to our senses, and hence to the natural landscape in which those senses are so profoundly embedded. We suddenly found ourselves inhabiting a sensuous world that had been waiting, for years, at the very fringe of our awareness, an intimate terrain infused by birdsong, salt spray, and the light of stars.

– David Abram

“A weapon based on Time …“ mused Viktor Mulciber. “Well, why not? The one force no one knows how to defeat, resist, or reverse. It kills all forms of life sooner or later. With a Time-weapon you could become the most feared person in history.”
“I’d rather be loved,” said Root.
Mulciber shrugged. “You’re young.”

– Thomas Pynchon

“And what we’ve been always been is…?”
“Is living on borrowed time. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs … planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”
After a while, “You’re not going to explain that, or…”
“Course not, it’s a koan.”

– Thomas Pynchon

Meditation is not what you think. You sit in absolute silence and your mind starts going over all your movies. During that process, you become so familiar with the scripts you keep in your life that you end up getting sick of them. Then you realize that the person you think you are is nothing but a complicated script you spend most of your energy on.

After a more thorough examination, you discover your personality disgusts you, and that’s because it’s not really you. If you feel terrified enough about that personality, you spontaneously allow it to fade away. Then, if you’re lucky, you can experience yourself without the distortion of that personality.

There’s so much talk about the mechanics of happiness – psychiatry and pills, positive thinking and ideology – but I really think the mechanism is there. All you have to do is get quiet for a moment.

– Leonard Cohen

Lost in awe at the beauty around me, I must have slipped into a state of heightened awareness. It is hard – impossible really – to put into words the moment of truth that suddenly came upon me then. Even the mystics are unable to describe their brief flashes of spiritual ecstasy. It seemed to me, as I struggled afterward to recall the experience, the self was utterly absent: I and the chimpanzees, the earth and trees and air, seemed to merge, to become one with the spirit power of life itself. The air was filled with a feathered symphony, the evensong of birds. I heard new frequencies in their music and also in singing insects’ voices – notes so high and sweet I was amazed. Never had I been so intensely aware of the shape, the color of the individual leaves, the varied patterns of the veins that made each one unique. Scents were clear as well, easily identifiable: fermenting, overripe fruit; waterlogged earth; cold, wet bark; the damp odor of chimpanzee hair, and yes, my own too. And the aromatic scent of young, crushed leaves was almost overpowering.

That afternoon, it had been as though an unseen hand had drawn back a curtain and, for the briefest moment, I had seen through such a window. In a flash of “outsight” I had known timelessness and quiet ecstasy, sensed a truth of which mainstream science is merely a small fraction. And I knew that the revelation would be with me for the rest of my life, imperfectly remembered yet always within. A source of strength on which I could draw when life seemed harsh or cruel or desperate.

– Jane Goodall

All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.
– Thomas Pynchon

Why was she dancing? No reason. Just alive, I guess.
– George Saunders

A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It is a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.
– Jimmy Carter

Poetry is something that walks the streets, that moves, that passes by us. All things have their mystery and poetry is the mystery of all things.
– Federico García Lorca

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, belovèd,
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always,
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

– Conrad Aiken

‘More’ is the constant cry of the self; it is the craving for sensation, whether of the past or the future.
– Krishnamurti

Eating healthy is actually eating normally but most people think it’s dieting.
– Dan Go

Be careful with the idea that ‘everyone is replaceable.’ Some people are truly one of a kind. If you lose them, life won’t hand you another version—you don’t meet certain souls twice.
– Rumi

Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.
– Rebecca Solnit

What I had learned from Buddhism was that I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing.
– Mark Epstein

Invocation

The day hanging by its feet with a hole
In its voice
And the light running into the sand

Here I am once again with my dry mouth
At the fountain of thistles
Preparing to sing

– W. S. Merwin

Action is a disease of thought, a cancer of the imagination. To act is to exile oneself. Every action is incomplete and imperfect. The poem that I dream is faultless until I try to write it down.
– Fernando Pessoa

Every time you worry, you’re denying the Self.

Every time you fear, you’re saying something is wrong someplace.

But I’m saying to you this is not your life.

It’s a false life.

It comes from false imagination.

– Robert Adams

The only way to live in any true security is to live so close to the bottom that when you fall you do not have far to drop, you do not have much to lose.

– Dorothy Day

The knight is a man of blood and iron….. he is also a modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.

– C.S. Lewis

No one is really going to help you or give you direction. In fact, the odds are against you.
– Robert Greene

The mind is the creator of the subject and the object and is the cause of the dualistic idea. Therefore, it is the cause of the wrong notion of limited self and the misery consequent on such erroneous idea.

– Ramana Maharshi

I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of
Federico Fellini, is a beautiful actress.
And chocolate malted.
– Frank O’Hara

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.
– Bernard DeVoto

The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.
– C.S. Lewis

I too have felt the presence of God in the broom
I hold, in the cobwebs in the room,
But most of all in the silence of the tomb.

– Stevie Smith, Mother Among the Dustbins

They might break its bones.

They might implant tanks on the insides of its children and women. They might throw it into the sea, sand, or blood.

But it will not repeat lies and say “Yes” to invaders.

– Mahmoud Darwish, Silence for Gaza

I used to lie on beaches stoned and think I was hearing the sound of the universe breathing. Where else can you hear this? Hardly anywhere, although sometimes crickets have the same wonderful sound of infinity, of something lightly sawing away.
– Anne Lamott

In reality, nothing happens. Onto the screen of mind, destiny forever projects its pictures, memories of former projections, and thus illusion constantly renews itself. The pictures come & go – light intercepted by ignorance. See the light and disregard the picture.
– Nisargadatta

I was pretentious—I drank Earl Grey tea and read Patrick White, who I’d heard was one of Robert Smith’s favorite novelists. Luckily, I picked quasi-intellectual rock stars to be obsessed with.
– Maggie Nelson

We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal.
– C.S. Lewis

Stay away from people, who knew all along, but didn’t tell you.
– Nithya Shri

I can pray
all day
& God
won’t come.

But if I call
911
The Devil
Be here
in a minute!

– Amiri Baraka, Monday in B-flat

When the man of iron beats them
The Muses sing louder.
With blackened eyes
They adore him like bitches.
Their buttocks twitch with pain.
Their thighs with lust.

– Bertolt Brecht

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little.
– Mark Twain

A person who forgets their own self has entered the kingdom of heaven.
– Zhuang Zhou

You have to question everything
that man has accepted as valuable,
as necessary.

– Jiddu Krishnamurti

No circus stays in town forever, and some comets never come back.
– Christian Lorentzen

Thinking has, many a time, made me sad, darling;
but doing never did in all my life…
My precept is, do something, my sister,
do good if you can.

– Elizabeth Gaskell

Someone has said, When you are born into this world there are at least two of you, but going out you are on your own. Death happens to every one of us, yet it remains the most solitary of human experiences, one that separates rather than unites us.
– Sigrid Nunez

The creative personality, when weighed down and depressed by a creative task, does very often behave like an awful neurotic. To correct a little, or to cut off neurotic behavior a little and at same time not to destroy the creative kernel of the process is a very delicate task.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions — these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
– Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

October is a fallen leaf, but it is also the wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hill once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above that hill once again.
– Hal Borland

Beings and their feelings are everywhere.
Be the cause for their happiness.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche

Dreams do not deceive, do not lie, they do not distort or disguise-they seek to express something ego does not know and does not understand. Dreams are neither deliberate nor arbitrary fabrications; they are natural phenomena which are nothing other than what they pretend to be.
– C.G. Jung

The finest of pleasures are always the unexpected ones.
– Erin Morgenstern

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

The wise person esteems everyone, for he recognizes the good in each, and he realizes how hard it is to do things well.
– Baltasar Gracián

Connectedness can’t be ordered up, laid out, or unraveled. Its fire runs through an infinite network of points of mutual contact and exchange that are beyond explanation and must simply be accepted with respect and gratitude.
– Susan Murphy

I tend to prefer the shelter of fiction.
– Armistead Maupin

I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.
– Elizabeth Strout

Remember, to be radical is simply to grasp the root of the problem. And the root is us.

– Howard Zinn, Marx in Soho

When a country of — overall – nice people turns
slowly – fascist, nice people
do not notice this transformation all at once.

As when a person we know intimately goes, next to us,
through an imperceptible process of aging.
Imperceptibly, new wrinkles slice the skin, frightening, deep

Nice people nod when they run into each other,
and try, more and more, to lower their eyes,
until finally, raising them becomes an inhuman gesture.

– Lyudmyla Khersonska (trans. Valzhyna Mort)

Note Left by Humanity in the Ruins

after Heaney

Sometimes we gave water to our neighbors.
Sometimes we didn’t hunt each other.
Sometimes our fathers weren’t broken
and told to kiss their homes
that would be stolen.
Sometimes there was bread and wine
on the tables
and sometimes we remembered
there was no such thing as someone else’s mother;
there was no such thing as someone else’s child.
Sometimes there were hearts that we could hear.
Listen. We forgot
that we could listen.
Sometimes, when the fires died, it was dark enough.
We walked out and we looked up and we saw it:
the starlight, the starlight that had made us.
Sometimes no one lay in any rubble
with seven braids in her hair-
a braid for every year she’d had.
A braid for every year.

– Joseph Fasano

The purpose of craft is not so much to make beautiful things as it is to become beautiful inside while you are making those things.
– Susan Gordon Lydon

I felt it shelter to speak to
you
– Emily Dickinson

Slowness means cleaving perfectly to time, so closely that the seconds fall one by one, drop by drop like the steady dripping of a tap on stone. This stretching of time deepens space. It is one of the secrets of walking: a slow approach to landscapes.
– Frédéric Gros

Cultural speciation had been crippling to human moral and spiritual growth. It had hindered freedom of thought, limited our thinking, imprisoned us in the cultures into which we had been born. . . . These cultural mind prisons. . . . Cultural speciation was clearly a barrier to world peace. So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the ‘global village’ we would propagate prejudice and ignorance.
– Jane Goodall

Turn off your radio. Put away your daily paper. Read one review of events a week and spend some time reading good books. They tell too of days of striving and of strife. They are of other centuries and also of our own. They make us realize that all times are perilous, that men live in a dangerous world, in peril constantly of losing or maiming soul and body. We get some sense of perspective reading such books. Renewed courage and faith and even joy to live.
– Dorothy Day

Stability says there must be no evasion; instead attend to the real, to the real necessity however uncomfortable that might be. Stability brings us from a feeling of alienation, perhaps from the escape into fantasy and daydreaming, into the state of reality. It will not allow us to evade the inner truth of whatever it is that we have to do, however dreary and boring and apparently unfruitful that may seem. It involves listening…to the particular demands of whatever this task and this moment in time is asking; no more and no less.
– Esther de Waal

If the warrior no longer has the hope of achieving success, he has nothing to lose.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Truth does not depend on formulas or alternative answers, but truth is seen to be one truth without relativity.
– Chögyam Trungpa

In America, money is the accepted measure of intelligence. A man who makes a great deal of money is supposed to be a clever man. Whatever the real reason may be, the man who is poor is thought to be stupid, however intelligent he may be. To me the value of money is that it gives a man security and affords leisure. But the average man desires it not for this reason, but in order that he may make a great display, and may be thought more highly of by those who were formerly his equals.
– Bertrand Russell

…it is useful to show someone the animus or the shadow or some other complex, to have it out in “washing dirty linen,” but it is very often best just to help people to find the essential meaning of their lives, what they are there for. When they become interested in that, they completely lose interest in petty nonsense. When the main water of life in a human being is flowing again, when there is, for instance, some meaningful creative interest, then one no longer has time to spend hours on the phone to one’s sister or brother or a friend to complain that she or he has been wrong. One just hasn’t the time, and therefore one is much more inclined to think, “Oh well, let it be. Never mind. It may be my fault, so let’s make peace.” Because life is flowing again. When one finds the essential meaning of one’s life, this has a purifying effect upon one’s “dirty linen” affairs.”

– Marie Louise von Franz

a god behind bars. sometimes the bars are made of metals and bricks, sometimes of words and beliefs. nietzche was not right: we have not killed god, we have taken god hostage. clearly, a dead god serves no purpose, but a god in captivity feeds the power and privilege of her captors. but i understand that the god religions teach is not the god of time and space. nor it is a god that transcends both. god is not in heavens above, nor it is on earth below. for god is the between of i and you. how are we to imprison this god? what bars and locks can contain the god of the embrace? surely the most difficult of gods. surely the most beautiful.
– hune margulies

The important
thing
is
the obvious
thing
that
nobody
is
saying.

– Charles Bukowski

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we grow, we rattle the cage of our restricted ego self, and we shake the stones that have been built around the heart.
– Michael Meade

Rivers do not drink their own water. Trees do not eat their own fruit. And clouds do not swallow their own rain. What great ones have is always for the benefit of others.
– Indian Proverb

A strong man cannot help a weaker unless the weaker is willing to be helped, and even then the weak man must become strong of himself; he must, by his own efforts, develop the strength which he admires in another. None but himself can alter his condition.
– James Allen

A friend called me from the mental
hospital and said,
‘I know I’m the Buddha…
But when I tell my mother that;
she doesn’t understand.
But when I AM the Buddha;
she appreciates it.’

– Ram Dass

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is.
– Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is.
– Assata Shakur

If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.
– Terry Brooks

Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.
– Carl G Jung

Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.
– Justice Robert A. Jackson

Data is not the plural of anecdote.
– John Green

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered you will never grow.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

We could change the world tomorrow if all the millions of people around the world acted the way they believe.
– Jane Goodall

A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.
– Eric Hoffer

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
– Ernest Hemingway

It is of great importance in a republic, not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers; but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.
– James Madison

You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.
– Rosa Parks

How do I say I miss you in a way that will make your heart ache as mine does.
– Mahmoud Darwish

No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.
– Ian Wilson

At last, my truth settled beside theirs,
my heart grew spacious,
unfolding like dawn,
and calm poured into me
like silence before sunrise.
– Priyanka Jaiprakash

If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or just across the river. Walk in someone else’s shoes—or at least eat their food.
– Anthony Bourdain

There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.
– C.S. Lewis

A man’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.
– James Allen

A man can be as truly a saint in a factory as in a monastery, and there is as much need of him in the one as in the other.
– Robert J. McCracken

TRUE LONELINESS
by Chögyam Trungpa

Because people feel so lonely and so desparate, they look for God. Due to loneliness, people compose music, write songs and poetry, do all kinds of things. But no matter what you accomplish, no many how many friends you’ve collected, whether or not you feel good, there is still a quality of loneliness. In Buddhism, the poets Basho and Milarepa wrote about loneliness. But in the West, some Buddhists become overly involved with their own discoveries, and the experience of loneliness is discarded. So we definitely need the doctrine of loneliness. Fundamentally you are not you, but you have lost yourself. That is the Buddhist notion of loneliness or egolessness.

True loneliness is very definite, but halfhearted loneliness is feeble. With halfhearted loneliness, you are still trying to replace your fifty percent loneliness with something else. You are still looking for entertainment. When you mix loneliness with the entertainment, the whole thing becomes hollow and fruitless. Nothing is really being entertained. In the beginning, you have expectations, but then nothing happens. That’s how the world functions. Because of that, people feel like killing themselves. They jump off a cliff, or they jump off the Empire State Building, or they take an overdose of poison. They do all those things because they are lonely and feel that there is no way out—and no way in, either. But in this case, loneliness is the way. With loneliness there is a path.

The experience of aloneness in sitting practice, in your married life, in your professional life, and in your scholarly life brings greater mindfulness and awareness because you have no reference point. You are by yourself, alone. From that quality of aloneness, you begin to realize that not only are you alone, but you have very little to complain about. Who is there to complain to? What is there to complain about?

You do not have to seek out loneliness—it is always there. Egolessness is a concept, a philosophy, but loneliness is a reality that you experience. A feeling of loneliness is part of the journey.

When you sense that you are not you anymore and that nothing can replace that state, you begin to make discoveries. You discover devotion, and you discover a quality of richness and artistic expression that is very special. Being you, but not being you, is very resourceful. You become a complete mountain man: you know how to make fire and cook food. But it doesn’t mean anything. You are still nobody. That is the inspiration.

Every billionaire is a policy failure.
– Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia

How anxious we are to find an answer to our problems! We are so eager to find an answer that we cannot study the problem; it prevents our silent observation of the problem.
– Krishnamurti

The cynic finds love with the idealist.
The rebel with the conformist.
The social butterfly with the bookworm.
They help each other balance their lives.

– Joyce Brothers

Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.
– Ray Bradbury

I don’t believe in doing the two hours of technical exercises a day that pianists are supposed to do. Something dies in your soul if you do that.
– Víkingur Ólafsson

Expecting our problems to go away is truly our fundamental problem. We resist facing our life as it is, because facing life as it is means abandoning how we think our life should be.
– Ezra Bayda, Being Zen

The stupider you are, the smarter you think you are, and vice versa.
– Richard Feynman

Pleasure in color, form, and movement, awareness of the amazing diversity of life, and the enjoyment of natural beauty are part of man’s heritage as a living creature.
– Rachel Carson

When someone dies, we go searching for poetry.

But I want elegies while I’m still alive… I want ballads, I want ugly, grating sounds, I want repetition, I want white space… and even center-aligned italicized poems that rhyme, and most of all — feelings.

– Jenny Zhang

The only real customer
Is God.

Chew quietly your
Sweet sugarcane
God-love
And stay playfully childish.

Your face will turn
Rosy with illumination
Like the red-bud flowers.

– Rumi

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, Verge

Emotional healing does not depend on the process of figuring something out. It does not depend on conceptual understanding, but rather on a return of the feeling life to a natural biological rhythm. Emotional healing involves allowing the feelings to enter into the basic pulsations of the body. This is accomplished, in part, by separating those feelings from the arrhythmic clutch of thought.
The feeling life is not a conceptual experience. Feelings are not ideas, but subtle physical experiences. They take place in the body. They are not inherently meaningful in the way they seem to be when we apply our thoughts and beliefs to them. Feelings are part of the rhythm, the giving and receiving, the nourishment, and the interdependent ecology of our experience here.
– Stephen R. Schwartz

September 1892

The sea refreshes our imagination because it does not make us think of human life; yet it rejoices the soul, because, like the soul, it is an infinite and impotent striving, a strength that is ceaselessly broken by falls, an eternal and exquisite lament. The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of the soul. Sweeping up with the waves of those movements, plunging back with them, the heart thus forgets its own failures and finds solace in an intimate harmony between its own sadness and the sea’s sadness, which merges the sea’s destiny with the destinies of all things.

– Marcel Proust, The Sea

THE LORD:

Therein thou’rt free, according to thy merits;
The like of thee have never moved
My hate.
Of all the bold, denying Spirits,
The waggish knave least trouble doth create.
Man’s active nature, flagging, seeks too soon the level;
Unqualified repose he learns to crave;
Whence, willingly, the comrade him I gave,
Who works, excites, and must create, as Devil.

J. W. Goethe, Faust, translation by Bayard Taylor

Talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but hard to bear and difficult to be rid of. Talk never wholly dies away when many people voice her: even Talk is in some ways divine.
– Hesiod, (tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White)

No one is so old as to think that he cannot live one more year.
– Cicero, Cato Maior de Senectute

Humanity fell into modern history like an animal into a trap.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Greta Thunberg switched from climate activism to humanitarian activism because SHE FIGURED OUT that humanitarian justice leads to climate justice.

We can’t save humanity until humanity is free. And do you know who suffers the most from Climate Catastrophe? Poor and vulnerable communities.

– Reed Alexander

What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn’t be?

– Angie Thomas

Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

– Thomas Carlyle

One half of me was taking the pain, the other half was taking notes.

– Arundhati Roy

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

The affairs of each person are really long and drawn out, and not at all short. If they were short, we’d all know where we came from and how we got where we are.
– Ajaan Lee

‘Ag cur dobhar’: Raining torrents, or pouring down floods. ‘Dobhar’ is an old word for water, which gives us the word ‘dobharchú’, an otter (literally, ‘water hound’). Nowadays it more often means a flood or torrent. It can also mean darkness or obscurity.

‘Raiste’: Rain driven furiously by the wind.

‘Bascadh’: a drenching or beating from rain or wind.

‘Báisteach dheannachtach’: Cold, drenching rain. ‘Deannachtach’ means biting, sharp or severe. Lá deannachtach means a bitter, nasty day.

– from Ninety-Nine Words for Rain (and One for Sun) by Manchán Magan

Realize yourself. That is all there is to do. Know yourself as you are – infinite spirit. That is practical religion. Everything else is impractical, for everything else will vanish. That alone will never vanish. It Is eternal. Hospitals will tumble down. Railroad givers will all die. This earth will be blown to pieces, suns wiped out. The soul endureth forever…

– Swami Vivekananda

I am, each day,
typing out the God
my typewriter believes in.
Very quick. Very intense,
like a wolf at a live heart.

– Anne Sexton

It is the design of the Eternal that there is nothing in this world to satisfy my soul, nothing in the heavens above, and nothing beneath.
– Swami Vivekānanda

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.
– Alvin Toffler

They sicken of the calm who know the storm.
– Dorothy Parker

Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.

– John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country – and we haven’t seen them since.
– Gore Vidal

With tremendous deception, we create samsara — pain and misery for the whole world, including ourselves.
– Chögyam Trungpa

FOLLOWERS OF DAO

Why do I use the term, “follower of Dao”? Not only do I want to sidestep the tangled question of “what is a Daoist?” (with all its confusion about religious versus philosophical, the many sects, whether anyone can truly claim to know Dao) but I want to emphasize the need to follow Dao.

The Yijing, 易經 (I Ching, Book of Changes; antecedents date earlier than the eleventh century BCE) gives us this important line:

Harmonious following is virtue (daode, 道德) and reason is righteousness.
—Yijing, “Shuogua,” 1

Daode is a term that means “ethics; morality.” Righteousness can also mean “justice; conduct.” A looser paraphrase might be: “Following in harmony is virtuous and understanding the truth leads to right conduct.”

The term, “follower of Dao,” resonates with this expression from the Yijing.

Dao is the supreme movement of the universe. Dao birthed us, virtue fosters us (Daodejing, chapter 51). If we want guidance in life, we go to the fundamental. That’s why everyone should follow Dao.

– Deng Ming-Dao

From a writer’s perspective, one benefit of fictionalizing a place of many converging threads is that it can steer us when our storytelling veers off track.
– Matthew Sullivan

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!
– Bernard Shaw

Love that lasts a minute like a filter on a faucet, love that is always like headlights in the glistening dark, heed the pen’s screech. Do not read what is written. In time it too shall become incoherent but for the time being it is good just to tamper with it and be off, lest someone see you. And when this veil of twisted creeper is parted, and the listing tundra is revealed behind it, say why you had come to say it: the divorce. The no reason, as the plane dives up into the sky and is lost. All that one had so carefully polished and preserved, arranged in rows, boasted modestly to the neighbors about, is going and there is nothing, repeat nothing, to take its place.
– John Ashbery, Flow Chart

I fight the constant conscious conscious.
– Eileen Myles

To gain your own voice,
forget about having it heard.
Become a saint of your own
province and your own
consciousness.
– Allen Ginsberg

It has become clear to me that aging itself does not bring wisdom. It often brings regression to childishness, dependency and bitterness over lost opportunities. Only those who are still intellectually, emotionally, spiritually growing inherit the richness of aging.
– James Hollis

This life we live nowadays! It’s not life, it’s stagnation, death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses, and the meaningless people inside them! Sometimes I think we’re all corpses. Just rotting upright.
– George Orwell

Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.
– Assata Shakur

I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence.
– Christopher Hitchens

exhausted
how much longer will this last?
autumn wind

– Basho

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.
– Daniel Kahneman

Every film is the result of the society that produced it. That’s why the American cinema is so bad now. It reflects an unhealthy society.
– Jean-Luc Godard

And then along came Hemingway. What a thrill! He knew how to lay down a line. It was a joy. Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.
– Charles Bukowski

Concentrate your energy where it needs to go not where it’s used to going.

All of life is neuroplastic.

– Kimia Nora

I’d woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.
– Fernando Pessoa

Every creative act strives towards the transcendent, towards passing beyond the borders of the given world. The creative act is always liberation and conquest. It is an experience of power. In essence, creativity is a way out, an exodus; it is victory.
– Nicholas Berdyaev

Just walking, not really looking for anything, just permitting the camera to be its own eye. Keep looking for things in places where there is nothing.
– Jonas Mekas

Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Yet in the wizard’s face he saw at first only lines of care and sorrow; though as he looked more intently he perceived that under all there was a great joy: a fountain of mirth enough to set a kingdom laughing, were it to gush forth.
– Tolkien

All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured.
– Tove Jansson

We are all the leaves of one tree;
we are all the waves of one sea.

