You are a songbird right this minute. Today you’re a better songbird than you was yesterday, ’cause you know a little bit more, you seen a little bit more, and all you got to do is just park yourself under a shade tree, or maybe at a desk, if you still got a desk, and haul off and write down some way you think this old world could be fixed so’s it would be twice as level and half as steep, and take the knocks out of it, and grind the valves, and tighten the rods, and take up the bearings, and put a boot in the casing, and make the whole trip a little bit smoother, and a little bit more like a trip instead of a trap.
– Woody Guthrie
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between being optimistic and being hopeful. I would say that I’m a hopeful person, although not necessarily optimistic. Here’s how I would describe it. The pessimist would say, “It’s going to be a terrible winter; we’re all going to die.” The optimist would say, “Oh, it’ll be all right; I don’t think it’ll be that bad.” The hopeful person would say, “Maybe someone will still be alive in February, so I’m going to put some potatoes in the root cellar just in case.” And that’s where I lodge myself on this spectrum. Hope is a mode of survival. I think hope is a mode of resistance. Hope is how parents get through the most difficult parts of their kids’ teenaged years. Hope is how a cancer patient endures painful treatments. Hope is how people on a picket line keep showing up. If you look at hope that way, it’s not a state of mind but something we actually do with our hearts and our hands, to navigate ourselves through the difficult passages. I think that as a fiction writer—or any kind of writer—hope is a gift I can try to cultivate.
– Barbara Kingsolver
But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologico-cosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities. From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic.
– Peter Wessel Zapffe
Where does mercy exist? –
by Jess Housty (Cúagilákv)
When the power cuts out, you can hear
the snowfall. We ask who needs stew, sweet tea,
a load of firewood or a little gasoline.
People blend against the arctic outflows to love one another.
We are all speaking quietly
as though to avoid waking others,
but the truth is all of us are wide-eyed in the darkness,
seeking each other out for comfort.
The hum comes from all around me now:
some of us are speaking to our neighbours, some to our lovers, some to our children and some to our ancestors.
But we all talk low and slow to make the night into a ritual of connection.
This is how we utter ceremony,
a ceremony builds bridges,
across the darkness – a blanket gifted or loaned,
an armful of kindling, a prayer.
Really wish meditation teachers would finally let go of all the “Sit comfortably by a peaceful lotus pond” aesthetics, because what we’re actually called to do now is help people work with their own minds-and work with others—in the midst of a world we’ve set on fire.
– Ethan Nichtern
There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
– W.E.B. DuBois
It is curious, too, that though the modern man in the street is a robot, and incapable of love he is capable of an endless, grinding, nihilistic hate:
that is the only strong feeling he is capable of; and therein lies the danger of robot-democracy and all the men in the street, they move in a great grind of hate, slowly but inevitably.
– D. H. Lawrence
Ah City!
I would tell you how it was to
stalk your streets!
So young! Anonymous!
– Lew Welch
…we can only
Walk in temperate London, our educated city,
Wishing to cry as freely as they did who died
In the Age of Faith. We have our loneliness
And our regret with which to build an eschatology.
– Peter Porter
Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out
to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married
to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do
if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on, cheerfully enough,
this and every crisping day,
though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.
– Mary Oliver
THE VISIBLE WORLD
Lilac willing to be beautiful. Wild
blackberries, wild lack—
now my tenderness is full
of briars. The light like velvet.
It was a time in the world.
The bluey lake dimming, the rhubarb.
You know-that simple.
Despite everything, there is still a self in me
who worships the visible world
and doesn’t take it back.
Egrets. Milkweed. Milk.
I am being here, right now.
– Leila Chatti
Forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of understanding.
– Proverbs 9:6
These memories won’t get any bigger,
will they?
– Alice Fulton
It is impossible to control things from outside. To change your world all you have to do is manage your thoughts and feelings on the inside of you, and then your whole world changes.
– Rhonda Byrne
It is inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.
– Clarice Lispector
In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone.
– Hunter S. Thompson
All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit, is to stop seeking something more, or better, or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.
– Adyashanti
But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness.
– D.H. Lawrence
a bottle stuffed
with wildflowers
an autumn gift
– Issa
One Way or Another
by Maya C. Popa
it is you who leaves. So I set out
to read for signs of imminence,
the same river twice stepped in.
Morning rises gently on the harbor;
our letters come disguised as life.