– Thich Nhat Hanh

To be something that does not feel the weight of the rain outside, or the pain of inner emptiness …

To wander with no soul, no thoughts, just pure impersonal sensation, along winding mountain roads, through valleys hidden amongst steep hills, distant, absorbed, ill-fated …

To lose oneself in landscapes like paintings. To be nothing in distance and in colors…

– Fernando Pessoa

How deeply you touch another life is how rich your life is.
– Sadhguru

Completion is temporal, a fleeting moment to enjoy the satisfaction of finishing a project. And just as quickly, it’s time to begin exploring the process again.
– Michelle Cutler

That’s what every uncomfortable feeling is for – that’s what pain is for, what money is for, what everything in the world is for: your self-realization.
– Byron Katie

Good Company

Walking through the snowy field
the day after
I walked through the snowy field,

I step next to my first set of prints
so anyone who cares to can see
I was never alone.

– Ryan Vine

We imagine the unconscious as something inside us … But the unconscious can equally well be imagined outside of our bodies, out in the world, like a dark, wild forest through which we roam. There are equal measures of mystery in dreams and wilderness.
– Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft

If you treated every single person as your Beloved Other, the world would change overnight. Cruelty and Violence would end. Lack and Insufficiency would evaporate. Suffering would disappear. Oppression would cease. Inequality would dissolve. Anger would terminate.

– Neale D.Walsch

And does she still write poems?
Not a whole one since I had been ill.
Five years. I kept saying I was
Doing it privately. So private even
I didn’t know about it.

– Tricia Lockwood

Judgment is simply an opinion, but it is one that blocks the flow of energy.
– Jennifer Hoffman

A thing that is not talked about ceases to exist.
– Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

To me, there is no greater act of courage than being the one who kisses first.
– Janeane Garofalo

If I may trust my personal experience no doctrine is, for the moment, dimmer to the eye of faith than that which a man has just successfully defended.
– C.S. Lewis

Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.
– Emily Dickinson

We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man’s support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.
– Alexis de Tocqueville

I dream of care that has nothing to do with survival.
– Jody Chan

It’s the best feeling when you wake up and it’s warm and cozy, and you don’t have to go to work.
– Emmy Rossum

Knowledge and mystery exist side by side; mystery does not invalidate the fact.
– Maynard Metcalf

Good leaders must first become good servants.
– Robert K. Greenleaf

My enemy is not the man who wrongs me, but the man who means to wrong me.
– Democritus

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

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.
– Yasutani Roshi

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
– Michel de Montaigne

You will always be your most productive and attractive when you’re inside your own skin. When you squeeze yourself inside someone else’s, you’re just plain scary.
– Marcus Buckingham

Get action. Do things; be sane; don’t fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody; get action.
– Theodore Roosevelt

How vast was a human being’s capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn’t a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.
– Janet Fitch

If I get through this year, no matter how badly, it will be the biggest victory I’ve ever done.
– Sylvia Plath

I think the Ku Klux Klan should be outlawed. I think the Nazi Party should be outlawed.
– Angela Davis

Nowadays, one has to think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
– Barley Scott Blair

The whole point of poetry isn’t
necessarily to save

It’s cool if it can, it’s ok to want it to
but you can’t be surprised when
car crashes still happen

– Travis Hupp

When it is all generally terrible, hold the smallest good in high regard.
– Sarah Bessey

I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even put a stopper in death.
– Professor Severus Snape

Capitalism killed the poetry star.
– Lily Kershaw

Literature is a place for generosity and affection and hunger for equals—not a prizefight ring. We are increased, confirmed in our medium, roused to do our best, by every good writer, every fine achievement. Would we want one good writer or fine book less?
– Tillie Olsen

I think the whole world needs a lot more of angry young women.
– Greta Thunberg

You cannot attract to yourself that which you are already connected to if you have short-circuited the connection. The presence of unconditional love is in all things that you wish to attract as well as in you.
– Wayne Dyer

Because if we lose hope, we’re doomed.
– Jane Goodall

When the night wind makes the pine trees creak… seek your soul: The Eternal I.
– Jane Goodall

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
– George Orwell, 1984

Once you learn to read, you will be free forever.
– Fredrick Douglas

Do not choose a coward’s explanation that hides behind the cause and the effect.
– Leonard Cohen

Live carefully, because there are people around you.
– Krzysztof Kieslowski

I know we engage in lofty meditations on kindness and compassion and that we marry beautiful ideals of love and peace. But it seems that we pursue them mostly as inner and subjective experiences geared towards personal transformation.

Too rarely does this kind of compassion roll up its sleeves and take to the field.

– Bhikkhu Bodhi

When a Poet Crosses Over

When a poet crosses over
by choice or by misfortune
Jimmy Rogers sits up in his grave
and yodels blue one more time.

Starlings drop from the sky
like lead hymns.

Nobody can remember
if it is noon or midnight.

The alphabet
takes bereavement leave,

and the blind mice lie down
and offer the farmer’s wife
their bellies.

The seas turn the color
the Greeks once called wine-dark,

and in the balcony
of a packed vaudeville-age theater
a skeleton drops a quarter–

it spins
and spins
like a silver top,

and when it finally comes to rest
an old man in a tweed vest
coughs into his elbow,

and then
a thousand years of silence,
a blue cloud of silence
that stains the air —
when and only when
a poet crosses over.

– Justin Hamm

I dislike Nietzsche because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into a duty, because the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die. But I think the ultimate argument against his philosophy, as against any unpleasant but internally self-consistent ethic, lies not in an appeal to facts, but in an appeal to the emotions. Nietzsche despises universal love; I feel it the motive power to all that I desire as regards the world. His followers have had their innings, but we may hope that it is coming rapidly to an end.
– Bertrand Russell

what does it mean
when we enter the world—
the “world”—
of reading,
turning away
from the
solid,
insistent
“world”
around us
which can interrupt
at any moment—
“hey, it’s raining”—
and turn us
away
from the
imaginary
“country” or
“place” or even
“universe”
to which we have
“travelled”
in voluntary,
passionate,
“personal”
renunciation.
what
“worlds”
open?

– Jack Foley

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
– Maya Angelou

George Bernard Shaw was once asked, ” can a man live lazily just by keeping his hands in his pockets? Shaw replied ” Yes he can. Just that the pockets should belong to someone else. “

Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.
– Niels Bohr

Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.
– Machiavelli

There has never been a parent
kept alive by a child’s love.
– Louise Glück

A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense [against] foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.
– James Madison

Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.
– Yuval Noah Harari

They won’t listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don’t want the truth; they want their traditions.
– Isaac Asimov

There is a very Simple Secret to being happy. Just let go of your ‘demand’ on this moment. Any time you have a demand on the moment to give you something or remove something, there is suffering.
– Adyashanti

I was one of those people who always had one foot in the other world.
– Manchán Magan

The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake – you can’t learn anything from being perfect.
– Adam Osborne

Some announce themselves with sirens. Some are quietly digging up the old wells.
Some are writing new anthems in sign language.

All are moving toward the shore knowing we are running out of time in this underwater experiment.

Welcome to the revolution.
Water walkers take your position.

– Dr. Thema

I don’t believe anyone should be a martyr, I don’t believe that people should throw their lives away. People should make a good fight, retreat, re-arm, fight again. That is the way to truly fight for what you believe in.
– Julian Assange

He disarmed the rulers and authorities and disgraced them publicly; he triumphed over them in him.
– Colossians 2:15

A thousand mythologies contributed to my conception.
– Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes.
– Milton Mayer

Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right.
– Jane Goodal

Young or old, when you wake to news of bombs falling, genocide, and rising fascism- you’ll want to crawl back under the covers. That’s the point. They’d gladly keep you there, in the dark, while they profit from your silence. Throw the covers off. Shine a bright light. Let your voice be heard.
– Lawrence Nault

Each one of us is responsible for the whole of humankind. We need to think of each other really as brothers and sisters and to be concerned for each other’s welfare. Rather than working solely to acquire wealth, we need to do something meaningful, something directed seriously towards the welfare of humanity as a whole.
– Dalai Lama

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
– Edmund Burke

A sibling is only a sibling if you share blood, says the west. Every oppressed neighbor is my sibling, says my blood.
– Aman Kaur Batra

It is not always necessary to search for the cause behind everything, because every cause is unfounded. A cause only looks like a cause from a certain viewpoint.
– László Krasznahorkai

There must certainly be a pleasure in criticizing everything, and in perceiving faults where others think they see beauties… there is a pleasure in having no pleasure.
– Voltaire, Candide

People who care only for what they get and not at all for what they are are surely uncommon. Even the worst of us seem to want others to like and admire us (if not morally then in other ways) and wither in the face of contempt. […] Why should the opinions of others be sources of pleasure and pain to us in the first place? We live in the eyes of others because we must live in our own.
– Christine M. Korsgaard

EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

– Derek Mahon

PERFECT HOME

Inside the body,
the sound
of rain falling.
Outside the body,
rain falling.

In the gap,
all things die
and are reborn.

Between in-breath
and out-breath
an endless pilgrimage
to Being.

Today,
be thankful
for this
liminal space.
In it you’ll find
a perfect home.

– Leza Lowitz

The evening, hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow,” she writes. “We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.
– Virginia Woolf

Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity: for convenience’ sake a man must be a whole. The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with skepticism and solitude.
– Virginia Woolf

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
– Virginia Woolf

Rising up, rising down! History shambles on! What are we left with? A few half-shattered Greek stelae; Trotsky’s eyeglasses; Gandhi’s native-spun cloth, Cortes’ pieces of solid gold (extorted from their original owner, Montezuma); a little heap of orange peels left on the table by the late Robespierre; John Brown’s lengthily underlined letters; Lenin’s bottles of invisible ink; one of Di Giovanni’s suitcases, with an iron cylinder of gelignite and two glass tubes of acid inside; the Constitution of the Ku Klux Klan; a bruised ear (Napoleon pinched it with loving condescension)… And dead bodies, of course. (They sing about John Brown’s body.) Memoirs, manifestoes, civil codes, trial proceedings, photographs, statues, weapons now aestheticized by that selfsame history – the sword of Frederick the Great, and God knows what else. Then dust blows out of fresh graves, and the orange peels go grey, sink, wither, rot away. Sooner or later, every murder becomes quaint. Charlemagne hanged four and a half thousand “rebels” in a single day, but he has achieved a storybook benevolence. And that’s only natural: historiography begins after the orange has been sucked,; the peeler believes in the “great and beautiful things,” or wants to believe; easy for us to believe likewise, since dust reduced truth and counterfeit to the same greyness – caveat emptor. But ends remain fresh, and means remain inexplicable. Rising up and rising down! And whom shall I save, and who is my enemy, and who is my neighbor?
– William T. Vollmann

Wrong as a squirrel with feathers, or a wolf with wooden teeth; not injustice, not unfairness—just a wrongness that, under the sky, could not exist.
– Theodore Sturgeon

Anger diverts one’s thoughts from the real problem to something in the past that cannot be changed. It makes one think that progress will have been made if the betrayer suffers, when, in reality, this does nothing to solve the real problem. It eats up the personality and makes the person quite unpleasant to be with. It impedes useful introspection. It becomes its own project, displacing or forestalling other useful projects… Far from being required in order to shore up one’s own self-respect, anger actually impedes the assertion of self-respect in worthwhile actions and a meaningful life.
– Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness

Tragedy is full of ghosts, ancient and modern, and the line separating the living from the dead is continually blurred. This means that in tragedy the dead don’t stay dead and the living are not fully alive. What tragedy renders unstable is the line that separates the living from the dead, enlivening the dead and deadening the living.
– Simon Critchley

There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not.
– Thomas Pynchon

Neurosis derives from a belief that the Other has the object—that the Other has a hidden mode of enjoyment inaccessible by the subject—and this belief sustains the enjoyment that the neurotic obtains from fantasy. But … the Other cannot give the neurotic what the neurotic wants. And as we remain within a neurotic relation to the object of desire (as most subjects do), we will continually run up against the barrier of demanding that the Other give us what it doesn’t have and what only we ourselves have.
– Todd Mcgowan

Time travel, as it turns out, is not for civilian tourists, you don’t just climb into a machine, you have to do it from the inside out, with your mind and body, and navigating Time is an unforgiving discipline. It requires years of pain, hard labor, and loss, and there is no redemption–of, or from, anything.
– Thomas Pynchon

Odd, yes, here in the capital of eternal youth, endless summer and all, that fear should be running the town again as in days of old, like the Hollywood blacklist you don’t remember and the Watts rioting you do – it spreads, like blood in a swimming pool, till it occupies all the volume of the day. And then maybe some playful soul shows up with a bucketful of piranhas, dumps them in the pool, and right away they can taste the blood. They swim around looking for what’s bleeding, but they don’t find anything, all of them getting more and more crazy, till the craziness reaches a point. Which is when they begin to feed on each other.
– Thomas Pynchon

Forage. Gather. Sift. Examine. Synthesize. Create. Expound. Refute. Deconstruct. Destroy. Scatter. Plant. Grow. Forage.
– Ahmed Salman

When the cat take off with your money, he don’t leave you no roadmaps.
– Lorraine Hansberry

The king dreams he’s king and lives and rules under this falsehood; and all the acclamations he receives are nothing but words that will later fade and turn to ashes scattered in the winds. And to think there are men who want to rule knowing that one day they must awaken from the sleep of death. The rich man dreams of gold coins and silver but with that dream comes the burden and the worries of guarding his fortune. The poor man dreams his sufferings, for the poor man has nothing but his misery and poverty. We live and dream our reality until we awaken from our sleep. The man who tries to get ahead in life is dreaming. The man who works and strives is dreaming. The man who hurts, offends, and wounds is dreaming. In this world all men dream who they are, but no one understands this. I dream that I am imprisoned in this cell. Yet I dreamt once before that I lived a better life. And what is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction… And our greatest good is but little, for all of life is a dream and dreams are only dreams.
– Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Life is a Dream
(translated and adapted by Nilo Cruz)

I turned to the animal world from the world of men; my heart was heavy with the tragedy of the night.
– Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

Your fear and distrust is unfounded, so do not be disheartened or change your plans but go forward with joy.
– Anne Carson

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
– Anne Carson

Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn’t know you left open.
– John Barrymore

Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person’s time line sideways till they all coincide.
– Thomas Pynchon

Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking, brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness.
– Gary Snyder

The Ancient Desert Fathers, when they were disconsolate and without hope, would repeat one word, over and over, as a kind of soothing mantra. And the word wasn’t “Jesus” or “God” or “Love.” The word was “Today.” It kept them where they needed to be.
– Gregory Boyle

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.
– Henry Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government

Stood awhile watching, thinking, praying: Lord, give us more. Give us enough. Help us not fall behind peers. Help us not, that is, fall further behind peers. For kids’ sake. Do not want them scarred by how far behind we are. That is all I ask.
– George Saunders

I detect an undercurrent of self-doubt among some Americans about what your role in the world should be… At a time when our world is at history’s turning point… Freedom and democracy are currently under threat around
the globe.
– Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida

…she had beauty in abundance, I think that’s mostly what one saw, what anyone would have seen with Marianne, this glorious beauty, and then she was an old-fashioned girl, and I kind of come from an old-fashioned background myself, so, the things that I took for granted with Marianne, and she perhaps took with me, a certain kind of courtesy and behavior and ritual and order, which became very scarce as I got older, I didn’t find it with such abundance in other women. But Marianne had some wonderful family qualities, and the home that she made was very very beautiful, very old fashioned. I don’t know how things go now with the young, but that house was very orderly and there was always a gardenia on my desk where I’d work, you know. There was such a sense of order and generosity, that she had, that she still has.
– Leonard Cohen

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will.
– John Green

The Quiet Wisdom of the Melancholic
We melancholics know that humans — ourselves foremost among them — are beyond redemption. We melancholics have given up on dreams of complete purity and unblemished happiness. We know that this world is, for the most part, hellish and heartbreakingly vicious. We know that our minds are full of demons that will not leave us alone for long. Nevertheless, we are committed to not slipping into despondency. We remain deeply interested in kindness, in friendship, in art, in family life — and in spending some very quiet local afternoons trying to cultivate a garden, however modest, of calm and meaning. The melancholic position is ultimately the only sensible one for a broken human. It’s where one gets to, after one has been hopeful, after one has tried love, after one has been tempted by fame, after one has despaired, after one’s gone mad, after one’s considered ending it — and after one’s decided conclusively to keep going. It captures the best possible attitude to pain — and the wisest orientation of a weary mind towards what remains hopeful and good.
– Voltaire

As we awaken from sleep, our consciousness undergoes a radical transformation composed of dramatic adjustments in neural processes. Some neural circuits go quiet while others come online. The entire orchestration of the symphony of mind unfolds like changes in a music score, and while there is no single, master conductor, the decentralized process does have hot spots of top-down modulation linked by connections built over evolutionary time.

These “command centers,” for lack of a more accurate but succinct term, do one thing really well: They create our sense of self, our sense of being a protagonist in a continuously unfolding nonlinear narrative through which we can travel again and again in our memories and plan possible and even impossible futures.

– Antonio Damasio

All things fall as low as they can go
I know I too have gone
Thud in the last bit
Not from carnal knowledge
But from my love of you Which is vast and unknowing
Beyond book and crypt keeper
Which is beyond light
– Dorothea Lasky

And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.
– Laini Taylor

ONE LOVE STORY, EIGHT TAKES
by Brenda Shaughnessy

As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story.
I was wrong to tell you how multi-true everything is,
when it would be truer to say nothing.
I’ve invented so much and prevented more.
But, I’d like to talk with you about other things,
in absolute quiet. In extreme context.
To see you again, isn’t love revision?
It could have gone so many ways.
This is just one of the ways it went.
Tell me another.

When you are on the right path, the devil wakes up in order to disturb you. It is a law. If the devil has never awakened in you, if he has always been asleep, then, when you are on the right path, he wakes up and troubles you. So struggle a thousand times more. You must see a thousand times—more and more—that there is a devil and an angel in you. Perhaps the devil has never shown himself in you. But today perhaps you are already an enemy to him. Or else, it is help from an angel who has sent you some kind of an assistant. There is a law: when the devil enters into someone, it is proof that an angel has entered before. Where there is no angel, there is no devil; no devil, no angel. This proves that you have a devil. Make use of these two forces, these two servants, of your nature.
– Gurdjieff

Consider the Hands That Write This Letter

Consider the hands
that write this letter.
The left palm pressed flat against the paper,
as it has done before, over my heart,
in peace or reverence
to the sea or some beautiful thing
I saw once, felt once: snow falling
like rice flung from the giants’ wedding,
or the strangest birds. & consider, then,
the right hand, & how it is a fist,
within which a sharpened utensil,
similar to the way I’ve held a spade,
match to the wick, the horse’s reins,
loping, the very fists
I’ve seen from the roads to Lima & Esteli.
For years, I have come to sit this way:
one hand open, one hand closed,
like a farmer who puts down seeds & gathers up
the food that comes from that farming.
Or, yes, it is like the way I’ve danced
with my left hand opened around a shoulder
& my right hand closed inside
of another hand. & how
I pray, I pray for this
to be my way: sweet
work alluded to in the body’s position
to its paper:
left hand, right hand
like an open eye, an eye closed:
one hand flat against the trapdoor,
the other hand knocking, knocking.

– Aracelis Girmay

She drove like one of the damned on holiday.
– Thomas Pynchon

Insanity is possession by an unconscious content that, as such, is not assimilatable to consciousness, nor can it be assimilated since the very existence of such contents is denied.
– CG Jung

Alone
a traveler on their way
in the Autumn wind.
– Basho

This long last childhood
Nothing provides for.
What can it do each day
But hunt that imminent door
Through which all that understood
Has hidden away?
– Philip Larkin

The alchemist doesn’t match energy.
They transform it.
– Nika Solé

The lesson of leverage is this: Assume that the worst imaginable outcome will occur and ask whether you can tolerate it. If the answer is no, then reduce your borrowing.
– Ed Thorp

Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.
– Bob Dylan

Silence is loud enough.

The ocean does not need
to be loud to be powerful.

The mountain does not need
to make noise to be seen.

– Yung Pueblo

If you reach your goals by compromising your values, you haven’t succeeded.

If you fall short of your goals by upholding your values, you haven’t failed.

The true measure of accomplishment is standing by your principles when they’re tested.

– Adam Grant

when speaking
my lips are cold
autumn wind

– Basho

I almost never delete any sentences, though I’m continually changing words. I start out with very little and then just keep adding and adding, to the beginning, middle, and end. It grows organically.
– Eliot Weinberger

which shines brighter today,
the lingering moon or
the leftover flowers?

– Basho

My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.
– C.G. Jung, The Red Book

Hesitancy is essential to discovery and further understanding, but how can there be hesitancy when you know so much and the self-protective armor is so highly polished?
– Krishnamurti

We can change. People say we can’t, but we do when the stakes or the pain is high enough. And when we do, life can change. It offers more of itself when we agree to give up our busyness.
– Anne Lamott

He who indulges empty fears earns himself real fears.
– Seneca

I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.
– Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

A look into the history of Microbiome health reveals that it was paired with a bunch of stuff that seemed kooky at the time- yet we now know it’s critical for brain/body health. Ingesting low sugar fermented foods each day and (the right types) of fiber arguably the best ways to support microbiome health.
– Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D.

Life is strange, so am I
I’ll be strange till the day that I die
Life is sad, so are you
That’s alright, we can cry if we want to

– Lord Huron, Life is Strange

When you’re a way-shower, you’ll often experience things before the collective does so that you can carry the answers that the collective will soon need. The solutions live themselves out through you.
– Nika Solé

…the positive religion must be retained, precisely in order to constrain men to exceed it, to call the resurrection of the adepts.
– Henry Corbin

A successful moment of poetry won’t let you calculate anything, for as long as it lasts, it is a mental force that silences all other mental forces.
– Clive James

The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast.
– C.S. Lewis

Much of poetry is an anguished waiting.
– Theodore Roethke

It’s crazy how we journey from the abyss, through a lifetime lived, just to find each other on a random day unexpectedly. The design is immaculate like that.
– Nika Solé

The iron cage of modernism is locked from the inside.
– Kale Zelden

with books unread, muscles untrained, and thousands of skills untouched – if you’re bored you aren’t even trying.
– @bluewmist

Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.
– Eckhart tolle

When an author is blocked from publication in his own country yet cannot live anywhere else, he finds himself being both debated and yelled at, attacked and beloved, forgotten but always remembered again, like a hedgehog.
– Yan Lianke

Wherever you think you’ve got it—that you understand, that you claim something as a certain kind of spiritual possession—get rid of it, and see that there isn’t any security at all.
– Alan Watts

Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage leaf that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle.
– Samuel Beckett

Home, too often, is the place where we take everything for granted. Elsewhere then becomes the place where suddenly we’re wide-awake.
– Pico Iyer

I have seen miracles, actual miracles, where people who have been given no chance of living have lived, and in some cases are living still.
– Anne Lamott

Did you know:

You can eat breakfast food for dinner.

And eat dinner food for breakfast.

Unchain yourself from society my friend.

– Dan Go

Every time a poem is written, every time a short story is written, it is written not by cunning, but by belief. The beauty, the something, the little charm of the thing to be, is more felt than known.
– Robert Frost

perhaps next year
she says . . .
autumn mist

– John Kinory

after his funeral . . .
his walking stick rests
beside the door

– Charlotte Digregorio

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.
– Milton Friedman

All of your ideas, all of your concepts they’ve all got to go. There has to be only silence, quietness and everything will take care of itself. … Let go of everything.
– Robert Adams

God is to be found not in religion, not in systems but in discovering truth in every little thing. Truth is not far away but very near.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

Self-discipline is self-respect. When you betray your routines, you teach your subconscious that your word is worthless. Strength doesn’t begin in the gym or the battlefield, it begins in keeping promises to yourself when no one is watching.
– unknown

It’s dark in this wood, soft mocker.
For whom have I swelled like a seed?
What a bone-ache I have.
Father of tensions, I’m down to my skin at last.

– Roethke

To dogs, therefore, is given the ability to bark in defense of their masters and their homes. Thus you should learn to use your voice for the sake of Christ, when ravening wolves attack his sheepfold.
– St. Ambrose

Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist.
– Albert Einstein

It is not enough to be nice; you have to be good. We are attracted by nice people; but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.
– Roger Scruton

every time you say “this is new for me” instead of “i’m bad at this,” you allow your brain space to learn instead of shut down. that’s neuroplasticity in real time.
– @bluewmist

Hanzi in the Rain
by Sean Thomas Dougherty

I think I’m tired of auditioning.
I’m not dancing for bread anymore.
I’m not paying your fee.
Give the grant, the residency,
that place in a journal, that job
to someone else.
I’ll be here under the Bodhi tree with Tu Fu.
He’s sold a sheaf of poems.
He pours me a cup of wine
mixed with the glint of fisherman’s lures.
He pours me a cup of sad songs
sung on a mountain pass.
At night, when I lie down in my cot
in our hut, I can hear him calling my name
to come out and dance.
He says my aloneliness
is long as a river.
He’s drunk and silly
and counting characters.
Come out he says.
Stop being an orphan.
I open the door
but it is the door to the house
of sleep. I hear wind chimes
on the rising wind.
He’s shouting me questions.
How can I write moon,
but mean mountain?
How can I write goose,
but mean grief?
Or a hanzi in the rain,
is it still the same
or something new
as it is washed away?
What is the page after?
Asks his voice of blurry ink.

Seeing that nothing is solid or permanent you begin to make yourself at home in the unknown.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

Giving is the master key to success, in all applications of human life.
– Bryant McGill

Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.
– St Thomas Aquinas

What we write, we read aloud to each other
the page is cold, but oh so straightforward.

– Susan L. Helwig, A lesbian and her lover in Siberia

untouched by words
the spring moon pauses
between pines

– Carolyn Thomas

There was pain and then there was pain. Different magnitudes you could stand or not stand.
– Colson Whitehead

The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I’m reminded of the past at every turn. But when I think of you, it’s as if you’ve gone away to sea on a ship — out in a foreign brightness where there are no paths, only stars and sky.
– Donna Tartt

An insult – it is a purification; it is the most pungent and painful consciousness! … And indeed, now I am posing myself one idle question: what is better – cheap happiness or sublime suffering? Well, which is better?
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Jung believes that when the gods fall from heaven, when the symbols pale, they don’t just go away or disappear. They are reborn, as it were, as turbulent forces in the psyche. When religion collapses, we discover the unconscious and open the Pandora’s box of the inner life.
– David Tacey

I seemed tranquil but I was extremely agitated, my face hurt with the effort of smiling.
– Elena Ferrante

A great work of art, if it accomplishes anything, serves to remind us, or let us say to set us dreaming, of all that is fluid and intangible. Which is to say, the universe. It cannot be understood; it can only be accepted or rejected. If accepted we are revitalized; if rejected we are diminished.
– Henry Miller

Artists! They were all crazy. In a good way, of course.
– Anne Tyler, French Braid

Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.
– Ryunosuke Satoro

I do not, of course, deny that many neuroses have a traumatic origin; I simply contest the notion that all neuroses are of this nature and arise without exception from some crucial experience of childhood.
– CG Jung

Be as you wish to seem.
– Socrates

So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made.
– Cormac McCarthy

While I was sleeping, I had a beautiful dream that all the people of the world got together on the same wavelength and began helping each other.
– Stevie Ray Vaughan

Writing is the ultimate form of communication because you can talk to someone one hundred years from now when they read it.
– Neil deGrasse Tyson

Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.
– George Eliot

Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.
– Desmond Tutu

For the Buddha, the anxious person was ignorant and deluded, clinging on to, grasping at, a quicksilver, ever-morphing reality, holding on for dear life to transient, ever-becoming possessions belonging to a nonexistent being.
– Samir Chopra

People make bad choices all the time, usually because of fundamental inability to operate over longer time frames.
– Charlie Munger

A heart that gives, gathers.
– Tao Te Ching

All Truth is eternal. Truth is nobody’s property. No race, no individual can lay any exclusive claim to it. Truth is the nature of all beings.
– Vivekananda

When you wish someone joy, you wish them peace, love, prosperity, happiness. All the good things.
– Maya Angelou

If snow is the silence that falls from the sky, perhaps rain is an endless sentence.
– Han Kang, Greek Lessons

ABSORPTION

Yoga is the art of absorption. In each practice aim to be like a sponge, soaking through your skin, muscle and nerves, all the way to the pithy core of your bones…. The word in yoga for mind-body saturation is samadhi. It is said in the Dattatreya-yogashastra that Siva taught 80 million techniques to realize samadhi. “One should fill the whole body from the soles of the feet to the crown of the head with divine fluid,” says the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. Like baptism, this interior drenching bathes every cell and every fiber. Not only does this involve physiological soaking— of the cells, glands, nerves and gut— but also a kind of psychic soaking. Like a sponge in the ocean, the mind is saturated in awareness. When mind and body become soaked all the way through, in what the poet Philip Larkin called “a furious devout drench,” we absorb into that which has no boundaries or limits.

All too often, people go about their day absorbing very little. When we are preoccupied, caught up in “busy brain,” very little sinks in. In time, people become hollow and heartless. In meditation, ultimate absorption involves steeping of the delicate fibers of the heart. The heart absorbs the most subtle of vibrations and in rapture, a wellspring of kindness, care and compassion rises up. Soaked in the tidal fluids of the heart, relinquish your grasp on “me, my and mine” and dissolve into a sea of grace.

– Tias Little

That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality–your soul, if you will–is as bright and shining as any that has ever been….Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.
– George Saunders

In an age that prides itself on being capable of resolving and clarifying every aspect of experience in such a way as to explain it, in the hope of controlling it, we are too apt, when faced with a question that cannot be answered, either to deny that the question has meaning, or to deny that the problematic entity exists, or both. It is not just Zen wisdom that is founded on pondering irresoluble questions, and paradoxical injunctions: you scarcely need to be a Zen master to see the deficiencies in the all too common modern Western strategy of ruling questions impermissible, or denying the existence of what we can’t comprehend. The most important questions are, precisely, the unanswerable ones.
– Iain McGilchrist

You have an identity not because you have invented one, or because you have a little hard core of selfhood that is unchanged, but because you have a witness of who you are. What you don’t understand or see, the bits of yourself you can’t pull together in a convincing story, are all held in a single gaze of love.
– Rowan Williams

Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,
to be filled with awe and contemplation,
to recognize that we are profoundly united
with every creature
as we journey towards your infinite light.

– Laudato Si by Pope Francis

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.
– Thomas Pynchon

Do not look for signs. Do not look for experiences. Do not be so complicated. Become like a child. See everything with awe.
– Robert Adams

Thought has altitude. Thought has velocity. Thought has acceleration. Thought has dimension. Thought has edges and vertices. Thought has a radius and a circumference. Thought dances in front of a thoughtless mirror.
– Ahmed Salman

We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out. We creep in upon ourselves and with big eyes stare into the night, and thus we wait for morning.
– Erich Maria Remarque

As long as the child remains inside the book, he or she remains powerful. To be inside the book, though, you have to believe in the book. You have to be immersed in it, to feel as if it’s happening all around you.
– Diane Purkiss

Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.

So let us rather not be sure of anything…
Then miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence,
Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.

– Rumi

Here is what the sea smells like. It is more texture than scent, because the sea is primarily made of two substances that have no smell of their own: water and salt. Salt has no smell, but makes the air sting, and so all of the other smells of the sea are layered upon the pang of salt. Water has no smell but instead a comfort. We feel moisture as life and so the smells of the ocean are layered upon the contentment of the water. Salt is treble and water is bass. I don’t know how I know this is true, but I know it is true. The sea smells like old wood and wet leaves. Like cold mud and warm stone. Like every creature who has ever lived in it, a churning graveyard and nursery. Like winds from the inland carrying the hot circulation of life and winds from the ocean carrying the distant froth of waves against ships and islands. Like gray, only more so. Like blue, only less so.
– Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor

…I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow (…) 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

But if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.
– Joseph Campbell

in nonsense is strength
– Kurt Vonnegut

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

I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long, they really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.
– James Baldwin

War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.
– Hemingway

Small source of comfort, dawn was
breaking in the air, breaking in the air,
breaking in the air
Small source of comfort, dawn was
breaking in the air
You don’t take these things for granted
when you think of what’s in need of repair
– Bruce Cockburn

Being sensitive, attuned, observant, these things don’t just improve your writing; they improve your life.
– Maggie Smith

A woman who becomes an artist is a kind of thief… she breaks the trance of domination by the very practice of her art.
– Susan Griffin

Don’t shy away from inventing rituals in your story. Invent rules and prayers. Give people roles to play and lines to recite. Include some form of communion and confession, a way for people to tell their stories and find connection with others.
– Chuck Palahniuk, Consider This

There are seasons in your life, as in nature. Bountiful and barren; warm and cold; becoming and declining.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Company in Loneliness

Hasten hither, little book,
with wholesome tales in speckled writing
and never part from me
now everyone deserts me.

Come, pure-leaved and smooth,
firm-stitched and bunched together,
and lull my grief for their loss
–that ardent-cheeked fair company.

Bring with you as you come
my radiant, ready, clean pen-case
full of sharp dart-like pens,
pliant-pointed, firm, new trimmed.

Bring paper and cushion also
form my hand, whence the writing pours
on the fluent smooth slope of leaf,
fine-lettered, jet-black, ordered.

And bring my poem-book
of noble changeless Gaelic
till I study each tale to the roots
(branches of bravery and bright knowledge)

that learned lays I may recite
with clear knowledge of branching kindreds,
the family tree of every man,
wonder feats and voyages.

Bring with you my handbook
of ordered arithmetic
til I number the points of the heavens
and the days it is since the Deluge.

And do not forget that music-bough
red-boarded, plaintive, dry,
soft-voiced, wailing sweetly
a sleepy lullaby to the mind

–bring me my fiery lyre,
grooved and shining, turbulent,
polished and tempered thoroughly,
thin-stringed, all engraved.

When I behold the skilful harp,
brown-shadowed, great, smooth-sloped,
beneath my fingers’ running fire
my mind quickens to itself.

Sparkling airs I have played
with my quick keen fingertips,
close-knit, precise and grave,
calloused fingers flowing even.

Put then my lovely blade
into my bright right fist
till I put a hard battle-edge
on both its shining sides.

And give me my sweet knife-jewel,
blue-bladed, bright, sharp-tipped,
with scabbard tightly corded
–a case worthy to keep it.

In the past I have taken keen delight
in the lined and level ficheall-board
pressing across it against the odds,
breaking up the ordered team,

throwing dice from dawn to dawn
in runs like a hurrying torrent
on the sleek and chequered board,
lovely, sweet, and light.

When these are gathered round me
they set my spirit soaring
and I walk in a wink of time
all the weighty sods of the world.

The more should one so love
this fair dear company
that they murmur against no man
in arrogance or reproach.

I ask their peace, and kneel to them,
this blessed dear lovely band,
and embrace this orphan over all
who never leaves me lonely.

– Anonymous from The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse
(translated by Thomas Kinsella)

Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.

– Garrison Keillor

I got fascinated by silence; by what happens to the human spirit, to identity and personality when the talking stops, when you press the off button, when you venture out into that enormous emptiness. I was interested in silence as a lost cultural phenomenon, as a thing of beauty and as a space that had been explored and used over and over again by different individuals, for different reasons and with wildly differing results. I began to use my own life as a sort of laboratory to test some ideas and to find out what it felt like. Almost to my surprise, I found I loved silence. It suited me. I got greedy for more. In my hunt for more silence, I found this valley and built a house here, on the ruins of an old shepherd’s cottage.

– Sara Maitland, How To Be Alone

CONVERSATION IN A DINER

I’m a writer, not
a filmmaker,
but if I were
a filmmaker,
I could easily
make a film
of the way
you two ladies,
one in white,
one in black,
look
together.

– Jack Foley

Wherever you have friends, that’s your country. And wherever you receive love, that’s your home.

– Old Tibetan Saying

Devices are not dangerous for literature.
People can be dangerous for literature.
People, for example, who do not read.
– László Krasznahorkai

Willingness

So often it is willingness that shapes us,
a door left ajar somewhere inside
that lets in the wind along with the sweet
fermenting scent of the coming autumn.
An openness to change and a beginner’s
mind that welcomes every surprise
like a delivery you’ve been expecting
your entire life. A knock at the door,
and then you open your arms, accept
the package that’s handed to you—
not knowing what it contains, or even
who it’s from, only that it has your name
written across the top.

– James Crews

Your whole life long
Again and again
And again
Give yourself the possibility
Of being heartbroken,
Of being disappointed,
Of being a fool

That you stand a chance
Of loving deeply,
Of being amazed
Of pursuing what is most
Blazing and true.

– Chelan Harkin

There are no poor countries, only failed systems of resource management.

No one will place the truth in your mind; it is something you must discover for yourself.

If you want to control a people, create an imaginary enemy that appears more dangerous than you, then present yourself as their savior.

One of the clearest lessons of history: rights are not granted; they are taken by force.

There is a purpose behind distorting history to make it seem like only great men achieve significant things. It teaches people to believe they are powerless and must wait for a great man to act.

The world is a mysterious and confusing place. If you are not willing to be confused, you become a mere replica of someone else’s mind.

To control people, make them believe they are responsible for their own misery and present yourself as their savior.

The West will one day regret its shallow ideas that alienate people from their true nature. One must seek the right religion and the right belief.

– Noam Chomsky

It would be wonderful if the next viral trend was compassion and empathy and understanding….guided by some critical thinking skills and accountability, the kind of accountability that begins with people just being honest and owning up to their own shit and a real transforming learning that just stops you from talking so much about things that you really just don’t know much about at all.

That would be nice.

– Kent Burgess

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

When the devil comes at you, maybe it’s because you’re trying to do something right.
– Denzel Washington

Stop wasting time on politics. The real problem is humans not acting human—emotionless, manipulative, destructive. This goes beyond left or right; it’s the difference between being alive and being a robot.
– unknown

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.
– Isaac Newton

All artists are of necessity in some measure contemplatives.
– Evelyn Underhill

Our dreams recover what the world forgets.
– James Hillman

Writing is medicine. It is an appropriate antidote to injury. It is an appropriate companion for any difficult change.
– Julia Cameron

You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.
– Carolyn Kizer

The final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.
– Anne Frank

They say you don’t know your principles until they become inconvenient to you.
– Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

We cannot become what we want by remaining what we are.
– Max DePree

The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.
– C.S. Lewis

Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conductive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls

The diamond absolutes.

– Seamus Heaney, NORTH

To see things as they are and treat them as they deserve. Don’t overlook this innate ability.
– Marcus Aurelius

You don’t have to think about doing the right thing. If you’re for the right thing, then you do it without thinking.
– Maya Angelou

How do you say a thing at all, at the end of the day? How do you say what’s in your mind? And as soon as you say what you actually have in mind, it’s wrong, isn’t it?
– Ciarán Carson

I have found that fate is as liquid and elusive a word as love. Plato thought they were the same…. Novalis wrote that fate and soul are two names for the same principle. Man’s oldest image of fate is the image of a woman.
– Liz Greene

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, Owning Your Own Shadow

Budgets are moral documents. If we can fund stadiums, tax breaks, and Argentinian bailouts, we can fund classrooms. Every cut to education is a cut to a child’s future.
– Tracey Nance

“Action may not always be happiness,” said the general; ‘but there is no happiness without action.”
– Benjamin Disraeli, Lothair

This is not haiku. This
Is more like fog and we’re
socked in and your body

is invisible and right
across from me
simultaneously.

How much ammo you got?
says one guy to another
in the cola-chip aisle
of the Food Lion.

– Erika Meitner

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people’s religion. And religion may, in a real sense, be understood as a popular misunderstanding of mythology.
– Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That

You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn’t come.
– Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

We shall understand the world when we understand ourselves, because we and it are integral halves.
– Novalis, Logological Fragments I

Investigating pleasure and pain, we see that they are not ours to claim. Pleasure is neither our right nor a reward—just as pain isn’t punishment for our actions.
– Vanessa Zuisei Goddard

And which comes first?… What we see or how we see it?
– Ali Smith, How to Be Both

Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well arranged, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and repeatedly thought over.
– Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims

Hey, With the intention of going to an independent bookstore
with you, both of us fed up with the machinery of capitalism,

consumption, the greed. Hey, with the intention of filling the void
with your smile, your laugh, your kiss beneath the autumn moon.

Hey, with the intention of moving to Montana with you,
writing and painting, inspired by the muse of the mundane,

living a minimalist lifestyle, until they grant us both MacArthur Grants,
and we can afford to fly away to the Moon.

– Jose Hernandez Diaz

THE WAY THROUGH

If we’re going to be honest,
it’s hard to see a pathway out of this.
Empathy might not be dead,
but discord and division have so overgrown
the field, it’s hard to imagine
a way to harvest peace. Of course,
there’s always counting on a miracle.
It works in the movies, although
the truth is clearly that miracles,
by their very nature, are not to
be relied on. Except, of course, that the
caterpillar carries beneath its green skin
tiny fragments of what will become
the monarch butterfly’s wings.
The azure dragonflies you see at play
by any pond or lake or stream
are an echo from 300 million years ago,
when their giant ancestors stormed the skies.
The minerals in your bones aren’t different
than the limestone where those fossils
are found. I’m not saying it’s all
going to be joy and delight.
I’m saying that life
is long, and complicated, and we
belong to a family that has found
a million ways to thrive.

– Lynn Ungar

Target Practice

The tide covers, discovers, recovers, and always walks in the nude.

The tide weaves and unweaves, embraces and separates, is never
the same and never another.

The tide, sculptor of forms that last as long as their surge.

The tide breaks rocks, polishes conchs.

The tide always assaults itself.

The tide, surge of syllables of the interminable word, without
beginning or end, spoken by the moon.

The tide is angry, and on some nights, beating against the rock
coast, it ­announces the end of the world.

The tide, transparency crowned with whitecaps that vanish.

The perpetual tide, the unstable tide, the punctual tide.

The tide and its daggers, its swords, its tattered flags, the
conquered, the victorious.

The tide, green spittle.

The tide, sleeping on the chest of the sun, dreaming of the moon.

The tide, blue and black, green and purple, dressed in the sun and
undressed in the moon, spark of noon and heaving breath of night.

The tide at night, murmur of bare feet on the sand.

The tide, at dawn, opens the eyelids of the day.

The tide breathes in the deep night and, sleeping, speaks in dreams.

The tide that licks the corpses that the coast throws at it.

The tide rises, races, howls, knocks down the door, breaks the
furniture, and then, on the shore, softly weeps.

The tide, madwoman writing indecipherable signs on the rocks,
signs of death.

The sand guards the secrets of the tide.

Who is the tide talking to, all night long?

The tide is honest, and eventually returns all of its drowned.

Storms come and go, the tide remains.

The tide, hard-working washerwoman of the filth that people leave
on the beach.

The tide does not remember where it came from or where it’s going,
lost inits coming and going, between itself, among itself.

There, at the cliffs, the tide closes its fist and threatens the earth and sky.

The tide is immortal, its tomb is a cradle.

The tide, chained to its surge.

The melancholy of the tide under the rain in the vagaries of dawn.

The tide knocks down the trees and swallows the town.

The tide, an oily stain spreading with its millions of dead fish.

The tide, its breasts, its belly, its hips, its thighs, beneath the lips
and between the arms of the wind in heat.

The spring of sweet water leaps from the rocks and falls into the bitter tide.

The tide, mother of gods and goddess herself, the long nights
weeping on the islands of Ionia, the death of Pan.

The tide contaminated with chemical waste, the tide that poisons the planet.

The tide, the living carpet on which the constellations walk on tiptoes.

The tide, lioness whipped into fury by the hurricane, panther tamed
by the moon.

The beggar, the nuisance, the bore: the tide.

Lightning splits the chest of the tide, plunges, disappears, and is
reborn, turned into a little foam.

The yellow tide, the hired mourner and her flock of laments, the
bilious and her wealth in complaints.

The tide: does it walk asleep or awake?

Whispers, laughter, murmurs: the coming and going of the tide in the
coral gardens of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, in the cove
of Unawatuna.

The tide, horizon that drifts off, hypnotist’s mirror that mesmerizes lovers.

The tide with liquid hands opens the deserted lands populated by
the gaze of the contemplative.

The tide lifts these words, rocks them for a moment, and then, with
a swipe, erases them.

– Octavio Paz, Translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger

Well, father, in the shipwreck of life, for life is an eternal shipwreck of our hopes, I cast into the sea my useless encumbrance, that is all, and I remain with my own will, disposed to live perfectly alone, and, consequently, perfectly free. (Eugenie to her father)
– Alexandre Dumas

When we speak of Nature it is wrong to forget that we are ourselves a part of Nature. We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire Universe.
– Henri Matisse

Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth Century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the world, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs.
– Joseph Campbell

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
– Kurt Vonnegut

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tis-sues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

And so on. Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

– Kurt Vonnegut

The modern age, which believes that truth is neither given to nor disclosed to but produced by the human mind, has assigned, since Leibniz, mathematical, scientific, and philosophical truths to the common species of rational truth as distinguished from factual truth. I shall use this distinction for the sake of convenience without discussing its intrinsic legitimacy.

Wanting to find out what injury political power is capable of inflicting upon truth, we look into these matters for political rather than philosophical reasons, and hence can afford to disregard the question of what truth is, and be content to take the word in the sense in which men commonly understand it. And if we now think of factual truths, we at once become aware of how much more vulnerable they are than all the kinds of rational truth taken together. Moreover, since facts and events – the invariable outcome of men living and acting together – constitute the very texture of the political realm, it is, of course, factual truth that we are most concerned with here.

Dominion (to speak Hobbes’ language) when it attacks rational truth oversteps, as it were, its domain, while it gives battle on its own ground when it falsifies or lies away facts. The chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed; it is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever.

Facts and events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries, theories – even the most wildly speculative ones – produced by the human mind; they occur in the field of the ever-changing affairs of men, in whose flux there is nothing more permanent than the admittedly relative permanence of the human mind’s structure. Once they are lost, no rational effort will ever bring them back.”

– Hannah Arendt

Book of Love
by Peter Gabriel

The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It’s full of charts and facts and figures
And instructions for dancing

But I
I love it when you read to me
And you
You can read me anything

The book of love has music in it
In fact that’s where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb

But I
I love it when you sing to me
And you
You can sing me anything

The book of love is long and boring
And written very long ago
It’s full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes
And things we’re all too young to know

But I
I love it when you give me things
And you
You ought to give me wedding rings

And I
I love it when you give me things
And you
You ought to give me wedding rings
You ought to give me wedding rings

The thing which in the waking world comes nearest to a dream is night in a big town, where nobody knows one, or the African night. There too is infinite freedom: it is there that things are going on, destinies are made round you, there is activity to all sides, and it is none of your concern.
– Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

TO A YOUNG NUN

This undemanding love
that our staggered births
have purchased for us –
You in your generation,
I in mine.
I am not the one
you are looking for.
You are not the one
I’ve stopped looking for.
How sweetly time
disposes of us
as we go arm in arm
over the Bridge of Details:
Your turn to chop.
My turn to cook.
Your turn to die for love.
My turn to resurrect.

– Leonard Cohen

Each of us expects to be finished off by injuries or by the years, whereas it would be so simple to put an end to all that. Individuals, like empires, favor a long, shameful end.

– Emil Cioran

It’s satisfying to eat
exactly the right amount
of, say, French toast
and then stop,
for you have just
achieved a moral victory
in the middle
of the flow of time,
and though it flows away,
this victory,
you have its aftertaste,
along with butter
and genuine Vermont maple syrup
from a tree not far down the road.

– Ron Padgett

The very impossibility of some loves brings you close to the mystery, allowing the soul to be initiated by your strong emotions and even your confusion. You are brought to a new level of loving where it is possible to work out the paradox of being a person and being a partner. In Hillman’s version, the pain of love is the discomfort of psychic pregnancy. Love’s Impossibility forces you to become a different person. You are forced to think and consider what love is all about. You believe you have to make hard choices, but, more important, in your
deliberations you are educating yourself.
– Thomas Moore

Many things were forgotten and found again in the ages of Middle-earth, and so it will be, doubtless, hereafter.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

I have found so much beauty in the dark, as I have found a lot of horror in the light.
– Azereth Skivel

So now that all is over,
Let the great stars emerge,
Placid and calm, and cover
The sky from verge to verge!
The deep and flowing magic
Of the universe is such,
Comic be it, or tragic,
It does not matter much!
– John Cowper Powys

I’ve been eating one meal a day for as long as I can remember, and my simple conclusion is that the body needs a lot less food than we’ve been led to believe.
– Nika Solé

If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.
– Epictetus

WANDERING-STANDING
by László Krasznahorkai

I have to leave this place, because this is not where anyone can be, or where it would be worthwhile to remain, because this is the place— with its intolerable, cold, sad, bleak, and deadly weight from where I must escape, to take my suitcase, before everything else the suitcase, two suitcases will be precisely enough, to stuff everything into two suitcases, then click the lock shut so I can dash to the shoemakers, and resoling have resoled, and resoled again, boots are needed, a good pair of boots—in any event one good pair of boots and two suitcases are enough, and with these things we can set off already, inasmuch as we can determine- because this is the first step—exactly where we are right now; well, so a kind of ability is required, practical knowledge is required so we can decide where we are exactly not just some kind of sense of direction, or some mysterious thing residing in the depths of the heart so that in relation to this knowledge, we can then choose the right direction; we need a sense, as if we were grasping some particular sort of orientation device in our hands, a device to help us state: at this point in time, we are here and here in this point in space, located, as it happens, at an intersection that is particularly intolerable, cold, sad, bleak, and deadly, an intersection from which one must leave, because this is not where a person can be, or can remain, a person—in this swampy, disconcertingly dark point in space—can’t do anything else besides say: leave, and leave right now, leave at once without even thinking about it, and don’t look back, just follow the route determined in advance, with one’s gaze fixed firmly ahead, one’s gaze fixed, of course, on the right direction, the choice of which doesn’t seem so agonizingly difficult, unless, of course, it becomes clear that this practical knowledge, this particular sense—as it manages to identify the coordinates of the points extending through sadness and mortality—suddenly states: under “ordinary circumstances” what normally happens is that we say that from here, we have to go in this or that direction, in other words, we say this direction is the right direction, or the complete opposite direction is the correct direction: but there are certain instances, so-called “unordinary circumstances,” when this sense, this practical knowledge, justifiably highly valued, announces that the direction we have chosen is good, it tells us: go right ahead, that’ll be it, this way, fine—and that same sense also simultaneously tells us that the opposite direction is good too, well, and that’s when the state known as wandering-standing sets in, because here is this person, with two heavy suitcases in his hands and a pair of excellently resoled boots, and he can go to

We survived. You and I. And those who survive have a duty. Our duty is to do our best to keep on living. Even if our lives are not perfect.
– Haruki Murakami

The whole problem of life is this: how to break out of one’s own solitude, how to communicate with others.
– Cesare Pavese

I DON’T NEED ANYTHING FROM HERE
by László Krasznahorkai

I would leave everything here: the valleys, the hills, the paths, and the jaybirds
from the gardens, I would leave here the petcocks and the padres, heaven and earth, spring and fall, I would leave here the exit routes, the evenings in the kitchen, the last amorous gaze, and all of the city-bound directions that make you shudder, I would leave here the thick twilight falling upon the land, gravity, hope, enchantment, and tranquillity, I would leave here those beloved and those close to me, everything that touched me, everything that shocked me, fascinated and uplifted me, I would leave here the noble, the benevolent, the pleasant, and the demonically beautiful, I would leave here the budding sprout, every birth and existence, I would leave here incantation, enigma, distances, inexhaustibility, and the intoxication of eternity; for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me from here, because I’ve looked into what’s
coming, and I don’t need anything from here.