We know the score but fracture
on fact. We sign a dotted line
made out of promise—the pipes
in November clanging on with heat,
the window left at night a little open.
I love you; then what? Hands
suddenly alive. I plead with time,
adamant, remorseless. So we begin
in earnest; what then? I plead
with time, adamant, remorseless.
Hands suddenly alive. I love you;
then what? The pipes in November
clanging on with heat, the window
left at night a little open. We sign
a dotted line made out of promise—
we know the score but fracture
on fact. Our letters come disguised
as life; morning rises gently on
the harbor. So I set out to read
for signs of imminence, the same
river twice stepped in. One way
or another, it is you who leaves.
React to no one, react to nothing. Do not react to the world. Do not even react to your own body. Do not even react to your own thoughts. Learn to become the witness. Learn to be quiet.
– Robert Adams
Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Happiness is simply the knowing of our own Being – the natural, effortless and innate condition of our Self, when it is no longer pulled into an imaginary past or projected into an imaginary future by resistance and seeking.
– Rupert Spira
If you are psychologically naïve you may believe that you are perceiving, rather than projecting.
– Murray Stein
The most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man; without failure, no ethics; for a being who, from the very start, would be an exact co-incidence with himself, in a perfect plenitude, the notion of having-to-be would have no meaning. One does not offer an ethics to a God.
– Simone de Beauvoir
MARVELOUS SHARING
Every time, it’s a miracle. Here are all these people, full of heartache and hatred or desire, and we all have our troubles and the school year is filled with vulgarity and triviality and consequence, and there are all these teachers and kids of every shape and size, and there’s this life we’re struggling through full of shouting and tears and laughter and fights and break-ups and dashed hopes and unexpected luck–– it all disappears, just like that, when the choir begins to sing. Everyday life vanishes into song, you are suddenly overcome with a feeling of brotherhood, of deep solidarity, even love, and it diffuses the ugliness of everyday life into a spirit of perfect communion…
Every time, it’s the same thing… everyone singing together, this marvelous sharing. I’m no longer myself, I am just one part of a sublime whole, to which the others also belong, and I always wonder at such moments why this cannot be the rule of everyday life, instead of being an exceptional moment, during a choir. When the music stops, everyone applauds, their faces all lit up, the choir radiant. It is so beautiful. In the end, I wonder if the true movement of the world might not be “a voice raised in song.”
– Muriel Barbery
YOU ARE EVERYTHING
Take a good look at yourself.
You are already saved.
You are originally Buddha.
You are overflowing with happiness and glory.
To talk of paradise or heaven is
to be talking in your sleep.
Take a good look at yourself.
Transcend time and space,
and you’ll see that you are eternal,
you are infinite.
Should the universe collapse and disappear,
you would still be immovable.
You are all forms and all formlessness
in the universe, the universe itself.
You are the twinkling stars and
the dancing butterflies – you are everything.
Take a good look at yourself.
All truths are within you.
To look for truth outside yourself is
to search for water outside of the ocean.
Take a good look at yourself…
Forget your selfishness and
use all your energies to help others.
If you remove all traces of greed and desire,
the Eye of the Heart will open up and
you’ll see yourself as you really are,
as pure gold.
– Seong Cheol Sunim
Let’s put down at least some of these gadgets and spend a little time just being ourselves. One of the essential problems of our society is that we have a tendency, amid all the craziness that surrounds us, to lose sight of what is truly human in ourselves, and that includes our own individual needs – those very special, mostly nonmaterial things that would fulfill us, give meaning to our lives, enlarge us, and enable us to more easily embrace those around us…
We need to reduce the speed limits of our lives. We need to savor the trip. Leave the cellphone at home every once in a while. Try kissing more and tweeting less. And stop talking so much.
Listen.
Other people have something to say, too. And when they don’t, that glorious silence that you hear will have more to say to you than you ever imagined. That is when you will begin to hear your song. That’s when your best thoughts take hold, and you become really you.
– Bob Herbert
I do not believe that our sexuality, gender expression and bodies can be liberated without making a ferocious mobilization against imperialist war and racism an integral part of our struggle.
– Leslie Feinberg
We’re a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that’s all. You can’t change history. History is happening to us now.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.
– Eckhart Tolle
The system wants us to be sad and we have to come to be happy to resist it.
– Gilles Deleuze
Poetry is inherently political; there’s not enough money changing hands for it to be anything else.