Translated, from the Hungarian, by Ottilie Mulzet

Our motive in searching for the cause is the desire to be rid of the effect. This desire is another form of resistance or condemnation, and when there is condemnation, there is no understanding.
– Krishnamurti

You grow to heaven. You don’t go to heaven.

– Edgar Cayce

“We are all strange inside,” writes Cărtărescu in his newest journal. “But only authors know it, for they have seen themselves from within… What I do is describe myself even as the vivisection is taking place, while the scalpel cuts, while the retractor pulls the wound apart.”

Wings are freedom only when they are wide open in flight. On one’s back they are a heavy weight.

– Marina Tsvetaeva

Slow Waltz Through Inflatable Landscape
by Christian Hawkey

At the time of his seeing a hole opened—a pocket opened—
and left a space. A string of numbers plummeted
through it. They were cold numbers.
They were pearls.

And though they were cold the light they cast was warm,
and though they were pearls he thought they were eyes.
They blinked. He blinked back.
Anything that blinks

must be friendly, he thought, until he saw the code
—a string of numbers—carved into their sides
and grew afraid. He tried to close
the space

but it was no longer his own. He tried to close his eyes
but they were no longer his. He tried to close
his mouth, his hands, his ears
but they were no longer

his, were never his to begin with: this was the time of his seeing.
The world opened. A line began. A tree grew above him
and he thanked it. A sun dawned over the line
and he thanked it.

A building unfolded abruptly and blocked the sun
and he put his hand on its side and thanked it
for the shade, he put his hand
on the sidewalk

and gave thanks to the cement—it was cool and wet and
took the shape of his hand into it—he put his eyes
at the feet of a woman
and she lifted them,

to her own, and he thanked her, from the inside, and she understood.
Wires swirled above him, straightened out along an avenue
and the lights came on. One moon rose.
A second moon

rose on the windshield of a car and he thanked them both.
This was the time of his seeing. This was the time.
An electric green beetle shuttled out
of the darkness

and landed on his forearm, pulsing, he didn’t remove it.
It seemed relieved. Some things work very hard
to leave the ground. Somewhere an infant
called out, sharply,

was comforted into silence. The deep note of an owl opened a tunnel
in the air. He was growing tired. He didn’t want to stop.
The world opened.
A line began.

It traveled out ahead of him and returned, tracing a wave,
white foam gathering, gathering the moonlight,
black water rising into a wall
and he held up his hand:

the wall froze, trembling, the head of a seal
poked through, looked around, withdrew,
he liked the way its whiskers
bent forward

as it withdrew and he liked the way his hand had stopped a wave
so he thanked his hand and moved on,
into the outskirts, the taste
of salt on his tongue,

the taste of brine, it made him thirsty although he had no thirst.
This was the time of his seeing. This was the time.
And the skeletal shadow of a radio tower
loomed to the right of him,

creaking, a red gleam, then nothing, he thought he heard music
passing through him and he was right:
he was humming something
from a song,

but he couldn’t remember the words, which was fine,
they were sentimental anyway so he
thanked the radio tower
and kept moving,

the road turning to gravel, the gravel turning to dust,
the ditches sang with frogs, the ditches were silent,
a pair of yellow eyes waited for him
to pass and so he passed,

calmly, since the beetle was with him, trying to refold its wings,
and the tree was with him, unfolding its leaves,
and a man was with him, walking at his side
—he didn’t need to ask

who he was, so he didn’t, but in the corner of his eye
he caught a glimpse: he seemed familiar,
he looked like him
and he was,

although a string of numbers was carved into his side.
He asked if he could touch them and he said Yes,
touch them. They were cold numbers.
They were pearls.

He asked if he could kiss him and he said Yes, kiss me, and so he did.
It was a strange kiss. It was a beautiful kiss.
It seemed to last a long time.
It seemed to last a lifetime.

Often I tried the frightening way of “reality,”
Where things that count are profession, law, fashion, finance.
But disillusioned and freed I fled away alone
To the other side, the place of dreams and blessed folly.
– Hermann Hesse

How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.
– Bram Stoker

Truly we can no longer afford to underestimate the importance of the psychic factor in world affairs.
– CG Jung

Just as waves arising on the surface of water have no independent existence and are only the water itself, so also are manifested phenomena only the apparent created form or body of the Unmanifest.
– Ramesh Balsekar

I am writing this to be as wrong as possible to you. Replace the door when you leave, it says. Now tell me how wrong that is, how long it glows. Tell me.
– Anne Carson

I believe my unconscious knows what I need more than anyone else does. If you allow a dream image into your life when you are sick or having psychological difficulties, it can pull you in a helpful direction.
– Marion Woodman

To be a comfort to you, if only a small comfort, that would be my joy.

– Franz Kafka, 1914

God isolates the chosen ones.
– Rumi

The horror of existence stares us blank in the face and we sense, in one devastating blow, that all souls are hanging by their own web and that a hellish abyss lurks beneath.
– Peter Wessel Zapffe

Horror is closely related to lust.
– Ernst Junger

The only kind of literature that is possible today: a literature that is both critical and creative.
– Italo Calvino

Certain women enter your life and by the laws of her gravity, level you up mind, body, and soul.
– Nika Solé

lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he
encounters.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

I don’t know what to do with what I lived, I’m afraid of that profound disorder.
– Clarice Lispector

You cannot leave a mess behind and go beyond, it will pull you back.
– Nisargadatta

east or west
the same beauty
autumn wind

– Basho

I remember waking at a certain point and feeling as if the four walls of books around me were like my very own Egyptian tomb; that I was, in a sense, already dead.

– Ian Penman

Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.

– @naval

Teaching is more a way for the teacher to learn than for the student to learn.
– @naval

Lessons are unlikely to stick unless they are repeated.

Behaviors are unlikely to stick unless they are repeated.

Love is unlikely to stick unless it is repeated.

The practice solidifies.

– James Clear

Once you realize that the pure consciousness that is listening right now is your true nature,

You are free.

– Nisargadatta

If we can teach our children to look at each person they meet as themselves, and part of God – struggle, superiority and a desire to hurt others will disappear.
– Neale Donald Walsch

Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
– C.S. Lewis

According to Sumerian mythology, the flood was the punishment the gods inflicted on man because of the noise he made. —What would I not give to know how they will reward him for today’s racket?
– Emil Cioran

If the private sphere seeps too much into the public domain, everyone ends up diminished and not knowing where to find exemplars.
– Pico Iyer

What if studying micro memoirs could unlock something for you too—whether or not you’re writing in that form?
– Bethany Jarmul

At the California Institute of Technology
by Richard Brautigan

I don’t care how God-damn smart
these guys are: I’m bored.

It’s been raining like hell all day long
and there’s nothing to do.

The eager note on my door said “Call me,
call when you get in!”

– Frank O’Hara

I have been popping corn tonight, which is only a more rapid blossoming of the seed under a greater than July heat. The popped corn is a perfect winter flower, hinting of anemones and houstonias. For this little grace man
has, mixed in with the vulgarness of his repast, he may well thank his stars.
– Thoreau

Last night the stars
were numerous and today
snow is their calling
card I’ll not be cordial
– Frank O’Hara

The strongest form of punishment is not revenge, it’s evolution. Grow so far, so fast, and so deliberately that they no longer feel qualified to speak your name without being reminded they were outpaced while they played games.
– @UnmodernmanBot

Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
– Henry Miller

Unless sounds are remembered by man, they perish. For they cannot be written down.
– Isidore of Seville

There are seasons that ask for full send and others that ask for full surrender, and you have to master both.
– Nika Solé

The threat of real scarcity on the horizon is brought to us by unbridled capitalism. Extraction and consumption outstrip the capacity of the Earth to replenish what we have taken,
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

Everyday you become better at what you don’t do.

Now read that again.

– @moveorperish

I was burning, while you came blaming me for the smell of ashes.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

In most cases men willingly believe what they wish.
– Julius Caesar

You are ever praising the past, yet you live day by day in a round of novelty.
– Tertullian

Not to write like a hammer to a nail,
or a nail in the word. But to write
like the memory of the tree.
The tree remembering the rain.
To write the rain. To read the wood.
– Sean Thomas Dougherty

May you find what you are searching for, my friend.
– I already have and lost it in the finding.
– Jack Higgins

Free speech is not the cause of the tensions that are growing around us, but the only possible solution to them.
– Roger Scruton

I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.
– Virginia Woolf

Memory of My Father
by Patrick Kavanagh

Every old man I see
In October-coloured weather
Seems to say to me
`I was once your father’.

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.

– Sandra Carey

Don’t look for me in a human
shape, I am inside your looking.

– Rumi

How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?
– J. M. Coetzee

The writer is the exemplary sufferer because he has found both the deepest level of suffering and also a professional means to sublimate his suffering. As a man, he suffers; as a writer, he transforms his suffering into art. The writer is the man who discovers the use of suffering in the economy of art — as the saints discovered the utility and necessity of suffering in the economy of salvation.
– Susan Sontag

Perfection is inhuman. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love – and I mean love, not lust–is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person peaks through, say, ‘This is a challenge to my compassion.
– Joseph Campbell

I love those who yearn for the impossible.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When you follow somebody, you have destroyed your own thought; you have lost your independence and your freedom – politically, but much more psychologically; outwardly, but much more inwardly.
– Krishnamurti

Compassion is the primary attitude that assists the awakening to reality.
– Karuna Cayton

Are we done yet? Future historians have all the forensic evidence they need to know our culture and era was one of the most absurd times in documented human history.
– Clifton Lee

Did worry ever help to solve any problem? It is born of confused thinking. Form the habit of clear thinking always, and laugh away your troubles and sorrows.
– Maharaj Jagat Singh Ji

Western notions of Buddhism have stripped it of its supernatural, ritual, and material culture, unless, of course, it’s associated with philosophically aligned canonical texts, monks, or mindfulness.
– Susanne Kerekes

To suppose that certain yoga exercises will lead you to salvation, to understanding, to God, truth or wisdom, is sheer nonsense.
– Krishnamurti

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.
– Oscar Wilde

An entire mythology is stored within our language.
– Wittgenstein

Did they see me coming, these ancestors of mine? Could they have imagined a descendant like me, navigating job loss and reinvention in a digital world of social media, artificial intelligence, and climate change?
– Daisy Lin

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
– G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World

Discernment is like a spiritual antenna. It’s that inner radar in your spirit that picks up what your natural mind can’t immediately explain. When you encounter something that’s not aligned with truth, love, or peace – your spirit senses it before your mind can name it.
– Mel Crossman

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When you try to ignore something or push it away, it actually seems to have a larger and more unrelenting presence. But when you turn toward and pay attention to the discomfort, it loses power over you.
– Susan Bauer-Wu

Do it now. It is not safe to leave a generous feeling to the cooling influences of the world.
– Thomas Guthrie

You have as much laughter as you have faith.
– Martin Luther

When corruption is the very foundation of a regime, those who battle it are extremists.
– Alexei Navalny

School is not important. Work is not important. Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.
– Fred Hampton

The welfare of each is bound up in the welfare of all.
– Helen Keller

If you have a question about the universe, you always have a few possibilities—in particular through language. The power of the word is, for me, the only way to get closer to this hidden reality.
– László Krasznahorkai

Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.
– Rebecca Solnit

We must all stand up and speak out.
– JB Pritzker

Yeah we all shine on, like the moon, and the stars, and the sun.
– John Lennon

If you love it enough, you’ll do it anyway and you’ll take what comes with it.
– Taylor Swift

Only the lost, find, To be sure, takes out the fun, Go where questions shriek.
– Nathaniel Rochester

I haven’t spoken to my wife in years. I didn’t want to interrupt her.
– Rodney Dangerfield

They are still burning us at the stake, but the pyre is our entire country.
– @tiffsawitch

There is no greater mystery than this,
that being the reality, we seek to gain reality.
We think that there is something hiding our reality
and that it must be destroyed
before the reality is gained.
It is ridiculous.

A day will dawn when you will yourself
laugh at your past efforts.
That which will be on the day you laugh
is also here and now.

– Ramana Maharishi

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
– Carl Sagan

You can’t accuse someone of being s traitor just because they have a better vocabulary than you.
– Alan Carr

Many will call me an adventurer – and that I am, only one of a different sort: one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes.
– Che Guevara

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances.
– Lin Yutang

Lady Lazarus
by Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?—

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there–

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

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

Why is self-control, autonomy, such a threat to authority? Because the person who controls himself, who is his own master, has no need for an authority to be his master. This, then, renders authority unemployed.
– Thomas Szasz

Our words come out sounding like a solemn declaration of fact, as though the emotions we’re describing are substantial, permanent, and unchanging, when they might be none of these things.
– Suli Qyre

Lesson

Because what is outer is inner
there is no outer
there is no inner –
I am trying to get this straight
And what the long sentence
assembled
by cemetery sparrows said
before my presence
arrived
dispersing them in its brief
wake, oh
wordless endless.

– Franz Wright

Ode to Everything
by Major Jackson

Somehow I have never thought
to thank the ice cream cone
for building a paradise in my mouth,
and can you believe I have never
thought to thank the purple trout lily
for demonstrating its six-petaled dive
or the yellow circle in a traffic light
for illustrating patience. My bad.
In my life, I have failed to praise
the postman whose loyalty is epic,
the laundress who treasures my skinny jeans
and other garments, and the auto repairman
who clangs a wrench inside my car tightening
her own music. Were my name called and I
were summoned on a brightly lit stage to accept
a little statuette, after staring in utter
disbelief, I would thank my dentist
as well as my neighbor who sits vigil
beside the dying far away from the lights,
and my fourth grade teacher who brought
down three-taped rulers on my hands
as punishment for daydreaming out a window
during an exam I already completed. Mea culpa.
Now that I know the value of the peaks
across from Flanders Hill, I will also perennially express
reverence for their green crowns.
I will never fail again to say small devotions for
the scar on a friend’s face that lengthens
when I walk into a room.

I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing (Though I may write about cabmen. That’s no matter.) But warm, eager, living life — to be rooted in life — to learn, to desire, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.
– Katherine Mansfield

Give up all working for a future, concentrate totally on the now, be concerned only with your response to every movement of life as it happens.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Late Wonders
My face is now gone.
Instead, I have a hawk’s face.
None of the poets
notice, they only want fame.
Fame is a bucket of eyes.
– Victoria Chang

A kind of time.
An implacable placement in
felt time diminish. Dots on a paper
of silk to decipher, waving tongs over a net
to seal the stars. Our fates are to motion
as sand is to shoe.
– Clark Coolidge

Whatever happens, I can derive some benefit from it.
– Epictetus

There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they may solve only in part. Believe me, we are now on the verge of one.

– Van Helsing, Bram Stoker

…the blurb thing. I just loathe it. They want to cover the whole back of the book with junk from other’s people’s bad language about what I wrote, and it just drives me crazy [. ..] with the next one I want to have a blank book. This is my aim. Nothing.
– Anne Carson

2 percent of your genetic code is the hardware. You can’t do anything about that, but 98 percent of it is the software. That’s how your genes operate, and you can do something. You can change how your genes activate. You can turn up or turn down your predisposition.
– James Longman

Good fiction is partly a bringing of the news from one world to another.
– Raymond Carver

A bad man, happy, is a man without the least inkling that his actions do not ‘answer’, that they are not in accord with the laws of the universe.
– C.S. Lewis

By meditating, we’re learning to disengage ourselves from habitual clinging.
– Lama Surya Das

the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood,
that poetry, by which I lived?

– Galway Kinnell

There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.
– @naval

Who you think you are will always be frightened of change. But it doesn’t make any difference to who you truly are.
– Ram Dass

The impossibility of imagining something they might correspond to, the impossibility of finding some substitute for what in visions they embrace, all this weighs on one like a judgement given one knows not where, by whom, or why.

– Fernando Pessoa

You must achieve liberation during your life time. Even if you fail to do it during your lifetime, you must think of God at least at the time of death, since one becomes what he thinks of at the time of death.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi

I don’t think poems have to have easy translation. I believe strongly in emotional and psychological narratives.
– Carl Phillips

The mind gives up before the body.
– @naval

Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconscious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell…
– McLuhan

Once you learn patience, your options suddenly expand.
– Robert Greene

Walking this path –
I choose one patch of sunlight
after another

– Mitsu Suzuki

Let Me Fall
by Josh Groban

Let me fall, let me climb
There’s a moment when fear and dream must collide
Someone I am is waiting for courage
The one I want, the one I will become will catch me

So let me fall if I must fall
I won’t heed your warnings, I won’t hear them
Let me fall if I fall
Though the phoenix may or may not rise

I will dance so freely, holding on to no one
You can hold me only if you too will fall
Away from all these useless fears and shame

Someone I am is waiting for my courage
The one I want, the one I will become will catch me
So let me fall if I must fall
I won’t heed your warning, I won’t hear
Let me fall if I fall
There’s no reason to miss this one chance
This perfect moment just let me fall

I want to break out – to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become.
– Thomas Pynchon

I beg you, give me something. Do something for me. Tell me some word that will make me be born again. Feed me. I am dead, dead, dead! I don’t even have the strength to desire anymore. Make something happen to me.
– Hélène Cixous

It’s hard to remember an illness because it’s just a lot of nothing. It’s very hard to make it into a shape.
– Susanna Clarke

In the bloodiest times / There are still good people.

– Bertolt Brecht

Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me. Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.
– Louise Erdrich

Language, the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in the sense of outward audible sounds but by virtue of the power and momentum of its inward flow.
– Boris Pasternak

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

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

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

– Dorothy Walters

It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.
– Randall Jarrell

Somewhere in the
night a
human being is
drowning.

– Marina Tsvetaeva

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
– Norman Maclean

We are like some particle in motion always moving and meeting other particle.
– Santosh Kalwar, That’s My Love Story

I would leave everything here: the valleys, the hills, the paths, and the jaybirds from the gardens, I would leave here the petcocks and the padres, heaven and earth, spring and fall, I would leave here the exit routes, the evenings in the kitchen, the last amorous gaze, and all of the city-bound directions that make you shudder, I would leave here the thick twilight falling upon the land, gravity, hope, enchantment, and tranquility, I would leave here those beloved and those close to me, everything that touched me, everything that shocked me, fascinated and uplifted me, I would leave here the noble, the benevolent, the pleasant, and the demonically beautiful, I would leave here the budding sprout, every birth and existence, I would leave here incantation, enigma, distances, inexhaustibility, and the intoxication of eternity; for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me from here, because I’ve looked into what’s coming, and I don’t need anything from here.
– László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite.
– Simone de Beauvoir

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I am at this instant in a white void awaiting the next instant. Measuring time is just a working hypothesis. But whatever exists is perishable and this forces us to measure immutable and permanent time. It never began and never will end. Never.
– Clarice Lispector

It is easy to imagine something perfect, and difficult to achieve it. Imagination marries desire, and conceives much more than things really are.
– Baltasar Gracián

During this degenerate age, irreversible faith cannot surface without serious study, thorough contemplation, and diligent meditation practice.
– Khenpo Sodargye

He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least.
– Kazuo Ishiguro

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

One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.
– Ryan Holiday

The shadow disguises itself in our projections, when we react intensely to a trait in others that we fail to see in ourselves.
– Connie Zweig and Steven Wolf, Romancing the Shadow

The earth thrummed with the movements of people eating, people waiting. All kinds of melodies and voices intermingled, accented at intervals by the onslaught of a roller coaster rushing overhead.
– Mieko Kawakami

To see danger is intelligence. And to see the danger of fear so completely is also intelligence. Therefore, it is intelligence that acts and sets you free from fear.
– Krishnamurti

Screaming felt like the only thing I could do to get through the day sometimes.
– Danielle LaRock

I say it again: we make things holy by the kind of attention we give them. In a time when we are begging for a new story, it may be the stories we need are supporting us right now, if only we would lower our gaze.
– Martin Shaw

Worrying about your reflection, and criticizing your body, shape, and size, is an act of violence against yourself.
– Emma Thompson

We chase freedom
only to miss its quiet disguise—
it never waited at the gates,
but inside the cage we built.
– Pelle Martens

Don’t let the sun go down without saying thank you to someone, and without admitting to yourself that absolutely no one gets this far alone.
– Stephen King

Great tranquility of heart is his who cares for neither praise nor blame.
– Thomas a’ Kempis

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.
– Baruch Spinoza

Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you.
– Mother Teresa

In the presence of a man who does not pray, theology loses its powers.
– Jacques Ellul

I am endeavoring to live every day as if it were a complete life.
– Seneca

We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody too.
– Helen Hayes

The deepest form of slavery is the hunger for being understood
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Questioning in a meditative way doesn’t demand an answer. We come to this art of inquiry with an attitude of openheartedness. We familiarize ourselves with silence, because wise questions and fruitful responses arise out of silence.
– Narayan Helen Liebenson

Become a possibilitarian. No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see possibilities — always see them, for they’re always there.
– Norman Vincent Peale

The best way to minimize risk is to think.
– Warren Buffett

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.
– Roberto Bolaño

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
– John Updike

You know, in high school if you didn’t believe in Science or History, it was just called failing.
– Michelle Wolf

May the space between where you are and where you want to be inspire you.
– Morgan Harper Nichols

The faster we travel, the less there is to see.
– Helen Hayes

The time will come when the people in their fury will straighten their bent backs and bring down the structure with one mighty push of their shoulders.
– The Pyramid of Capitalist System, 1911

What is the bravest thing you’ve ever said? asked the boy.
’Help,’ said the horse.
’Asking for help isn’t giving up,’ said the horse. ‘It’s refusing to give up.’

– Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

I love America the way I love my family – I was born into it. And there’s no escape out of it.
– Ta-Nehisi Coates

Those who dared to speak out against the injustices in this country, both Black and white, have paid dearly for their courage, sometimes with their lives.
– Assata Shakur

You can be standing stark raving still, and life will still happen to you.
– J. California Cooper

If anyone is magically going to appear and suddenly make your life better, just know that person is always going to be you.
– Brianna Pastor

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
– Harold Pinter

But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.
– Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here

How could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened.
– Samwise Gamgee

One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

To rest, go to the woods where what is made is made without your thought or work.
– Wendell Berry

The dharma, whether it is sutra, tantra, mahamudra, or dzogchen, is like pure gold. No matter how many other metals that mix with it, pure gold can always be extracted. Likewise, any culture can easily absorb the dharma, whether it is in ancient Tibet or the modern day West, as the dharma is beyond culture, time, and place.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche

I’ve learned not to hold people hostage to who they used to be. We all carry versions of ourselves that no longer fit—the mistakes we made, the things we didn’t know, the pain we caused when we didn’t yet understand our own.

I’ve seen how easily someone can be reduced to their worst moment, how quickly a past version becomes the only version others choose to remember. But the truth is, people outgrow their old skin. They stumble, they learn, and if life allows, they try to do better. We all have chapters we wish we could rewrite. That doesn’t mean we haven’t earned the right to start a new one.

I’ve watched friends become softer, more patient. I’ve seen people who once lived in chaos become anchors for others. Growth isn’t always loud or dramatic—it’s often quiet, steady, unglamorous. But it’s real. And when we dismiss someone for who they were, we miss out on who they’ve worked so hard to become.

No one should be permanently defined by a version of themselves they’ve already outgrown. We’re all in motion, figuring things out, trying again. And if we can give that grace to ourselves, we should be willing to offer it to others too.

– Michael Naylor

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

ADVICE TO MYSELF #2: RESISTANCE
by Louise Erdrich

Resist the thought that you may need a savior,
or another special being to walk beside you.
Resist the thought that you are alone.
Resist turning your back on the knife
of the world’s sorrow,
resist turning that knife upon yourself.
Resist your disappearance
into sentimental monikers,
into the violent pattern of corporate logos,
into the mouth of the unholy flower of consumerism.
Resist being consumed.
Resist your disappearance
into anything except
the face you had before you walked up to the podium.
Resist all funding sources but accept all money.
Cut the strings and dismantle the web
that needing money throws over you.
Resist the distractions of excess.
Wear old clothes and avoid chain restaurants.
Resist your genius and your own significance
as declared by others.
Resist all hint of glory but accept the accolade
as tributes to your double.
Walk away in your unpurchased skin.
Resist the millionth purchase and go backward.
Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book —
maybe the book you give away.
Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.
Resist all pressure to have children
unless you crave the torment of joy.
If you give in to irrationality, then
resist cleaning up the messes your children make.
You are robbing them of small despairs they can fix.
Resist cleaning up after your husband.
It will soon replace having sex with him.
Resist outrageous charts spelling doom.
However you can, rely on sun and wind.
Resist loss of the miraculous
by lowering your standards
for what constitutes a miracle.
It is all a fucking miracle.
Resist your own gift’s power
to tear you away from the simplicity of tears.
Your gift will begin to watch you having your emotions,
so that it can use them in an interesting paragraph,
or to get a laugh.
Resist the blue chair of dreams, the red chair of science, the black chair of the humanities, and just be human.
Resist all chairs.
Be the one sitting on the ground
or perching on the beam overhead
or sleeping beneath the podium.
Resist disappearing from the stage,
unless you can walk straight into the bathroom and resume the face,
the desolate face, the radiant face, the weary face, the face
that has become your own, though all your life
you have resisted it.

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

All conservative ideologies justify existing inequities as the natural order of things, inevitable outcomes of human nature. If the very rich are naturally so much more capable than the rest of us, why must they be provided with so many artificial privileges under the law, so many bailouts, subsidies and other special considerations – at our expense? Their “naturally superior talents” include unprincipled and illegal subterfuge such as price-fixing, stock manipulation, insider training, fraud, tax evasion, the legal enforcement of unfair competition, ecological spoliation, harmful products and unsafe work conditions. One might expect naturally superior people not to act in such rapacious and venal ways. Differences in talent and capacity as might exist between individuals do not excuse the crimes and injustices that are endemic to the corporate business system.
– Michael Parenti

Some of the worst tyrannies of our day genuinely are “vowed” to the service of mankind, yet can function only by pitting neighbor against neighbor. The all-seeing eye of a totalitarian regime is usually the watchful eye of the next-door neighbor.
– Eric Hoffer

Sentiment

Whatever it was in plain sight
gave me fresh heart, if, nonetheless
it could not, being nature, give me rest.
soon it will be far away, outside.

Ill go without it then, this glow,
this ringing of the sounds and of the colors,
and with a passion sing of it. Somehow, as if
what’s missing left me with a mystery,
its absence makes me love it all twice over.

Once you have seen it with your inward eye,
a beautiful thing spreads beauty all around.
To dote on it, or want it back again, is wrong.
It walks along with you, kept well in mind.

– Robert Walser (translated by Christopher Middleton)

How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above.
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?
– Robert Browning

Being on the left is, like being on the right, one of the infinite ways that man can choose to be an imbecile: both, in effect, are forms of Moral Hemiplegia.
– José Ortega y Gasset

I am a lover without a
lover. I am lovely and
lonely and I belong
deeply to myself.
– Warsan Shire

I originally coined the term spiritual bypassing in 1984, to describe a common tendency I discovered among Western spiritual seekers to use spiritual ideas and practices to avoid dealing with their emotional unfinished business.
– John Welwood

Between too early and too late lies always only a moment.
– Franz Werfel

There’s only one of us here: What we give to others, we give to ourselves. What we withhold from others, we withhold from ourselves. In any moment, when we choose fear instead of love, we deny ourselves the experience of Paradise.
– Marianna Williamson

Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.
– Eric Hoffer

To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good. But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete: and a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.
– C.S. Lewis

I read through everything I wrote and I feel very disappointed. But what can I do. I wrote it. It’s there.
– Chantal Akerman

You say, “I must control my mind.”
But who is the controller?
It is still the mind playing both roles in its own drama.

– Jiddu Krishnamurti

As with all cities, there was an atmosphere of depression and unnameable sorrow in contrast to the light of the evening, and the artificial gaiety was even more sorrowful.
– Krishnamurti

Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth.
– Erich Fromm

Education is what most receive, many pass on, and few possess.
– Karl Kraus

You, poetry
incarnate, must
know, after all, that
your very
name is a poem.

– Marina Tsvetaeva

Again space is full of voices, the entire body has become heart.
– Hélène Cixous

All the self-examination that we do is valuable only as an introduction to our real selves as we live in the world. I firmly believe that none of us can be, or should be, so self-involved that the external world pales in importance in comparison with the inner world.
– June Singer

A hunted man sometimes wearies of distrust and longs for friendship.

– Strider (Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring)

No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.
– Lily Tomlin

a caterpillar
still not a butterfly
deep autumn

– Basho

Sometimes you have to hard reset your relationships. Some of them will survive it. Others won’t.
– Nika Solé

Life is very short in this body and all of the things you’re going through will soon come to an end.

If you have not made any spiritual headway
you will be under the delusion of karma.
And you will return again and again in a delusory body form …

– Robert Adams

I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. These two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
– George Carlin

Don’t remind the world it is suffering. Remind the world it is beautiful.
– Mooji

Almost every facet of my meager maturation and spiritual understanding has sprung from hurt, loss, and disaster.
– Anne Lamott

The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it.
– Henri J.M. Nouwen

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.
– Eckhart Tolle

I am convinced that most people do not grow up … our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.
– Maya Angelou

The people on the right make me hate the right, the people on the left make me hate the left. In fact, with a man of the right, I am on the left; with a man of the left, I am on the right.
– Emil Cioran

Even now I have a huge resistance to getting to work, perhaps because my body knows how exhausting and shaming it’s going to be. I don’t want to go through the shame and the exhaustion!
– Deborah Eisenberg

As a general rule, the more immediate pleasure you get from an action, the more strongly you should question whether it aligns with your “long-term” goals.
– James Clear

We can’t save the past or solve the riddle of love. But to me, it’s worth trying.
– Diane Keaton

No one, no one knows what it is
But for centuries we have longed for it
– Anna Akhmatova

We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear—unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called ‘the insolence of elected persons’—in a word, free men.
– Gerald W. Johnson, American Freedom and the Press

There really can be no peace without justice. There can be no justice without truth. And there can be no truth, unless someone rises up to tell you the truth.
– Louis Farrakhan

I wear the coat of a cynic only to conceal the heart of an agitated otter.
– Nick Davies

The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual.
– Carl Jung

We have the money, the power, the medicine, the science, the love, and the community to produce a human paradise. But we are led by the least among us, the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary.
– Terence McKenna

Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head.
– Mike Rich

The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.
– James Baldwin

You enter the forest
at the darkest point,
where there is no path.

Where there is a way or path,
it is someone else’s path.
You are not on your own path.

If you follow someone else’s way,
you are not going to realize
your potential.

– Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey

No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn’t know it.
– Paulo Coelho

I myself believe that poetry is the only “self-help” that works.
– Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why

That Which Is Brahman Is verily Shakti.
Address That as The Mother.
Call It Brahman when It is inactive, and
Shakti when It creates, preserves and destroys.
It is like water, sometimes still
and sometimes covered with waves.

– Ramakrishna

I do not wish to die either young or mad.
– Cyril Connolly

The world is not composed of people who hate each other; it is composed of people who fear each other.
– Manly P. Hall

Every tyrant fears a thinker more than an army.
– Voltaire

The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees the truth *while it’s true* but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.
– Neal Stephenson

There are many paths to enlightenment.
Be sure to take the one with a heart.
– Lao Tzu

Let your eye live and grow in God, and your soul will never shrivel. You can count on it to keep you alive…awake…tender.
– Hildegard of Bingen

Make sure that you are consuming content that is aligned with the goals that you are trying to achieve and manifest.
– Natalie Grace Smith

…To my mind there are no advantages and many disadvantages in lectures compared with reading.
– Charles Darwin

I had learned that you should always shout louder than your aggressor.
– Marjane Satrapi

Idleness does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class.
– Robert Louis Stevenson

Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the deep with the same feelings that you do those of the shore.
– Herman Melville

As the digital mass liquefies into undifferentiated slop, when everyone becomes no one, when flesh is feed, the author retreats behind the image while the work must advance. This is the inversion. As identity cheapens, content carries the entire weight. Quality becomes the sole currency in an economy where the creator has already been spent. And yet, everything seems to be getting worse in general.
– D Hartnett

The shrieking of the demons is the stillness of the spirit.

It means a withdrawal unheard of, until one hears the great silence

– C.G. Jung

If work was a good thing, the rich would have it all and not let you do it.

– Elmore Leonard

Writers are not, by nature, respectable: their function is to be subversive.
– Anthony Burgess

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be — and behind them… there is nothing.
– Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

The thought is the thinker. There is no one behind it. The thought is thinking itself. It comes uninvited. You will see that when there is a strong detachment from the thought process, thoughts don’t last long.
– Joseph Goldstein

Jung recounts that his intense study of mythologies forced him to conclude that without a myth, a human “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.
– Lance Owens

Humanity may endure the loss of everything: all its possessions may be torn away without infringing its true dignity — all but the possibility of improvement.
– Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of the Scholar

The vital thing that Jung has discovered for us is that we have lost our sense of soul because we have lost our respect for symbols; our modern mind is trained that symbols are illusion. We say, “It is only your imagination,” not realizing that all the missing parts of ourselves that we long for, the “lost lane into heaven,” are constantly mediated to us in the forgotten language of the soul: the symbols and images that emanate through dream and imagination.
– Robert A. Johnson

A poem’s beauty tells us precisely if and how our attention during its writing was directed to the ineffable.
– Simone Weil

It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.
– Roger Ebert

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive manifestations of their aggressiveness.
– Sigmund Freud

Every viewpoint is a view from a point. Unless we recognize and admit our own personal and cultural viewpoints, we will never know how to decentralize our own perspective, and we will live with a high degree of illusion and blindness, a blindness that brings much suffering into the world. I think this is what Simone Weil meant in saying “the love of God is the source of all truth.” Only an outer and positive reference point utterly grounds the mind, or the heart, for that matter.
– Richard Rohr

Depression is your body saying, ‘I don’t want to be this character anymore. I don’t want to hold up this avatar that you’ve created in the world. It’s too much for me.’ You should think of the word ‘depressed’ as ‘deep rest’. Your body needs to be depressed. It needs deep rest from the character you’ve been trying to play.
– Jim Carrey

Love is impotent
though mutual
because it is
not aware that
it is but the
desire to be One
which leads us to
the impossibility of
establishing the
relationship between
‘them-two’.

– Jacques Lacan

I think people who are unhappy are always proud of being so, and therefore do not like to be told that there is nothing grand about their unhappiness. A man who is melancholy because lack of exercise has upset his liver always believes that it is the loss of God, or the menace of communism, or some such dignified cause that makes him sad. When you tell people that happiness is, in reality, usually a simple matter, they get annoyed with you.
– Bertrand Russell

From time to time, we hear physicists claim that Einstein didn’t understand Quantum Mechanics and therefore wasted his time with naive classical theories. I very much doubt that this is true. His arguments against Quantum Mechanics were extremely subtle, culminating in one of the most profound and most cited papers in all of physics.¹ My guess is that Einstein was disturbed by the same thing that bothered the slow student. How could the ultimate theory of reality be about nothing more concrete than our own degree of surprise at the outcome of an experiment?
– Leonard Susskind

The interesting thing about
capitalism is that it’s entirely
incompatible with the future, so
we’ve just decided to get rid of the
future and keep capitalism for a
short while.

– @ecomarxi

Awareness of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.
– Socrates

Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.
– Gore Vidal

Orion, the Pleiades,
all red dirt in the end.
The story of our lives,
so short, so analogous,
Spreads open, empty, silent,
No matter what clothes we put on.
Fills the air. I’m still here.
As twilight tightens, air

– Charles Wright

The music that is inside me.
The music that is in silence, in possibility
May it come and amaze me.
– Paul Valery

And ever living queens that grow not old
And poets wise in robes of faerie gold
Whisper a wild, sweet song that first was told
Ere God sat down to make the Milky Way.
And in those gardens we shall sleep and play
For ever and for ever and a day.

– C.S. Lewis

Our practical projects have run into confusion again and again through failure to see that individual people, nations, animals, insects, and plants do not exist in or by themselves. This is not to say only that things exist in relation to one another, but that what we call “things” are no more than glimpses of a unified process.
– Alan Watts

From the outside, you seem mature with philosopher’s mind. But inside, you’re just a child lost in a sweet delusion.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

APPETITE

I eat these
wild red raspberries
still warm from the sun
and smelling faintly of jewelweed
in memory of my father

tucking the napkin
under his chin and bending
over an ironstone bowl
of the bright drupelets
awash in cream

my father
with the sigh of a man
who has seen all and been redeemed
said time after time
as he lifted his spoon

men kill for this.

– Maxine Kumin

Give up the notion that ‘I am so and so’. All that is required to realize the Self is to be still. Your duty is to be, and not to be this or that. ‘I am that I am’ sums up the whole truth. The method is summed up in the words ‘Be still’.
– Ramana Maharshi

If you mean to act nobly, and seek to know the best things which God hath put within the reach of men, you must fix your mind on that end, and not on what will happen to you because of it.
– George Eliot

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
– Aldous Huxley

bell hooks would tell us: fight fascism not with fury alone, but with love engineered as infrastructure. Tenderness is the counter-refinery.

There is an old saying…. “They blame the man who is silent, they blame the man who speaks too much, and they blame the man who speaks too little.” No one can escape blame in this world.”
– The Dhammapada, 500 BCE

Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.
– Napoleon Bonaparte

Grief is not a disorder, a disease, or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical, and spiritual necessity, the price we pay for love, and the only cure for grief is grieving.

– Rabbi Earl Gollman

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.
– Pericles, 430 B.C.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.
– Emile M. Cioran

In order to understand I destroyed myself.
– Fernando Pessoa

People constantly speak of ‘the government’ doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men.
– H.L. Mencken

We’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.
– Ramsey Clark

I think white Americans have not learned what it means to have enough.
– Nikki Giovanni

Whether we can save democracy – or not – depends on you, what you do today. What we collectively do today matters.
– Maria Ressa

Acting is in everything but the words.
– Stella Adler

…really, he didn’t want to be a nuisance to anyone, nor would he, he decided, be a nuisance, then sat down on the bed, got up again, went over to the window, then sat back down on the bed once more, before getting up again, and so it went on for several minutes, since the feeling of joy continued welling up in him, overwhelming him, so time and again he had to sit down or stand up and eventually achieved complete happiness by pulling the table ever so gently over to the window, turning it so the light should fall fully on it, drew up the chair, then sat on the bed and stared at the table, at the arrangement of it, stared and stared, gauging whether the light was falling on it in the best possible way, then turning the chair a little so that it was at a different angle to the table, so it should fit better, staring at that now, and it was plain that the happiness was almost too much for him, for he now had somewhere to live, a place with a table and a chair, because he was happy that Mr. Sárváry existed in the first place, and that he should have this apartment on the top floor of 547 West 159th Street, right next to the stairs to the attic, and without the resident’s name on the door.
– László Krasznahorkai

So that’s it. I ought to have seen. She’s wondering- what will become of me? That’s what everyone goes through life wondering, probably, the one absorbing anguish. What will become of me? Me.
– Margaret Laurence

when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among
the ten thousand things,
each scratched too late with such knowledge,
the wages of dying is love.
– Galway Kinnell

Passion is a feeling that follows action. It tends to be created or discovered, not predicted or planned. You don’t find your passion. It finds you as you get in the mix and try things.
– James Clear

Your body contains sequenced memories of trauma or joy, and inherited behaviors and patternings that influence and direct the intuitive choices you make. These traces of culture, background, upbringing, environment and experience are both a guide and a useful limit to your work.
– Jonathan Burrows, The Choreographer’s Handbook

Fascism is not to be debated, it is to be destroyed!
– BUENAVENTURA DURRUTI

– Mark Bray, Antifa

Our life is woven wind.

– Joseph Joubert

“What are we born for?”

“For infinite happiness,” said the Spirit. “You can step out into it at any moment.”

– C.S. Lewis

Is there something worthy of perpetuation in our Indian spirit of democracy, where Earth, our mother, was free to all, and no one sought to impoverish or enslave his neighbor?
– Ohiyesa

Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.
– Dwight Eisenhower

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

How do you know that you are on your path – because it disappears. That’s how you know. How do you know that you are really doing something radical? Because you can’t see where you are going. That’s how you know. And everything you have lent on for your identity has gone. And so you are going to enter the black contemplative splendors of self-doubt, at the same time as you are setting out on this radical new path.
– David Whyte

Record store people and bookstore people are the same people in a different font.
– Grace Murphy

Don’t call it ego when I choose myself — call it recovery.
– Venard West

Love makes you an anthropologist of your own life.
– Anne Carson

Every ideology is a mental murder, a reduction of dynamic living processes to static classifications, and every classification is a Damnation, just as every inclusion is an exclusion.
– Robert Anton Wilson

We’re anti-fascist, we’re anti-violence, we’re anti-racist and we’re procreative.
– Joe Strummer

First you make your habits, then your habits make you!
– Lucas Remmerswaal

Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost.
– Roberto Bolano

It is serious playfulness, a combination of concern and humility, which makes it possible to be both engaged and carefree at the same time. One does not need to win to feel content — helping to maintain order in the universe becomes its own reward, regardless of the consequences.
– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Yoga and writing, I’ve found, both depend on a delicate balance between structure and freedom, will and surrender.
– Anne Cushman

Memories are the safeguards we use to keep from making the same mistakes.
– Jodi Picoult, Wish You Were Here

How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense.
– Franz Kafka

It didn’t occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That’s how one has to write anyway—in secret.
– Louise Erdrich

Education isn’t for employment.

Education is for enlightenment.

– James Clear

Through the orifice of silence, the whole geyser of Bliss, perpetually shoots up and flows over the soul.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

Zora Neale Hurston said fear is the greatest emotion and I said, No my dear sister. Fear will make us move to save our own skins. Love also makes us save ourselves, but it will make us move to save others as well.
– Sonia Sanchez

Men don’t listen to the lessons of history and that is the most important lesson of all.
– Aldous Huxley

The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another – no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.
– Friedrich Engels

All the bright, precious things fade so fast. And they don’t come back.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The United States is not only the strongest, but also the most terrified country.
– Leon Trotsky

What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor.
– Friedrich Engels

Censorship and the suppression of reading materials are rarely about family values and almost always about control.
– Stephen King

Men pray to the Almighty to relieve poverty. But poverty comes not from God’s laws-it is blasphemy of the worst kind to say that. Poverty comes from man’s injustice to his fellow man.
– Leo Tolstoy

Your inner conversations make the outer a fact and are only revelations of your own inner speech.
– Neville Goddard

You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.
– Leo Tolstoy

If you’re good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can’t be wrong.
– Sherman Alexie

We are a society of altruists, governed by psychopaths.
– George Monbiot

Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full.
– Leon Trotsky

But just because you’re strong and resilient doesn’t mean you never need someone to be there for you, to take care of you.
– Tammara Webber

All those men who are preeminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the other arts are clearly melancholic.
– Aristotle

An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person’s main task in life—becoming a better person.
– Leo Tolstoy

Theosis is the final stage of self after it has passed through the experience of matter through successive incarnations and reunification with the Godhead.
– K. Markides

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.
– Rosa Luxemburg

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, don’t you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
– Cormac McCarthy, The Road

History has a way of altering villains so that we can no longer see ourselves in them.
– Adam Serwer

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow- witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
– Leo Tolstoy

I don’t tell people, ‘You’re okay the way that you are.’ That’s not the right story. The right story is, ‘You’re way less than you could be.’
– Jordan Peterson

Life isn’t that messy if you stay away from mess.

– Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You

I do not know of any salvation for society except through eccentrics, misfits, dissenters, people who protest.

– William O. Douglas, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.

– Leon Trotsky

You can’t fake individuality. You either have the nerve to be yourself or you don’t.
– Diane Keaton

No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.
– Friedrich Engels

If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for ignorance, greed, and love of power.
– P. J. O’Rourke

Finally, in these extremes of loneliness, no one could hope for help from his neighbor and everyone remained alone with his anxieties.
– Albert Camus

The world which we see is our own mind turned inside out.
– George MacDonald

I prefer to have some beliefs that don’t make logical sense.
– Louise Erdrich

If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk.
– Robert Baden-Powell

Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.
– Jalal al-Din Rumi

That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy… —all these are undoubtedly great virtues…But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself—that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness—that I myself am the enemy who must be loved—what then?
– C. G. Jung

Anything which throws light upon the Universe, anything which reveals us to ourselves, should be welcome in this world of riddles.
– Aleister Crowley

To be successful is to be helpful, caring, and constructive, to make everything and everyone you touch a little bit better.
– Norman Vincent Peale

A thief broke into a mystic’s home
and found nothing worth stealing.
He sighed, “You own nothing.”
The mystic replied, “Then take that.”
– unknown

The simple act of caring is heroic.
– Edward Albert

There are too many angles to view it from
for any single discipline to explain it
We can only define it together
Only by disagreement

– Travis Hupp, Painted Corner

Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.

– H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

– Louise Erdrich

You really can change the world if you care enough.
– Marian Wright Edelman

Letting go of expectations and recognizing the nature of cyclic existence do not entail becoming cynical. Derisively thinking ‘I can’t expect anything of anyone’ is not a virtuous or realistic attitude that helps us on the path to enlightenment!

– Ven. Thubten Chodron

One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.
– Douglas Coupland

To write is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.

– Marguerite Duras

Projection is the way the psyche reaches out to someone or something new. Jung says that “everyone creates for himself a series of more or less imaginary relationships based essentially on projection.” Every new relationship—whether with a person, an object, or an idea—in some way involves projection.

– Robin Robertson, The Shadow’s Gift

Imagination, as opposed to fantasy, is the ability to see the other thing, what one might call, to use those old-fashioned words, nature, reality, the world… Imagination is a kind of freedom, a renewed ability to perceive and express the truth.
– Iris Murdoch

Great nature herself, whether viewed in connection or apart from man, is in its manifold operations a picture of progress and a constant rebuke to the moral stagnation of conservatism.
– Frederick Douglass

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

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’
– Susan Sontag

Few beings have ever been so impregnated, pierced to the core, by the conviction of the absolute futility of human aspiration. The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty, traversed by the feeble light of half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movements of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure ‘Victorian fictions.’ All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact, and radiant.
– Michel Houellebecq

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.
– Zadie Smith, Feel Free

It’s no good closing your eyes, you must leave them open in the dark, that is my opinion. I am not speaking of sleep, I am speaking of what I believe is called waking.
– Samuel Beckett

The bully hates the nerd because their intelligence may be his own area of weakness. This is the dynamic of scapegoating – the innocent is blamed for the crime in order to protect the guilty; one is chosen to be taken in place of ourselves. When we project, we psychologically and emotionally invest something of ourselves in an outer person who then bears that quality for us.

– Gary Bobroff, Carl Jung: Knowledge in a Nutshell

There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats.

– Albert Schweitzer

There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey.
– William Kingdon Clifford

What is progress? That we can drive faster on the roads? No, progress is the rest the body needs and the peace the soul requires. Progress is man’s well being.
– Knut Hamsun

In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature.
– Eckhart Tolle

Without a direct line to the archetypal level, people sooner or later become depressed. Life becomes two-dimensional, a daily round of treadmill existence. Creativity dries up because daily communication with the creative matrix is gone. Ideas are no longer exciting.
– Marion Woodman

This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
– C.S. Lewis

The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.
– Thomas Pynchon

Poetry suspends time. Poetry is
time. Poetry gives us time.
– Anne Michaels

violin player
the shape of the sound
in her arms

– Raffael de Gruttola

As long as you do not see that it is mere habit, built on memory, prompted by desire, you will think yourself to be a person.

– Nisargadatta

I have the feeling of being nothing, but I don’t have the humility. The feeling of nothingness is the opposite of humility.
– E. M. Cioran

There was no fight
left in me.
Not because I was weak,
but because
nothing felt
worth the effort.
I didn’t give up —
I drifted out.

– Franz Kafka

Seeing God without seeing the Self, one sees only mental image. Only he who has seen himself, has seen God, since he has lost individuality, and now sees nothing but God.

– Ramana Maharshi

I spent my twenties doing more reading, translating, editing, and traveling than writing. I wrote bad poetry.
– Eliot Weinberger

Chaos is the space of change that has not yet harmonized or synchronized.
– Jamye Price

It is becoming more and more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is mankind’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. There is no such protection because the understanding of the psyche is still so inadequate. It is indeed no exaggeration to say that our civilization is still in a state of psychic infancy.
– Carl Jung

I wisely started with a map.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

You don’t have to live like a refugee.
– Tom Petty

He who stands on tiptoe
doesn’t stand firm.
He who rushes ahead
doesn’t go far.
He who tries to shine
dims his own light.
He who defines himself
can’t know who he really is.
He who has power over others
can’t empower himself.
He who clings to his work
will create nothing that endures.
If you want to accord with the Tao,
just do your job, then let go.
– Lao Tzu

One of the the things that I realized during my time in space is that we’re not from Earth, we’re of Earth. To take that one step further is that we’re not in the universe, we are the universe. We are the universe becoming conscious of itself.
– Ron Garan

I have said before that all stories were magic; it never occurred to me that all magic was stories.
– Jim C. Hines

Conservative, moderate, liberal; right, left, hard left, far right; religious, secular, socialist — we must not be blindsided by these Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure can host the virus and virtually any developed country can become a suitable home. Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing — marketing for power.
– Toni Morrison

…I don’t mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don’t regard a home as a…well, as a place, a building..a house…of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can… well, nest-rest—live in, emotionally speaking.
– Tennessee Williams

A poem is an action of the mind captured on a page. It is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning.
– Anne Carson

It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards bigger ones – a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever-increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative system, and especially of its offspring, the students.

This passion for bureaucracy … is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics … we were deliberately to become men who need “order” and nothing but order, become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it.

That the world should know no men but these: it is such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is, therefore, not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parcelling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life.

– Max Weber

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
– Gore Vidal

Writing is like following a scent. You don’t know where it will lead, but you know when you’ve lost it.
– W. G. Sebald

People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a ‘common purpose’. ‘Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they’re going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people but I love individuals. Every person you look at; you can see the universe in their eyes, if you’re really looking.
– George Carlin

I learned never to rely on secondary sources, but to trust only primary ones — a teaching that leads directly to this ideal: Write so as to become primary.
– William H. Gass

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is now the opposite. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to pull the emergency brake.

– Walter Benjamin

Doing the work of a journalist can never be considered a crime, but it is a right that must be protected. … With your patient and rigorous work, you can act as a barrier against those who, through the ancient art of lying, seek to create divisions in order to rule by dividing. You can also be a bulwark of civility against the quicksand of approximation and post-truth.

– Pope Leo XIV, speaking to media execs at the Conference of the MINDS International Association

Dirt used to be a badge of honor. Dirt used to look like work. But we’ve scrubbed the dirt off the face of work, and consequently we’ve created this suspicion of anything that’s too dirty.
– Mike Rowe

One should be celebrated for doing the right thing over the probably-wise thing.
– Anthony Bourdain

The love of God is a difficult love. It assumes a total abandonment of oneself and contempt for one’s person.

– Albert Camus

You can’t defeat the darkness of the world if you carry it within you.
– Gibran Khalil Gibran

The Russian language has two words for truth. The word most Americans know is ‘pravda’—the truth that seems evident on the surface. It’s subjective and infinitely malleable, which is why the Soviet Communists called their party newspaper ‘Pravda.’ But the real truth, the underlying, cosmic, unshakable truth of things is called ‘istina’ in Russian. You can fiddle with the pravda all you want, but you can’t change the istina.
– Andrew Rosenthal

People were standing up everywhere shouting, ‘This is me! This is me!’ Every time you looked at them they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had no more idea who or what they were than he had. They believed their flashing signs, too. They ought to be standing up and shouting, ‘This isn’t me! This isn’t me!’… Then you might know how to proceed through the flashing bullshit of this world.
– Philip Roth, American Pastoral

There is no parallel universe. This one is the only one we’ve got.
– Lisa Dordal

The feminine character, and the ideal of femininity on which it is modelled, are products of masculine society. The image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite. … The feminine character is a negative imprint of domination. But therefore equally bad. Whatever is in the context of bourgeois delusion called nature, is merely the scar of social mutilation.
– Theodor W. Adorno

To be cut off from one’s emotional basis always means complete sterilization. Whoever cannot connect with his emotions feels, and is, sterile. There is no creativity and no essential realization of anything psychologically without emotion.
– Marie Louise von Franz

Accept nothing pleasant unless it is beneficial.
– Democritus

Don’t say that we’re the last generation —soot is cooling in our hands, ash in our blood— that people stop waiting by closed doors.

– Anzhelina Polonskaya, If All the Birds Are Killed

The object of a projection is not limited to individuals. It may be an organization, a nation, an ideology or a racial type which becomes the focus for one’s projection of the unrecognized dark side.
– Liz Greene

The sun is our second heart, our heart outside of our body.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

Never allow a struggle to turn your sky into a ceiling. You must believe there’s always a way.
– Kristen Butler

Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which has turned everything upside down…
– St. Oscar Romero

Believe in yourself and what you feel. Your power will come from that.
– Melissa Etheridge

And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.
– Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

Rest and be kind, you don’t have to prove anything.
– Jack Kerouac

I was looked at, but I wasn’t seen.
– Albert Camus, The Misunderstanding

Like the appearance of silver in mother of pearl, the world seems real until the Self, the underlying reality is realized.
– Shankaracharya

I do think that many people who say they don’t like poetry like the things that poetry can do; they just don’t know that it’s poetry that’s doing them.
– Richard Howard

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from a horse master. He told me to go slow to go fast. I think that applies to everything in life. We live as though there aren’t enough hours in the day, but if we do each thing calmly and carefully, we will get it done quicker and with much less stress.
– Viggo Mortensen

It is not ‘left-wing arson’ to want to commemorate a different set of values than the country held in the 1920s.
– Heather Cox Richardson

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

I should never have surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive.
– Geronimo

Employers are at their happiest on Mondays. Employees are at their happiest on Fridays.
– Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Detachment is not that you own nothing, detachment is that nothing owns you.
– Bhagavad Gita

The base of biography has to be facts.
– Robert Caro

Our survival is our resistance. Our language, our stories, our children — these are revolutions.
– Lyla June Johnston

There is no such thing as a good influence. All influence is immoral; immoral from the scientific point of view.
– Oscar Wilde

You cannot discover an inhabited land. Otherwise, I could cross the Atlantic and ‘discover’ England.
– James Loewen

If we must die, we die defending our rights.
– Sitting Bull

Our people do not remember time as a line; we remember it as a circle. The atrocities of the past are not behind us — they live in the systems that govern us today.
– Winona LaDuke

Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.
– Anne Lamott

We have to address the crisis of democracy to solve the climate crisis.
– Al Gore

The greatest danger to our future is our apathy. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other.
– Jane Goodall

Sometimes growth requires new company, new locations, and new mindsets.
– Simon Riley

If you plan to build walls around me, know this: I will walk through them.
– Richelle E. Goodrich

Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.
– Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed

The trouble in this Indian question which I meet again and again is that it is not the Indian who needs to be educated so constantly up to the white man, but that the white man needs to be educated to the Indian.
– Marie Bottineau Baldwin

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.
– Louise Erdrich

People who imagine that history flatters them…are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.
– James Baldwin

We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.

– Herman Melville

A society concerned with shalom will care for the most marginalized among them. God has a special concern for the poor and needy, because how we treat them reveals our hearts, regardless of the rhetoric we employ to make ourselves sound just.
– Randy Woodley

It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
– Paul Farmer

I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.

Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature – all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.

– Twyla Tharp

You know what it’s like having five kids? Imagine you’re drowning… And someone hands you a baby.
– Jim Gaffigan

One cannot love except by becoming a non-haver, even if one has.
– Jacques Lacan

As long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas and colors enough to paint the beautiful things I see.
– Vincent Van Gogh

I don’t envision a long life for myself. Like, I think my life will run out before my work does, you know? I’ve designed it that way.
– Townes van Zandt

In great literature, a decision can be a prism through which a culture is refracted into different modes of expression.
– Laurie L. Patton

So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf — seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life. …

Do all the other things, the ambitious things — travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers … but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.

That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality — your soul, if you will — is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Teresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.

– George Saunders

In my view, all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference.
– George Saunders

When we are all dead and gone and those who are born to replace us are dead and gone, time will inch forward and the music of the world will play on, even when there are no human ears to hear it.
– Gregory Maguire

You need not be religious, but you need deep reserves of faith.
– David Hare

“How does distance look?” is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved. It depends on light.
– Anne Carson

To replace all negative attitudes towards the existing world by a feeling of confidence and love towards the new world which is being born, towards the still unborn child that is the future mankind, to arouse in oneself constantly this love of the future humanity. Every time one observes in oneself some kind of negative attitude, to take this as the reminder that we human beings live on this Earth in order to serve and particularly to serve the future, and to serve with love, with hope, with confidence that it is possible for mankind to be born again.
– JG Bennett

Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic ‘feeling’ about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes ‘pick up’ accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.
– Colin Wilson

Wildness is the mother, the first thing, not a lurking predator. Wildness is holy.
– Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

Awareness is not the same as thinking. Awareness is the vast, spacious soul place that doesn’t think. It watches the thinking. So don’t take your thinking seriously.
– Richard Rohr, Franciscan Mysticism

Changing the story isn’t enough in itself, but it has often been foundational to real changes. Making an injury visible and public is often the first step in remedying it, and political change often follows culture, as what was long tolerated is seen to be intolerable, or what was overlooked becomes obvious. Which means that every conflict is in part a battle over the story we tell, or who tells and who is heard.
– Rebecca Solnit

Know that your precious, infinitely beloved, and irreplaceable self will dissolve like a sand castle, grain by grain—and what a relief it is to know. You exist in a great space of knowing, filled with the shared ephemerality of all things.
– Sallie Tisdale

Rosewater light at sunset moistens a sea of wheat. Love makes us transparent, sky weathered – a shimmer, like something bright and feathered singing low in its throat.
– LeighAnna Schesser

Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality.
– Bessel A. van der Kolk

Many things are not obvious. Most psychotherapies use speech to get to unconscious, forgotten, early experience. Yet feelings go on in ourselves long before speech is learned. Some pay attention not to what is said but to how it is said. Doing this enables one to find the intentions behind the structure of the phrasing, so that one can get to the feelings that dictated the particular way of phrasing. In short, how one says what one does is at least as important as what one says.
– Moshe Feldenkrais

Revolutionary Dreams

i used to dream militant dreams of taking
over america to show
these white folks how it should be
done
i used to dream radical dreams
of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers
of correct analysis
i even used to think i’d be the one
to stop the riot and negotiate the peace
then i awoke and dug
that if i dreamed natural
dreams of being a natural
woman doing what a woman
does when she’s natural
i would have a revolution

– Nikki Giovanni

Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don’t remember summer even saying goodbye.
– David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Intuition appears to be something that, while inevitably fallible, is often more reliable, much quicker, and capable of taking into account many more factors, than explicit reasoning, including factors of which we may not even be consciously aware. It also underlies motor, cognitive and social skills, and is the ground of the excellence of the expert. The attempt to replace it with rules and procedures is a typical left hemisphere response to something it does not understand – a response that is, alas, powerfully destructive. We inhabit a world in which reason is needed more than ever before, yet in which reason is so narrowly conceived that it drives out true understanding. For that we would have had to learn respect for the power of intuition, not as opposed to reason, but as both grounding it, and the means for it to fulfill its potential in making judgments in life.
– Iain McGilchrist

What a degraded cosmos. What a case of something starting out nice and going bad.
– George Saunders

But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years – and it opens.
– Marcel Proust

Fiction is an urgent business. It is the Dying Us telling stories to the Dying Us, trying to crack the nonsense in our heads open with a big hammer pronto, before Death arrives.
– George Saunders

Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.
– Constantin Brancusi

It was autumn, the springtime of death. Rain spattered the rotting leaves, and a wild wind wailed. Death was singing in the shower. Death was happy to be alive. The fetus bailed out without a parachute. It landed in the sideline Astroturf, so upsetting the cheerleaders that for the remained of the afternoon their rahs were more like squeaks.
– Tom Robbins

Our suffering was not caused by our parents or grandparents. It was merely passed down. We are social animals. We grow through modeling. We teach what we have learned. We act as we have been acted upon. A person who is not loving has not experienced love. It is not his fault. Realizing this gives rise to forgiveness. And in Chan we vow that suffering will stop with us. We will not pass it down.
– Guo Jun, A Special Transmission

We must see God not as a Him (some linear rewarding fellow) but an IT, a great beast beyond our understanding, who wants something from us, and we must give it, and all we may control is the spirit in which we give it and the ultimate end which the giving serves.
– George Saunders

To love means to give. When you love you seem to go outwards, flow out in order to help, to serve. But as you cannot breathe out without breathing in, so you cannot love without receiving. Love is an out-breathing and an in-breathing. It is a light that burns deep within: as warmth, a certainty, an inner knowing.
– White Eagle

We cannot understand this moment of authoritarianism as solely coming from the White House, when it is also characterized by the cowardice of those in response to it…
– Mamdani

The wicked act is a transfer onto others of the degradation that one carries within oneself.
– Simone Weil

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

The forgiving state of mind is a magnetic power for attracting good.
– Catherine Ponder

Obstacle
This body, still walking.
The wind must go around it.
– Jane Hirshfield

Some people have a job.
Others of us have a mission.
It’s different.
– Nika Solé

I try to write not like a ‘good writer,’ but like I’m telling something I can’t wait to tell to one person, who already knows everything about me and still likes me.
– Lisa Carver

Intelligence isn’t the ability to remember and repeat, like they teach you in school. It is the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use our knowledge to adapt to new situations.
– Prof Feynman

The spiritual dimension is an extremely significant dimension in the human psyche and also in life. If we suppress it, the way Western culture has been doing it, we will be paying a very serious toll for it. We are really acting against our deepest nature.
– Stanislav Grof

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one…
– C.S. Lewis

The fundamental, ultimate mystery-the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets-is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.
– Alan W. Watts

cut grass
sticking to my feet
autumn rain

– Issa

You are afraid of dying. But, come now, how is this life of yours anything but death?
– Seneca

Sometimes death is invisible, especially when we laugh.
– Martha Silano

Such beautiful comfort, the holy form, the only comfort there really is—the heart, a breath, a hand.
– Anne Lamott

…courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.
– C.S. Lewis

The root of all trouble, that which prevents the seeing of Truth, is desire.
Desire in any form, is the only obstacle, EVEN IF THAT DESIRE IS FOR LIBERATION!
– Ramesh Balsekar

all those things
I wish now I’d asked you
snow falling

– Caroline Gourlay

Do whatever it takes – meditate, exercise, pray, read, write, listen to music, whatever you find that works – to ignite your awareness daily. Then you will create and contribute to Life as you have never contributed before.
– Neale Donald Walsch

Never fear periods of darkness in life. They are the atrium to new phases of life, the threshold to new experience, the invitation to move on from where you are to where there is more for you to learn.
– Joan Chittister

The claim that someone who writes does not live properly can only come from those people who understand humans and their lives as subject and object. I would say, I live, and my life lives too. My writing lives as well.
– Yoko Tawada

We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.
– Orson Welles

Sentences are the bricks as well as the mortar, the motor as well as the fuel. They are the cells, the individual stitches. Their nature is at once solitary and social. Sentences establish tone, and set the pace. One in front of the other marks the way.
– Jhumpa Lahiri

The true purpose of Zen
is to see things as they are,
to observe things as they are,
and to let everything go as it goes.

– Shunryu Suzuki

Stop talking and thinking,
and there is nothing you
will not be able to know.
– Dogen Zenji

Some kinds of disguised falseness imitate truth so well that it would be a misjudgement not to be deceived by them.
– François de La Rochefoucauld

Only the young can be so stubborn, so decisive in the face of their own fear.
– Han Kang

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

Living a solitary life, you are able to let the regular rhythm of long hours of work followed by brief rest carry you through the days, with no time to fear the outer dark beyond the circle of light.
– Han Kang

Paper turns out to be a superb information-storage-technology, still readable after 500 years, which our own tweets likely won’t be.
– Walter Isaacson

‘The soldiers are the scary ones,’ you said with a half-smile. ‘What’s frightening about the dead?’
– Han Kang

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
– George Orwell

If Apple could, they would jump right into your 401k for that subscription.
– Javed White

The mind ought sometimes to be diverted, that it may return the better to thinking.
– Phaedrus

Nothing can justify…the obliteration, the bombardments, the erasure of entire neighborhoods, the killing of tens of thousands of innocents for whom we did not even pretend to mourn.
– Avrum Burg

The is literally nothing more American and patriotic than declaring: No Kings.
– Marc Elias

I have covered many cults. Some end with a bang, others with a whimper. But they invariably end. The question is how much damage they leave in their wake.
– Dan Rather

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.
– Albus Dumbledore

I am not asking for your permission to exist. I am reminding you that I already do.
– Lyla June Johnston

Winter passes, and spring comes round again. Spring sends me into my usual delirium, summer brings exhaustion and illness I find difficult to shake off. By the time autumn sets in it’s as much as I can do just to keep breathing.
– Han Kang

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
– William James

It was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.
– Han Kang

There is a story that makes sense of all the stories you’ve ever loved.
– Malcolm Guite

The real joy of writing comes from surprising oneself.
– Alfred Kazin

Don’t just listen to the word, do what it says.
– James 1:22

Our life is as meaningful as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.
– Richard Dawkins

Once we build a relationship with something, we know about it, and we take care of it.
– Nina Aguilina

Coming from where I come from, it was unimaginable to ever be wealthy. That was just too far out of my reach.
– Shania Twain

No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.
– C.S. Lewis

We should be working the least amount we’ve ever worked if we were actually paid based on how much wealth we are producing. But we’re not. We’re paid on how little we’re desperate enough to accept and then the rest is skimmed off and given to a billionaire.

– AOC

I waited patiently for the Lord; He turned to me and heard my cry.
– Psalm 40:1

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

It is better to die
for an idea that will live,
than to live for an idea
that will die.

– Stephen Biko

But in all that suffering, the most painful suffering of all was the consciousness that it was all banal, had all been discovered a long time ago, and was known to all the generations past, all just a repeated series, stamped out by our genes. That the universe was filled to its edges with groans as alike as two notes, that those particular groans formed one great groan similar to the shrill parliament of the sparrows and that groan became an interstellar roar, the inaudible groan of the aging cosmos.
– Tadeusz Konwicki

to move at the speed of your own dissolving,
what grace to drift without agenda,
trusting the current to remember the way.
Even the soil keeps whispering:
the past does not vanish—it composts.
Each step presses yesterday deeper into the earth
until even grief grows green.
– Kyle Cork

Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness,” to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.
– Rollo May, The Courage to Create

Soul is found where life deepens us, where meaning calls to us, where trouble deters us, wherever and however we slow down in the midst of the rushing and racing at the surface level of life.
– Michael Meade

Legacy
Some days, I want to leave
my mark on this world like
a handprint in wet cement,
lifelines of my palm still
visible years later in that
hardened slab of sidewalk.
Other days, able to relish
my smallness, making peace
with my own impermanence,
I just want to be like a leaf,
having left the faintest ghost-
print on the wet pavement
with the last of my tannins
after a night of heavy rain.
– James Crews

The ignorant man’s position and character is this: he never looks to himself for benefit or harm, but to the world outside him. The philosopher’s position and character is that he always look to himself for benefit and harm.
– Epictetus, The Enchiridion

If stupidity couldn’t easily be mistaken for progress, talent, hope or improvement, no one would want to be stupid.
– Robert Musil

Everybody acquires some measure of wisdom in their lives; sometimes it’s just about little things, sometimes it’s on a planetary or even a universal scale. Whichever way it is, it’s not wrong to share your wisdom with those who can benefit by it.

But you should do it with awareness of what kind of wisdom it is and what its limitations are. Many self-anointed dispensers of wisdom are really talking to people who already have wealth and power. They’re offering first-world answers to first-world problems. That’s all very well for them, but what about everybody else?

If your wisdom has nothing to offer (other than, maybe, condescension) to the powerless, to the poor, to the dispossessed, to people whose life experience isn’t sipping champagne from the porch of a beach house, then it’s a very limited form of wisdom. And if you’re presenting it as the solution to all the world’s problems, then you’re not being fully honest.

True wisdom has to confront the needs and problems of all people, not just those who can bring money to the table. It needs to be a wisdom that can survive in war and in terror and in poverty, in bleak and directionless lives, without much in the way of education or options or hope. It needs to speak to everyone.

– Zal de Vere

Inside this chaos, there’s a music
only stillness can hear.
– David Whyte

There is no other light but what burns in your mind.
– Georg Trakl

Judging others is easy because it distracts us from the responsibility of judging ourselves.
– Charles F. Glassman

This drive to expand, to accumulate, feels almost hardwired into us, an instinct we’ve rarely questioned. We don’t just store objects; we store memories, identities, and fears. It’s what so many Buddhist teachings try to combat.
– Christopher Rivas

I measure every grief I meet
With analytic eyes.
– Emily Dickinson

James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.
– Cormac McCarthy

They’ll tell you that the arts and humanities aren’t practical and then read poetry at funerals and weddings, cry over films and search for meaning in ancient philosophy.

Surviving is one type of practicality, knowing why we bother is another.

– Joel Vili

Between me and the world
there is always the thin glass of my breath.
– Clarice Lispector

Meditation is not merely a useful technique or mental gymnastic, but part of a balanced system designed to change the way we go about things at the most fundamental level.
– Judy Lief

Someone asked me, ‘Who do you write for?’ And I stood on that stage, this incredibly green writer, and said, ‘I write for myself.’ There was total silence.
– Jhumpa Lahiri

We become what we behold.
We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.
– Marshall McLuhan

Don’t be scared of yourself.
– Ocean Vuong

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product’s something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.
– Richard Wilbur

You must first discover what you are afraid of; then you can overcome it. . . Georg Groddeck said something I like a lot: “You are afraid of what you desire.”

– Alejandro Jodorowsky

An artist is always the most original and creative when they lean into their own style as much as possible. Doing this requires great honesty and courage, for it means revealing the self, and there is always a chance that an artwork expressing a unique self will be rejected by others.
– Suli Qyre

The closer you come to knowing that you alone create the world of your experience, the more vital, alive and innocent you become.
– Byron Katie

Whether the people are happy or not in their lives, they have learned to keep steadily moving, moving all the time.
– Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life

The human ego really doesn’t like ambiguity. We want clarity, predictability. Yet life is much more complex than that. The only way to truly respect it is to realize it’s a mystery. It continues to unfold. What we think and feel today may be functional, or maybe not, but it will in any case prove inadequate tomorrow. When we live with that process and grow into it, then we are in right relationship to the essential mystery.
– James Hollis, A Life of Meaning

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

– Margaret Atwood

I want to write a novel about silence. The things people don’t say.
– Virginia Woolf

A man asked Mr. K whether there was a
God. Mr. K replied “I advise you to consider
if, depending on the answer, your behavior
would change. If it would not change then
we can drop the question. If it would
change, then I can at least be of help to the
extent that I can say you have already
decided; you need a god.

– Bertolt Brecht

The wise man does not climb a mountain to be seen, but to see.
– Zen Saying

You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.
– Ernest Hemingway

The wind never asks for direction.
– Matsuo Bashō

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.
– Pearl S. Buck

Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more than we can comprehend.
– Dennis Covington

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
– John Dos Passos

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

Simplicity is the final achievement.
– Frederic Chopin

People do not see you, / They invent you
and accuse you
– Hélène Cixous

It’s better to feel good than to look good.
– Tom Hanks

The land remembers what has been done to it.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book.
– Alice Walker

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
– Hannah Arendt

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.
– Hannah Arendt

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
– H.G. Wells

The evolution of culture has never been in the hands of the rich. It has always been in our hands, the artists.
– Bono

It is good people who make good places.
– Anna Sewell

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.
– e. e. cummings

There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world.
– J. R. R. Tolkien

Narcissists try to destroy your life with lies because theirs can be destroyed with the truth.
– Nikita Gill

If you want to be a true rebel, then slow down the pace.
– Richard Rudd

When you get out of the driver’s seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver’s seat, it can drive itself so much easier—it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the ‘me’ is no longer in the way. Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.
– Adyashanti

Some days it feels like the whole world’s been hypnotized by the loudest liar in the room. We’ve forgotten that truth doesn’t need to shout — it just waits, patient and undefeated, for the noise to collapse under its own weight.

History never sides with the bullhorn. It sides with the whisper that refuses to die.

– Oliver Chadwick

And then there is the most dangerous risk of all – the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.
– Randy Komisar, The Monk and the Riddle

The most dangerous creature on this earth is a woman who knows how to think. Ain’t nothing she can’t do.
– Richard Williams

We live in fragments,
but sometimes the wind rearranges them
into a brief moment of wholeness.
– Naomi Shihab Nye

It’s a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that you lack.
– Germany Kent

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

A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.
– Thomas Paine

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.
– Douglas Coupland

Courage is like—it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: You get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.
– Brene Brown

“Every event has two handles,” Epictetus said, “one by which it can be carried, and one by which it can’t.”
“Reach for the “smooth handle”, as Thomas Jefferson put it..
– Ryan Holiday

It is always one’s virtues and not one’s vices that precipitate one into disaster.
– Rebecca West

You will find peace, or rather peace will find itself, when there is apperception that what we are searching for cannot be found, for a very simple reason: that which is searching and that which is sought are not different!
– Nisargadatta

Idolatry is worshiping anything that ought to be used, or using anything that ought to be worshiped.
– Augustine of Hippo

These are the roots of trees, O monks, these are empty huts. Meditate, monks, do not be negligent, or else you will regret it later. This is our instruction to you.
– Gotama Buddha

Afrofuturism is a juke joint in Louisiana that only appears after midnight. The band is half-human, half-shadow, and they never repeat a song. Folks leave barefoot, pockets full of dirt, claiming they’ve danced with their dead.
– Kayla Love

If the challenge is loud, the call of duty is clear. We are called upon to stand up and be counted, for we have a duty, we have a clear and a compelling duty, to make it clear that America has not fallen and will not fall into the hands of extremists of any stripe.
– Lyndon B. Johnson

To me, the thing that is worse than death is betrayal. You see, I could conceive death, but I could not conceive betrayal.
– Malcolm X

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world
is that it is something that we make,
and could just as easily make differently

– David Graeber

If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.
– June Jordan

Reverend Ike was right, the best thing to do for the poor is not be one of them.
– Les Brown

You can’t pour vision into people who only understand survival.
– David Shands

The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.
– Werner Heisenberg

Everything that hurts you, find a way to overcome it. Everything that feels difficult, find a way to do it anyway. As long as you can take action, stop listening to the mind.
– Master Shi Heng Yi

I know a good kid when I see one. Because they are all good kids.
– John Candy

Yes, I grew because that is what living things do.
– David Gate, A Rebellion of Care

And I will not be a pawn for the prince of darkness any longer.
– Indigo Girls

The greatest adventure is what lies ahead.
Today and tomorrow are yet to be said.
The chances, the changes are all yours to make.
The mold of your life is in your hands to break.
– J. R. R. Tolkien

Change your mind and keep it changed.
– Emmet Fox

Jesus was not trying to show people their depravity.
He was trying to awaken their love.
– Matt Boswell

Let your gentleness be evident to all.
– Philippians 4:5

and everything burned in blue
– Pablo Neruda

The era of buying and selling will end.
The era of consumerism will end.
The era of celebrities and influencers will end.
The era of capitalism will end.

We are entering an era of collaboration.
We are entering an era of connection.
We are entering an era of barter.
We are entering an era of decolonization.
We are entering an era of community.

The old matrix is ​​crumbling.
A new era is coming.

– Frannessun Witch

It has turned out that no individual, business, or group, can profit alone as much as they would together. There is no credible research suggesting that poverty and unemployment are somehow beneficial, but plenty suggesting the opposite. Even so there is an unspoken thought that some people will either weather it, or come out ahead afterward, or even succeed in spite of it. Whatever that train of thought, it runs out of track as poverty increases.
– Hugh McGillivray

And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray.
– Herman Melville

I know we often think of our intelligence as being related to our brains … But the body has its own intelligence.
– Maggie Smith

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

– Andrei Tarkovsky

Very few really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds — justification, explanations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.
– Ann Rice

You ultimately judge the civility of a society not by how it treats the rich, the powerful, the protected and the highly esteemed, but by how it treats the poor, the disfavored and the disadvantaged.
– Bryan Stevenson

Most structures weren’t designed to hold your dreams. That’s not your failure — it’s their design. Build your own path
– Luana Nemteanu

Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.
– Oscar Wilde

…a man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope.
– G.K. Chesterton

A high vibration bends reality and rearranges the universe at will. An alchemist understands this.
– Nika Solé

Claritas. The dry-eyed Latin word
Is perfect for the carved stone of the water
Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees
And John the Baptist pours out more water
Over his head: all this in bright sunlight
On the façade of a cathedral. Lines
Hard and thin and sinuous represent
The flowing river. Down between the lines
Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.
And yet in that utter visibility
The stone’s alive with what’s invisible:
Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,
The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.
All afternoon, heat wavered on the steps
And the air we stood up to our eyes in wavered
Like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.
– Seamus Heaney

I just have to stumble along, let go, and give up my ego. I suggest that you write on my epitaph: ‘She stumbled along with her nose in the mire, always getting up again—right to the end.’
– Marie-Louise von Franz

No, you must live! You must struggle and strive to live, though death would seem a boon unspeakable.

– Van Helsing, Bram Stoker

“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,” Walt Whitman wrote of the other animals, “they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.”

One simple point Jung makes clear is that individuation is not to be confused with individualism. It is not about the growth of the ego. ‘Individuation does not shut out one from the world, but gathers the world to itself’
– Nathan Field

Hope has nothing to do with optimism…. It is in Hell where solidarity is important, not in Heaven.
– John Berger

It’s in the silence that your problems dissolve.
– Robert Adams

A poem is a means of bringing the wind in the door, so to speak.
– Charles Simic

BONNARD

No, it wasn’t a Monet or a Manet. It was a Bonnard. It was at the house of some people in Berne who were great art collectors. They had a painting by Bonnard: a boat, with the wife’s family in it. Bonnard always wanted to alter the sail, and because he kept on about it they let him have the painting back. When he returned it he said he considered it finished now. But the sail had swallowed up everything, dwarfing the sea, the people in the boat and the sky. That can happen with a book: you can start a new sentence and change the whole subject. You don’t notice anything; you look up at the window and it’s evening. And the next morning you find you’ve sat down to a different book. The making of pictures and books isn’t something completely conscious. And you can never, never find words for it.

– Marguerite Duras

Two of us who loved you
spoke your name
and you came.
Surprising rain.

– Pat Schneider

Yet still, she dreamt of sending letters, dreamt in the manner of Mandelstam.
– Jenny Boully

We’re stuck with a certain vision of what an essay should be when in fact its possibilities seem limitless. That’s what attracted me to it—it was this kind of unexplored territory.
– Eliot Weinberger

Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes.
– Immanuel Kant

Years will pass, and you will
have visitings of despair and
yet be tortured by hope.
– Mary Shelley

Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Coming and going these several seasons, / Do stay out on the baobab tree
– J.P Clark

It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t. It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.
– James Gordon

A message from a Kindergarten teacher:
After forty years in the classroom, my career ended with one small sentence from a six-year-old:
“My dad says people like you don’t matter anymore.”
No sneer. No malice. Just quiet honesty — the kind that cuts deeper because it’s innocent. He blinked, then added, “You don’t even have a TikTok.”
My name is Mrs. Clara Holt, and for four decades, I taught kindergarten in a small Denver suburb. Today, I stacked the last box on my desk and locked the door behind me.
When I started teaching in the early 1980s, it felt like a promise — a shared belief that what we did mattered. We weren’t rich, but we were valued. Parents brought warm cookies to parent nights. Kids gave you handmade cards with hearts that didn’t quite line up. Watching a child sound out their first sentence felt like magic.
But that world slowly slipped away. The job I once knew has been replaced by exhaustion, red tape, and a kind of loneliness I can’t quite describe.
My evenings used to be filled with construction paper, glitter, and glue sticks. Now they’re spent filling out digital reports to protect myself from angry emails or lawsuits. I’ve been yelled at by parents in front of twenty-five children — one filming me with his phone while I tried to calm another child mid-meltdown.
And the kids… they’ve changed too. Not by choice.
They arrive tired, anxious, overstimulated. Their tiny fingers know how to swipe a screen before they can hold a crayon. Some can’t make eye contact or wait in line. We’re expected to fix all of it — to patch the gaps, heal the trauma, teach the curriculum, and document every move — in six hours a day, with resources that barely fill a drawer.
The little reading corner I once built, full of soft beanbags and paper stars, was replaced by data charts and “learning metrics.” A young principal once told me, “Clara, maybe you’re too nurturing. The district wants measurable results.”
As if kindness were a weakness.
Still, I stayed. Because of the small, holy moments that no spreadsheet could measure —
a whisper of, “You remind me of my grandma.”
a shaky note that read, “I feel safe here.”
a quiet boy finally meeting my eyes and saying, “I read the whole page.”
Those tiny sparks were my reason to keep showing up.
But this last year broke something in me.
The aggression grew sharper. The laughter in the staff room turned to silence. The light went out of so many eyes. I watched brilliant teachers — my friends — vanish under the weight of burnout, their joy replaced by survival.
I felt myself fading too, like chalk on a board that’s been wiped one too many times.
So today, I began my goodbye. I pulled faded art off the walls and tucked thirty years of handmade cards into a single box. In the back of a drawer, I found a letter from a student from 1998:
“Thank you for loving me when I was hard to love.”
I sat on the floor and cried.
No party. No applause. Just a handshake from a young principal who called me “Ma’am” while checking his notifications.
I left my rocking chair behind, and my sticker box too. What I carried with me were the memories — the faces of hundreds of children who once trusted me enough to reach out their hands and learn. That can’t be uploaded. It can’t be measured. It can’t be replaced.
I miss when teachers were partners, not targets. When parents and educators worked side by side, not in opposition. When schools cared more about wonder than numbers.
So if you know a teacher — any teacher — thank them. Not with a mug or a gift card, but with your words. With your respect. With your understanding that behind every test score is a heart that cared enough to try.
Because in a world that often overlooks them, teachers are the ones who never forget our children.

The only difference between a flower and a weed is a judgment.
– HL Howells

They were bonding beyond non-communicative connection. He was jealous of her. She was of him too. They talked seldom. Casually. Despite his envy deep down he really appreciated her. His infatuation surged for her. Maybe he even longed for her. Her libido? Her love? Her image? Nothing particular. She was so conscious about not exposing her vulnerability to world. She kept on radiating vigorous aura. Last time they talked she was at her most feeble self. The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.

She was not different either. They were neighbors.
He was cynic. She was a go-getter. She wanted to belong to the peak. His position was perpetually the pit. All he was able to do just howl about his futile hilarious condition hence he spent his time sneering and frowning. She by weaving dream. And by being practical. The prime dichotomy which separated them was she accepted her life and he couldn’t get rid of ennui of being alive in an unfathomable cosmos. That’s why he was jealous of her. And she was jealous of him because his very existence would instigate her to question her own sense of self. She was the finest owl in town. And he was just another passerby on whom Minerva’s tower collapsed.

– Mehedi Hasan

We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.
– David Brooks

In all jazz, and especially the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been “down the line,” as the song puts it, know what this music is about…. White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality, and do not any longer understand it. The word “sensual” is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous here, either.
– James Baldwin

IN THE MIDDLE

In the middle
of a life that’s as complicated as everyone else’s,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather’s
has stopped at 9:20; we haven’t had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don’t ring. One day I look out the window,
green summer, the next, the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee
and evening’s slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail, a metronome, 3/4 time. We’ll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.

– Barbara Crooker

More than one commentator has mentioned that science fiction as a form is where theological narrative went after Paradise Lost, and this is undoubtedly true. Supernatural creatures with wings, and burning bushes that speak, are unlikely to be encountered in a novel about stockbrokers, unless the stockbrokers have been taking a few mind-altering substances, but they are not out of place on Planet X. The form is often used as a way of acting out the consequences of a theological doctrine. The theological resonances in films such as Star Wars are more than obvious. Extraterrestrials have taken the place of angels, demons, fairies and saints, though it must be said that this last group is now making a comeback.

We want wisdom. We want hope. We want to be good. Therefore we sometimes tell ourselves warning stories that deal with the darker side of some of our other wants.

Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling — heaven, hell, monsters, angels and all — out into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are and what we want, and what the limits to those wants may be. Understanding the imagination is no longer a pastime, but a necessity; because increasingly, if we can imagine it, we’ll be able to do it.

– Margaret Atwood

Unless the inner forces of negative emotions are conquered, strife with outer enemies will never end.
– Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

The omega point represents a quantum leap in global evolution. The omega point is to the individual minds which form it as the individual human mind is to the neurons which form the brain. Like the human mind, the omega point has its own emergent and qualitatively higher properties. It has a transcendent mystical dimension, and at the same time it unifies and centralizes the activities of its constituent minds in a fashion not unlike that in which the activity of the individual human mind draws together and centralizes the activities of the nerve cells of the brain. This process occurs, not through loss of individuality but through a mutual enfolding of the most personal inwardness of each individual with other individuals. In a word, the omega point is the fruit of that most essential of inner experiences—love.

– allan combs & mark holland, synchronicity

It did not seem (and please destroy this letter after you have read it) that someone so clownish could disrupt something so noble and time-tested and seemingly strong, something that had been with us literally every day of our lives. We had taken, in other words, a profound gift for granted. Did not know the gift was a fluke, a chimera, a wonderful accidental of consensus and mutual understanding.
– George Saunders, Liberation Day

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

– Marshall McLuhan, Counterblast

Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable.

And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises. […] Perhaps if we found a new way to document [the world], we might begin to understand this new way we experience space and time.

– Valeria Luiselli

But there’s a paradox at work: categorizing an illness can offer a false sense of definition, locking us into an expectation that becomes self-fulfilling. The reality of both mind and body is one of dynamism and change; any vision of human life that is static at heart is an illusion. When a patient tells me ‘I’ve got that depression’ I know that part of my job will be to guide that patient back towards a more fluid understanding of mood, and a more hopeful perspective on their mental state. I’ve found that the most helpful approach is not to think of illness categories as concrete, immutable destinies but as stories of the mind and the body. Within limits, stories can be rewritten.

– Gavin Francis

The path is unchartered. It comes into existence moment by moment and at the same time, drops away behind us. It’s like riding in a train sitting backwards. We cant see where we’re headed, only where we’ve been. This is a very encouraging teaching because it says that the source of wisdom is whatever is going to happen to us today. The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right at this very instant.
– Pema Chödrön

I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope– an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford’s greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one’s past.

One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn’t found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world.

– John Fowles

The soul is the greening life force of the flesh, for the body grows and prospers through her, just as the earth becomes fruitful when it is moistened. The soul humidifies the body so it does not dry out, just like the rain which soaks into the earth.
– Hildegard of Bingen

“You know,” my aunt says, “I once had a terribly difficult period that lasted twenty-four years.” Wait. Twenty-four years? “And it was so important to realize that I didn’t know what was on the other side of the darkness. Every so often there was a sliver of light that shot the whole world through with mystery and wonder, and reminded me: I didn’t have all the information.”
– Dani Shapiro

The word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.
– Rebecca Solnit

The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.
– Larry Niven

I have with me
all that I do not know
I have lost none of it
– W. S. Merwin

The secret of forgiving is to understand nothing.
– George Bernard Shaw

All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions.

We don’t need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do’s and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon A Time lasts forever.

– Philip Pullman

If one can, one needs—before death is knocking on the door—to open oneself and to make oneself completely empty of all the ordinary concerns, worries, and anxieties of life. Then one may become open to that in one which is not of time, not of space, which is not this, not that, but nevertheless exists and by virtue of its existence is not vulnerable to any of the risks that can endanger those things that are subject to time and space. If one is able to become open in this way, then one knows without any possibility of doubt that death of the body is, as it were, an event that does not and cannot touch this other thing in one.
– Hugh Ripman

Many things are not obvious. Most psychotherapies use speech to get to unconscious, forgotten, early experience. Yet feelings go on in ourselves long before speech is learned. Some pay attention not to what is said but to how it is said. Doing this enables one to find the intentions behind the structure of the phrasing, so that one can get to the feelings that dictated the particular way of phrasing. In short, how one says what one does is at least as important as what one says.
– Moshe Feldenkrais

Autumn
Again the wind
flakes gold-leaf from the trees
and the painting darkens
as if a thousand penitents
kissed an icon
till it thinned
back to bare wood,
without diminishment.
– Jane Hirshfield

There’s always been a fight over the true story of America. I believe deeply in the story that says we’re all created equal, and that if we can treat each other with decency and respect, all of us will be better off.
– Barack Obama

Seeing You
Seeing you will make me sad.
I want to do it anyway.
We can’t relive the times we had –
Seeing you will make me sad.
Perhaps it’s wrong. Perhaps it’s mad.
But we will both be dead one day.
Seeing you will make me sad.
I have to do it anyway.
– Wendy Cope

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.
– Toni Morrison

(As I Dig for Wild Orchids]
by Izumi Shikibu

As I dig for wild orchids
in the autumn fields,
it is the deeply-bedded root
that I desire,
not the flower.

Translated by Jane Hirshfield
with Mariko Aratani

Exiled among the living, I have made myself a soul to fit my dwelling.
– Jean Genet

When we stop and conscientiously consider our life’s patterns, especially the self-defeating patterns, the ones that bring harm to ourselves or others, the ones where we are most stuck, we realize that indeed we are the progenitor of most of our problems.
– James Hollis

I would like bleeding heart or fuchsia to redden the banks

In their brief seasons. Rain, rain, Irish rain.

Diamonds on the stamens when the sun goes blind.

– Fanny Howe

There is something so literary, so distinguished about completely ruining your life early on in your twenties in a way that leaves you reeling from the consequences forevermore.
– @luhaenten

Life regularly shows us the flimsiness of our thoughts, but it can’t change what we know deep down.
– Pico Iyer

For You Who Are About to Give Up

Do it. Give up
the old ghosts, the old fears; give up
the shadowy house of childhood,
the voices like knives spilled in the kitchen;
give up the stories
you never meant to be, your father’s
rage, your mother’s silence inside you.
Stay, stay
in this one world
but give it up, give it up to wonder.

I am here. I will hold you
through the hard part. I will thumb away
the cold thorns from your face.

And then,
my love, when you are ready,
when you’ve told yourself
no one is ever ready,
give up
that life you never meant to be,
those clothes that have worn you
like old ghosts, those dreams
you have carried in you like winters.
Give up
and walk out through the rivers
and look at it, that old moon
in the spruces. She is trying, she is still trying
to tell you: like a child,
like a bride stepping
from a wedding dress, give up
every heft you have borrowed
and live the life you have imagined.
In your life is where the dead are saved.

– Joseph Fasano

Every human being is a raindrop. And when enough of the raindrops become clear and coherent they then become the power of the storm.
– John Trudell

The great lie is that it is “civilization”. It’s not civilized. It has been, literally, the most bloodthirsty, brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That’s the great lie, is that it represents “civilization”. . .or if it does represent “civilization” and it’s truly what civilization is, then the great lie is that civilization is good for us.
– John Trudell

When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.

For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I’m feeling most ghost-like, it is your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I’m feeling sad, it’s my consolation. When I’m feeling happy, it’s part of why I feel that way.

If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget, part of who I am will be gone.

– Frederick Buechner

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.’
– Doris Lessing

What I am telling you–and this is my belief–is that writers become what they read. They are shaped and expanded by what they read. They learn what to edit, to excise, to study and to examine by what they read. To be a writer is to attach oneself to a lifetime of reading. If you would like an analogy: There are these stories, ideas, trapped within you, and they derive from your unique history, your memories, your perceptions. However, what does one do with them? By reading and studying other writers, you are seeking out rescue workers, and that rescue–all of that reading and study, learning how others made a book or a play work–will come and release and save those memories. You will now be able to attach a form to what you know and who you are. I am shocked by how little my students read now. They are bright, but their ideas are coming from films and watching plays. Watching a play is not studying a play. Plays are literature, and you have to look at the joints and the screws and the final finish. We have superficial students now.

I was attracted to Carson [McCullers] because she had a way of writing–of thinking and sharing–that was beyond me. She impressed me. I studied her carefully, and I tried–perhaps in vain–to capture some of that, to meld it with my own perceptions and history. It is called writing. It is how I think it is done.

– Edward Albee

On Rain

It was blacker than olives the night I left. As I ran past the palaces, oddly joyful, it began to rain. What a notion it is, after all-these small shapes! I would get lost counting them. Who first thought of it? How did he describe it to the others? Out on the sea it is raining too. It beats on no one.

– Anne Carson

Star circle me an axe.
I cannot cut myself
from any of your emblems.
It will soon be cold here,
and dark here;
the grass will lie flat
to search for its spring head.
I will bow again
in the winter of your eyes.

– Jay Wright

My imagination makes
me human and makes
me a fool; it gives me all
the world, and exiles
me from it.

– Ursula K. Le Guin

A cure without a disease.
A disease without a trace.
A mineral without a shape.
A line without extension.
Persistence without intention.
Blank without emptiness.
Border without division.

– Charles Bernstein

Alignment is perfect circuitry.
– Nika Solé

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

Wisdom is merely the movement from fighting life to embracing it.
– Rasheed Ogunlaru

There [is] meaning in pain; it [teaches] you how to survive with a modicum of grace when you [do] not get what you want.
– Anne Lamott

When people can’t handle
God any more, they turn
to religion.

– Erich Fromm

Isn’t everyone on the planet or at least everyone on the planet called me stuck between the two impulses of wanting to walk away like it never happened and wanting to be a good person in love, loving, being loved, making sense, just fine? I want to be that person, part of a respectable people, but I also want nothing to do with being people, because to be people is to be breakable, to know that your breaking is coming, any day now…
– Catherine Lacey

Most people tend toward narrowness of sympathy. They can easily become immured in narcissistic projects and forget about the needs of those outside their narrow circle.
– Martha Nussbaum

In any contest between the conscious and the unconscious, it is the unconscious which usually wins. Unconscious aims and urges are more powerful than conscious ones, because they operate surreptitiously, so we unwittingly find ourselves at their mercy.
– Liz Greene

Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power… Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become.
– Ken Kesey

Are there any rules for the making of a novel, which, if we neglect, the tale must be called by another name?
– Guy de Maupassant

Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free… They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real bind.
– Haruki Murakami

There are only two cases in which war is just: first, in order to resist the aggression of an enemy, and second, in order to help an ally who has been attacked.
– Montesquieu

Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.
– Terence McKenna

I rode my imaginary horse across the yard, up and down the slopes. I rode it all spring and into the summer even as it was steamy hot and bees buzzed. And I rode it into the fall when the leaves turned and the wind blew them into swirls like little tornadoes.
– Mary Morris

It is not the destination where you end up, but the mishaps and memories you create along the way.
– Penelope Riley

Poets, novelists, playwrights, drawing art out of their unconscious, can write anywhere. Historians require their notes, their files, their books, their familiar surroundings.
– Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it begins as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
– Mary Oliver

How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.
– Mother Teresa

In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.
– Lee Iacocca

They often say that they are defending freedom, but they are defending first of all the privileges freedom gives to them, and to them alone.
– Albert Camus

Motivation is everything. You can do the work of two people, but you can’t be two people. Instead, you have to inspire the next guy down the line and get him to inspire his people.
– Lee Iacocca

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
– Italo Calvino

When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstance, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help.
– Marcus Aurelius

It is not enough to hate fascism; one must organize against it.
– Clara Zetkin

Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth.
– Mahatma Gandhi

I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
– Jerome K. Jerome

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven’t done much today.
– Mikhail S. Gorbachev

Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.
– Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

Inspiration is enough to give expression to the tone in singing, especially when the song is without words.
– Franz Liszt

Someone struggled for your right to vote. Use it.
– Susan B. Anthony

No one is more miserable than the person who runs from the truth.
– Plato

the book was a thousand pages without commas
– Donald Hall

There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.
– Maria Ressa

Decolonization is the work of generations, but it begins wherever we refuse to forget.
– Joy Harjo

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
– Henri Bergson

If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn’t call it genius.
– Michelangelo

Journalism in a democracy…tends to neglect what’s healthy in a society while obsessing over everything that’s not. In autocracies it’s the opposite.
– Bret Stephens

Whether it took months or minutes does not
matter.
– Rick Rubin

In music, it is rather a matter of building for any truly great master a personal dwelling, in which he can live for himself as a specific ‘condition’ beyond the compass of his talents. Herein he is free, housing solely his spiritual self.
– Ernst Bloch

Writing is like breathing, it’s possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.
– Julia Cameron

It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and to start doing all the things they’d told me not to do.
– Anne Lamott

Sometimes, the poem seems like a mask that only exists because the others need something from time to time to hide their sanctified, grotesque everyday faces.
– Paul Celan

The actions of life are not so many. To go in, to go, to go in secret, to cross the Bridge of Sighs.
– Anne Carson

This is not your week to run the Universe. Next week is not looking so good either.
– Susan J. Elliott

Do they really vanish, do you think—all those conscious creatures who come into being, live for a time, and then die? Does anything simply vanish? How do you know that all things aren’t in a sense stored up in the infinite, or that this life isn’t only a prelude to a greater reality, or that the history of life in time isn’t also the story of something being prepared for eternity? I certainly don’t think of death as the end of anything other than one episode within the living soul’s greater story. And, anyway, what would infinite moral intelligence be like, and from what vantage would we be able to judge its purposes? Surely we’re not talking about some large psychological subject somewhere out there in the beyond; it’s vastly more unimaginable than that. I don’t know what to say, Phaesty. Alas, you’re asking religious questions, and none of us is competent to discuss those. We’re not theologians, we’re merely gods—to paraphrase you. I, no less than you, have no trust in dogma or creedal authority, and so here I have nothing to rely on but what I take to be reasonable intuitions and a few ambiguous signs I sometimes think I see in the patterns of cosmic existence… not to mention a few spiritual experiences… perhaps.

– David Bentley Hart, ALL THINGS ARE FULL OF GODS

TESTAMENT

So often has it been displayed to us, the hourglass
with its grains of sand drifting down,
not as an object in our world
but as a sign, a symbol, our lives
drifting down grain by grain,
sifting away – I’m sure everyone must
see this emblem somewhere in the mind.
Yet not only our lives drift down. The stuff
of ego with which we began, the mass
in the upper chamber, filters away
as love accumulates below. Now
I am almost entirely love. I have been
to the banker, the broker, those strange
people, to talk about unit trusts,
annuities, CDS, IRAS, trying
to leave you whatever I can after
I die. I’ve made my will, written
you a long letter of instructions.
I think about this continually.
What will you do? How
will you live? You can’t go back
to cocktail waitressing in the casino.
And your poetry? It will bring you
at best a pittance in our civilization,
a widow’s mite, as mine has
for forty-five years. Which is why
I leave you so little. Brokers?
Unit trusts? I’m no financier doing
the world’s great business. And the sands
in the upper glass grow few. Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper. its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below.

– Hayden Caruth

The road must eventually lead to the whole world
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road

If I were to give a simple formula or recipe for distinguishing between what I consider to be admissible plans for social reform and inadmissible Utopian blueprints, I might say: Work for the elimination of concrete evils rather than for the realization of abstract goods. Do not aim at establishing happiness by political means. Rather aim at the elimination of concrete miseries.
– Karl Popper

Do not worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older it will avoid you.
– Joey Adams

Socialism, by converting private property to public wealth, will restore society to its proper condition.
– Oscar Wilde

My natural bent certainly does not lead me to suppose that the worst is always inevitable. Yet I am committed to looking reality in the face and speaking about it without pretense… It is because I reject lies and running away that I am accused of pessimism; but this rejection implies hope — the hope that truth may be of use. And this is a more optimistic attitude than the choice of indifference, ignorance or sham.
– Simone de Beauvoir

The work of love is the work of presupposing the wish for awakening in the other. In the midst of all that two people must face and live through together, the work of love silently acknowledges in the other the wish to become free from illusion, fear, egoism, false imagination, self-deception, tension, and violence; free from the power of life itself to devour our inner possibilities. The work of love, intermediate love, presupposes not only the wish to be free from these perennial weaknesses of the human condition — but to be free for contact with another quality of being in oneself, a conscious energy that is meant to penetrate the mind, heart, and body of every human being.
– Jacob Needleman

We need a definition of spirit and spirituality that is separate from religion and religious education.
– Amelia Richardson Dress

Spirit is the thing within us that makes us us. Spirituality is the way we connect our ‘inner us’ to everything else, including other people’s inner ‘usness.’ This understanding helps us think creatively about how to approach spirituality while respecting a child’s home culture. It also enables us to clearly identify our goal, in order to determine if we are achieving it. While it is extremely difficult to measure the ‘spirit’ of a child in the same way we might measure physical or academic growth, there are indicators of spirituality that we can look for in our classrooms and the children. “It is my belief that the thing which we should cultivate in our teachers is more the spirit than the mechanical skill of the scientist.

– Maria Montessori

You left when I said I was curious. I never said I was brave
– Leonard Cohen, So Long Marianne

No friend or animal wants to be interpreted, even though it may cry for understanding.
– James Hillman

The truth of the world is exhausting.
– Don DeLillo

Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home — not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.
– Ellen Meloy

There’s no understanding fate
– Albert Camus

Future generations will look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad.
– Kurt Vonnegut

A mystical experience would be wasted on me. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me. One Calvinist notion deeply implanted in me is that there are two sides to your encounter with the world. You don’t simply perceive something that is statically present, but in fact there is a visionary quality to all experience. It means something because it is addressed to you. This is the individualism that you find in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. You can draw from perception the same way a mystic would draw from a vision.

It’s not an acquired skill. It’s a skill that we’re born with that we lose. We learn not to do it.
– Marilynne Robinson

A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.
– Diane Arbus

It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.
– John Green

What relation has the poetry of joy, proclamation, affirmation, to
politics?

I would answer:

A poetry of anguish, a poetry of anger, of rage, a poetry that, from literal or deeply imagined experience, depicts and denounces perennial injustice and cruelty in their cur- rent forms, and in our peculiar time warns of the unprecedented perils that confront us, can be truly a high poetry, as well wrought as any other. It has the obvious functions of raising consciousness and articulating emotions for people who have not the gift of expression. But we need also the poetry of praise, of love for the world, the vision of the potential for good even in our species which has so messed up the rest of creation, so fouled its own nest. If we lose the sense of contrast, of the opposites to all the grime and gore, the torture, the banality of the computerized apocalypse, we lose the reason for trying to work for redemptive change. Not as an escape-not instead of but as well as developing our consciousness of what Man is doing to the world and how we as individuals are implicated—we need more than ever before to contemplate daily (and to make, if we are so fortunate as to be capable of it works of praise, works that by power of imagination put us in mind-re- mind us—of all that makes the earth’s survival, and our own lives, worth struggling for. To imagine goodness and beauty, to point them out as we perceive them in art, nature, or our fellows, and to create works that celebrate them—are essential incentives to finding a route out of our apparent impasse. A passionate love of life must be quickened if we are to find the energy to stop the accelerating tumble (like a fallen man rolling over and over down a mountain) towards annihilation. To sing awe-to breathe out praise and celebration-is as fundamental an impulse as to lament.
– Denise Levertov

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 m 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, In the Shelter – Finding a home in the world

We huge many-celled creatures have to coordinate millions of different oscillation frequencies, and interactions among frequencies, in our bodies and our environment. Most of the coordination is effected by synchronizing the pulses, by getting the beats into a master rhythm, by entrainment…

Being in sync—internally and with your environment—makes life easy. Getting out of sync is always uncomfortable or disastrous. Then there are the rhythms of other human beings. Like the two pendulums, though through more complex processes, two people together can mutually phase-lock. Successful human relationship involves entrainment—getting in sync. If it doesn’t, the relationship is either uncomfortable or disastrous…

Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in—become part of the action.

– Ursula K. Le Guin

A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possible, and as cautiously, because it knows its girth and the tight confines of the china shop it’s blundering into. And it knows that no matter how well prepared it is – no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny – the place it is headed for is going to very different from the place it imagined. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one’s intent, equals the evil one will do.
– George Saunders

Dreams and restless thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the twinkling stars at night, from the sun’s melting rays. Dreams and a restlessness of the soul came to him.
– Herman Hesse

So what can they tell us,
the writers of dreambooks,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors
with couches for analyses—
if anything fits,
it’s accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings at times
even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.

– Wisława Szymborska

Your parents,
Grandparents ….
All constituted in Yourself.
Love Yourself,
Revere Yourself.

– a Zen Harvest

Clarity

After the event the rockslide
realized,
in a still diversity of completion,
grain and fissure,
declivity
&
force of upheaval,
whether rain slippage,
ice crawl, root
explosion or
stream erosive undercut:

well I said it is a pity:
one swath of sight will never
be the same: nonetheless,
this
shambles has
relived a bind, a taut of twist,
revealing streaks &
scores of knowledge
now obvious and quiet.

– A.R. Ammons

Lethargy

It smiles to see me
Still in my bathrobe.

It sits in my lap
And will not let me rise.

Now it is kissing my eyes.
Arms enfold me, arms

Pale with a thick down.
It seems I am falling asleep

To the sound of a story
Being read me.

This is the story.
Weeks have passed

Since first I lifted my hand
To set it down.

– Donald Justice

The paradox of civilization is that the more one is anxious to survive, the less survival is worth the trouble.
– Alan Watts

If we don’t change
we don’t grow.
If we don’t grow
we aren’t really living.

– Gail Sheehy

And if you missed a day,
here was always the next,
and if you missed a year,
it didn’t matter,
the hills weren’t going anywhere,
the thyme and rosemary kept
coming back,
the sun kept rising,
the bushes kept bearing fruit

– Louise Glück

One third of the food produced in the world gets wasted, while one in three people do not have sufficient food. This is not a failure of agriculture – it is a failure of the Human Heart.
– Sadhguru

Everybody can’t be done to all the same. Everybody is not ready for the same thing.
– George MacDonald

The only real failure in science is pretending you have all the answers.
– Prof. Feynman

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from … my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home?

– Psyche (C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces)

I would come back not hide be in motion
I would attach myself to home again
I would be sister mother lover brother
I would be father I would be infant animal awesome
I would suffer & become extinct again
I would relight the earth with love

– Anne Waldman

I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
– JD Salinger

The dimensions of what we have fucked up in this country are beyond any coherent explanation.
– Hunter S Thompson

If today was your last day in this body, would the opinions of your mind make any difference to you? Why not then live like this?
– Mooji

Why resist change when it’s the main source of your growth?

Remember – change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end.

– Robin Sharma

It is the bell that moves, but you who ring. It is the sun that shines, but you who see. The nourishment is in the meat, but the taste is in you. Fire gives or creates warmth, but it is you who feel it.

– Joseph Joubert

When you become stabilized in your Self, the continuous commentary of the mind will stop. The mind becomes silent as the thought-flow ceases.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

Memory and forgetfulness are the mother and father of the muses. True knowledge is composed of these two things. Or: it holds a riddle in its hand. This riddle is called forgetfulness.
– Joseph Joubert

Change yourself, and you have done your part in changing the world.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

Energy mastery means that you stop taking other people’s stuff on. You use your gifts to transform and not absorb. And you raise your vibration so your baseline experience does all of the above for you.
– Nika Solé

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs that properly concern them.
– Paul Valéry

searching the thesaurus
deep winter

– Jennifer Corpe

Create inner beauty,
a beauty which is not of the body,
not even of the mind,
but of your consciousness.
And this is the mystery:
once your consciousness has grace,
your whole body becomes beautiful,
suffused with the inner.

– Osho

How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? And the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?
– Proverbs 1:22

We have to allow ourselves to realize that we are complete fools; otherwise, we have nowhere to begin.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Mystical explanations are thought to be profound. In fact, they are not even superficial.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

My emotional life has always insisted that I should have an intimate friend and a hated enemy.

I have always been able to provide myself afresh with both, and it has not infrequently happened that the ideal situation of childhood has been so completely reproduced that friend and enemy have come together in a single individual – though not, of course, both at once or with constant oscillations, as may have been the case in my early childhood.

– Sigmund Freud

Feel our burly backs against
the childhoods.
There is no Canada
buttered in snow
like there used to be. Sister
has no burden.

– Judy Thorn, Fealty

Do not be satisfied with
the stories that come before you.
Unfold your own myth.

– Rumi

Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.
– C.G. Jung

The change in my attitude toward dreams involved a change of method; the new technique was one that could take account of all the various wider aspects of a dream. A story told by the conscious mind has a beginning, a development, and an end, but the same is not true of a dream. Its dimensions in time and space are quite different; to understand it you must examine it from every aspect—just as you may take an unknown object in your hands and turn it over and over until you are familiar with every detail of its shape.
– C. G. Jung

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.
– Cheryl Strayed

What we dream is what we really are, everything else, because of the simple fact that it exists, belongs to the world and to everyone else.
– Fernando Pessoa

I choose the sea in spite of shipwrecks
– Nadia Tueni

Eventually one has to come to appreciate and to give more time to being quiet and to meditation. On the other hand, one has to acknowledge that the whole idea of search entails a process. When one speaks of meditation, one has to take into the account the preparation to be able to meditate. Most people’s minds and feelings run away with them. We associate rather than think. We react rather than feel in a true way. And to be able to meditate means to be able to withdraw part of this associative thinking. This requires a concentration and an ability to be here in this moment of now, listening, letting something enter which we ordinarily block away from ourselves.
– Bill Segal

I don’t know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.
– Jeanette Winterson

If the door were open, I’d listen to creek water / And think I heard voices from long ago, / distinct, and calling me home. / The past becomes such a mirror–we’re in it, and then we’re not.
– Charles Wright

Sometimes when he has fallen asleep face upward in the sun, his dreams have taken on this quality of supernatural bright darkness.
– John Crowley

I confess that I felt something closer to exultation than fear. Something inexplicable was happening. Forged in Jesuit logic and tempered in the cold bath of science, I nevertheless understood at that second the ancient obsession of the God-fearing for another kind of fear: the thrill of exorcism, the mindless world of dervish possession, the puppet-dance ritual of Tarot, and the almost erotic surrender of séance, speaking in tongues, and Zen Gnostic trance. I realized at that instant just how surely the affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis – the God of Abraham.
– Dan Simmons

Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.
– Frances Hodgson Burnett

Why was it, she sometimes wondered, that in dreams we can’t do the simplest things? Like a crying puppy is standing on some broken glass and you want to pick it up and brush the shards off its pads but you can’t because you’re balancing a ball on your head. Or you’re driving and there’s this old guy on crutches and you go, to Mr. Feder, your Driver’s Ed teacher, Should I swerve? And he’s like, Uh, probably. But then you hear this big clunk and Feder makes a negative mark in his book.
– George Saunders

Earth, give me back your pure gifts,
the towers of silence which rose
from the solemnity of their roots.
I want to go back to being what I have not been,
and learn to go back from such deeps
that amongst all natural things
I could live or not live; it does not matter
to be one stone more, the dark stone,
the pure stone which the river bears away.

– Pablo Neruda

All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.

– Ursula K. LeGuin

I put off a thousand plans till tomorrow, hoping it is not yet too late. The tree that carries my coffin in itself still rocks birds’ nests on its branches.
– František Hrubín

The masseur said:
The sound for the throat is Ah.
The sound for the heart is Who.
– Richard McCann

That’s the whole game: Becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf. […] How emphatically can you like what you like? How long are you willing to work on something, to ensure that every bit of it gets infused with some trace of your radical preference?
– George Saunders

Let’s contemplate the sky. Forget the crazy hammering heartbeat, don’t listen to it, don’t start counting, remember that there is a clever way of breathing that conserves oxygen as if you’re lying below the surface of a body of water breathing through a very thin straw but you can breathe through it if you’re careful, if you don’t panic; one breath and then another and then another, isn’t that the story of all lives? careers? Just a matter of breathing. Of course it is. But contemplate the sky, it’s there to be contemplated.

A mild shock to see it so blank, blue, a thin airy ghostly blue, no clouds to disguise its emptiness. You are beginning to feel not only weightless but near-bodiless, lying on the earth like a scrap of paper about to be blown off. Two dimensions and you’d imagined you were three! And there’s the sky rolling away forever, into infinity — if ‘infinity’ can be ‘rolled into’ —and the forlorn truth is, that’s where you’re going too. And the lovely blue isn’t even blue, is it? isn’t even there, is it? a mere optical illusion, isn’t it? no matter what art has urged you to believe.

– Joyce Carol Oates

The brain is a belief engine… It relies on two processes: patternicity and agenticity. It finds meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. It infuses patterns with meaning, and imagines intention and agency in inanimate objects and chance occurrences… We believe before we reason. Once beliefs are formed, we seek out confirmatory arguments and evidence to justify them. We ignore contrary evidence or make up rationalizations to explain it away. We do not like to admit we are wrong. We seldom change our minds…
– Michael Sherman

Facing everything, let go and attain stability
– Taigen Dan Leighton

When you listen to someone, you should give up all your preconceived ideas and your subjective opinions; you should just listen to him, just observe what his way is. We put very little emphasis on right and wrong or good and bad. We just see things as they are with him, and accept them. This is how we communicate with each other. Usually when you listen to some statement, you hear it as a kind of echo of yourself. You are actually listening to your own opinion. If it agrees with your opinion you may accept it, but if it does not, you will reject it or you may not even really hear it.
– Shunryu Suzuki

Waves are the practice of the water.
– Shunryu Suzuki

Believe, Believe
by Bob Kaufman

Believe in this. Young apple seeds,
In blue skies, radiating young breast,
Not in blue-suited insects,
Infesting society’s garments.
Believe in the swinging sounds of jazz,
Tearing the night into intricate shreds,
Putting it back together again,
In cool logical patterns,
Not in the sick controllers,
Who created only the Bomb.
Let the voices of dead poets
Ring louder in your ears
Than the screechings mouthed
In mildewed editorials.
Listen to the music of centuries,
Rising above the mushroom time

The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony, and all things take place by strife.
– Heraclitus

Plenty of things in real life are superlatively uninteresting; so that it is one-half of art to select from realities those which contain possibilities of poetry.
– Honoré de Balzac

There are many people who think they want to be matadors, only to find themselves in the ring with two thousand pounds of bull bearing down on them, and then discover that what they really wanted was to wear tight pants and hear the crowd roar.
– Jerry Farber

Smell the sea and feel the sky.
– Van Morrison

Online, all impersonal worldly events are experienced as intensely personal, even if we don’t play a role in them. We internalize everything, struggle to see beyond ourselves, to see the mechanisms that are not centered on us. The internet is a claustrophobia of interiority that only appears to be ours. It “doesn’t work by suppression, or repression, but through a participative process … [It] doesn’t represent or even ‘manipulate’ public opinion but substitutes for it.” All actions are reactions, predictable reactions, endless nervous systems swaying to the same rhythm.
– Bogna Konior

Whatever happens,
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
into the lasting world
and will not leave,
whatever happens.
– Wendell Berry

Fantastic to feel how my poem grows
while I myself shrink.
It grows, it takes my place.
It pushes me aside.
It throws me out of the nest.
The poem is ready.

– Tomas Tranströmer

I shall pass this way but once; any good that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being; let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.
– Etienne de Grellet

Stop whatever you are
doing for a moment and
ask yourself: Am I afraid
of death because I won’t
be able to do this anymore?
– Marcus Aurelius

Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.
– Jane Austen

Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. … You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.
– James Baldwin

Oh, the clownish stupidity of thinking that we can figure out what existence is and how it came about. Spoiler: study Kant if you want to appreciate the naivety of our efforts.
– Martin Butler

When everything is social, suddenly nothing is.
– Jean Baudrillard

Black holes are fascinating because they don’t erase information-instead, they link it together.
– Nassim Haramein

Most of the people I admire, they usually smell funny and don’t get out much. It’s true. Most of them are either dead or not feeling well.
– Tom Waits

If you want to solve any problem in life do not try to solve it verbally. Become quiet.
– Robert Adams

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
– William Faulkner

I would like this poem
to be a machine.
Concise, metallic,
a counting apparatus.
A means to keep each moment
contained and fixed

– Cynthia Cruz

There’s a point where psychology becomes a spiritual journey. You have to rebuild rotten foundations, deal with the negative mother & negative father. But once the depths are reconstructed, you can’t go on wallowing in negativity. That’s not only boring, it’s destructive.
– Marion Woodman

Away eastward the sun was rising red out of the mists that lay thick on the world. Touched with gold and red the autumn trees seemed to be sailing rootless in a shadowy sea.

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

You know your vibe is high when everything around you is glitching.
– Nika Solé

a thousand year old cedar
held tight by a windstorm
dark moon

– Basho

Out of the unconscious flows the well of life, and what you don’t accept in yourself naturally falls back into that well and poisons it.

– Carl Jung

The average age of a U.S. Senator is 64.

The average age of a U.S. House Rep is 57.

The average age in America is 39.

These people squatting in seats for decades can’t accurately

relate to, or represent, the needs of Americans.

We need term limits.

– Melanie D’Arrigo

Solitude cannot be a mere preference, Thomas Merton points out; it has to be a calling and a need.
– Pico Iyer

Once you create a self-justifying storyline, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples.
– Pema Chödrön

Ultimately, you are not even the observer
– Nisargadatta

Once with Ingeborg we talked about old age. (…) Wouldn’t you like to live together when we are old? (…) Then her eyes radiated happiness and years went by.
– Fleur Jaeggy

yellow leaves scattering
beyond the blue sky
cloudless, stainless

– Kyonin

Memorial Day
the shadows of tourists
on the wet sand

– Bruce Ross

I know that humans want and need exactly the same thing: to belong, to feel safe and respected. I also know that we don’t live long. And that dancing almost always turns out to be a good idea.
– Anne Lamott

Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.
– Yousuf Karsh

True reasoning is only possible when there is no motivation.
– @naval

Do not envy those who seem to be naturally gifted; it is often a curse, as such types rarely learn the value of diligence and focus, and they pay for this later in life.
– Robert Greene

Our world looks very stressful and difficult and lacks joy through the lens of our ego, because we see ourselves as the victim, and everyone else the villain.
Reminder: Your ego is not your amigo!
– Cy Wakeman

Not even parents obsessed with daily labors
watched over my childhood in the native village
as the well-digger did,
the man with a soul brimming with silence
and hidden, clear waters,
from whom I learned the poetry of depths
and the alphabet of listening.

– Constantin Severin

Only a fool goes with their first thought. A wise person takes time to contemplate.
– Ryan Holiday

We pass between sea and sky with unaccountable, humiliating ease, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, no above or below, here or there, now or then, with only the feeble conventions of language, our contrived principles, and our love of one another’s light to keep our own light from going out; abandon any one of them, and we dissolve in darkness like salt in water.
– Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

march bluster
the dragon kite
rattles its tail
– Darrell Byrd

Energy mastery is preventative medicine. It keeps your body from having to deliver the message that you’re avoiding.
– Nika Solé

One begins to know solitude when one hears the silence of things. Then one knows the secret buried in the stone and reawakened in the plant, Nature’s hidden as well as open ways. The odd thing about solitude is that it knows no inanimate objects. All objects have a language which we can decipher only in total silence. There is a burning solitude in which all is life. The spirit is asleep in nature, and I would like to interpret the dreams of plants.

Shadows too have their life of mystery. There haven’t been enough poets in this world, for so many things have remained undisclosed, estranged from their own meaning!

– E. M. Cioran (translated by Ilinca Zarifopol Johnston)

Just relieve (your) mind of the job of making sure that everyone and everything will be the way you need them to be so that (you) can feel better inside.
– Michael Singer

Suffering is an idea that there is an ‘I’ that doesn’t like what is happening.
– Jac O’Keeffe

teach the next generation that rest isn’t something you earn after grinding yourself into dust. that their worth isn’t measured by their productivity. that “I’m tired” is a complete sentence. break the cycle that taught you to apologize for being human.
– @MichellCClark

In our age, science has extended life expectancy, technology has brought continents closer, and knowledge has opened horizons once thought unimaginable. Therefore, allowing millions of human beings to live—and die—stricken by hunger is a collective failure, an ethical lapse, and an historical culpability.
– Pope Leo XIV

Conquer the angry with love, not with anger. True strength lies not in fighting back, but in staying calm and kind when the world tests your heart.
– Dhammapada 223

I hadn’t been back in that fair brick buzz of a place for twenty years. I had been a young man when I lived in Cambridge attending divinity school. I had dreams. I wanted to be a poet.
– Spencer Reece on Louise Glück

Let us be carriers of the gospel. The gospel of the revolutionary, brown-skinned Palestinian Jew who made it very clear that he didn’t come to be status quo. He wasn’t a chaplain of the empire but a prophet of God.
– Liz Theoharis and Dr. Charon Hribar

autumn colors —
late apple harvest
in full swing

– Mueder Krieger

You need not cease thinking. Only think of the root of the thoughts; seek it and find it. When that is found, the thoughts cease of their own accord.
– Ramana Maharshi

We spend life trying to become —
and miss the joke:
we are nothing pretending to be something.

– Jiddu Krishnamurti

Life,
although it may only
be an accumulation of anguish,
is dear to me,
and I will defend it.

– Mary Shelley

Perhaps you’ve never lived or studied or loved or believed / (For it’s possible to do the motions of all this without doing any of it)
– Fernando Pessoa

Awakening is like a
bottomless well;
When an individual falls into it,
The individual disappears.
– Wu Hsin

“So Rinpoche,” she asked, “if these grand old living Buddha-lamas are as perfectly enlightened, awakened, omniscient, skillful, powerful, and compassionate as we think they are, why don’t they just wake us up from the sleep of delusion?”

“Who’s asleep?” the master replied.

– Lama Surya Das

How to Make a Life

It’s not too late. The sun still rises
& so do you, hips wide with desire.
Learn another language. Be humbled
by your ignorance. Listen more
than you speak. Become fluent
in silence. Feast on poetry. Befriend
those unfazed by your battlescarred
palms. Divorce shame & self-loathing.
Let your sequoia heart be licked by fire—
you too are wired for survival.

– Danielle Coffyn

Every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist.
– Walter Brueggemann

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.
– John Maeda

The extreme state of the human realm is that you are stuck in an absolute traffic jam of discursive thoughts.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Life’s just a bunch of accidents, connected by one perfect end.
– Daniel C. Tomas