– Ramsey Tawfick
I wrote this letter to you to curb my consumption. To stop my fingers growing fatter. Love in the time of quantities, I begin to eat my pen.
– Ramsey Tawfick
The next life will be darker
than this so we must
prepare a light.
– Franz Wright
I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
I write prose with a poet’s head.
– Lucy Sante
November 4.
Paralysis again. How I waste my days. I feel a terrific blocking and chilling go
through me like anesthesia.
– Sylvia Plath
Cool how writing poetry requires turning off the part of your brain that can tell if it’s good
– @ratlimit
I’m a night writer and a binge writer—I could go sixteen, twenty hours. In those moments I am just not aware of having a body. My thoughts are elsewhere. I forget to eat. I’m barely functional as a human, my brain’s doing a little extra.
– Mary Robison
autumn wind
a couple red leaves
show an old caterpillar
how to fly
– @NJBarico
How do we write joy without all the implied exclamation marks, the gooey language, the purpling of our prose? How do we make, of joy, a story that is alerting, alive, and credible?
– Beth Kephart
We have to remember the virtues of our ancestors instead of justifying ourselves by carefully remembering their vices.
– Manly P. Hall
Most everything has been done before.
– Rosmarie Waldrop
One of the first signs of a saint may well be the fact that other people do not know what to make of him.
– Thomas Merton
The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence.’ There is no such mode of existence; every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.
– Alfred North Whitehead
We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.
– Teju Cole
If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child’s soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man’s wisdom for the child’s.
– Johan Huizinga
When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder. Evil is that which kills spirit. There are various essential attributes of life – particularly human life – such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy, will. It is possible to kill or attempt to kill one of these attributes without actually destroying the body. Thus we may “break” a horse or even a child without harming a hair on its head. Erich Fromm was acutely sensitive to this fact when he broadened the definition of necrophilia to include the desire of certain people to control others-to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredectibility and originalty, to keep them in line. Distinguishing it from a “biophilic” person, one who appreciates and fosters the variety of life forms and the uniqueness of the individual, he demonstrated a “necrophilic character type,” whose aim it is to avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming others into obedient automatons, robbing them of their humanity. Evil then, for the moment, is the force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness.
– M. Scott Peck
A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate “need” for “stuff.” A mall—the shops—are places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthy’s taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary, instead. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power.
– Caitlin Moran
To be away from home, yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world — such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.
– Charles Baudelaire
My memory rummaged through that heap of insignificant recollections that we haphazardly cast aside once our attention has judged them unfit for use — yet which, through some old thrifty habit of our subconscious, end up stacked away in the vast, empty chambers of remembrance, as in the attic of an old country house where three-legged chairs, dented buckets, cracked dishes, chipped jugs, and mismatched books take refuge, to endure quietly in their serene uselessness.
And sometimes it happens that we stumble among the innumerable castoffs of our memory, irritated or moved to discover there an object, an image that we would never have thought to keep.
– Marcel Brion
There is the inner life, which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time, consciously or unconsciously like the heartbeat. There is also the thinking process by which we break into the inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it. That process of raid, or persuasion or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we do not somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of man who cannot fish.
– Ted Hughes
The endless expanses of the human brain are crumpled to the size of a fist.
In April the swallow returns to last year’s nest under the guttering of this very barn in this very parish.
She flies from Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks over two continents, makes for precisely this vanishing dot in the landmass.
And the man who catches the signals from a whole life in a few ordinary chords for five strings,
who makes a river flow through the eye of a needle,
is a stout young gentleman from Vienna known to his friends as “The Mushroom,” who slept with his glasses on
and stood at his writing desk punctually in the morning.
And then the wonderful centipedes of his manuscript were set in motion.
– Tomas Tranströmer
In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
– George Orwell
They were both so scared they weren’t talking at all, which made me feel the kind of shame you know you’re not going to cure by saying sorry, and where the only thing to do is: go out, get more shame.
– George Saunders
Your voice I know. It had me terrified. When I hear it in dreams, from time to time all my life, it sounds like a taunt—but dreams distort sound, for they send it over many waters. During these hard days, I, a pilgrim, am giving my consideration to this. I trudge along the bottom of the river and the questioning goes on in me. What are we made of but hunger and rage? His heels rise and fall in front of me. How surprised I am to be entangled in the knowledge of some other animal.
– Anne Carson
“This isn’t about what is,” said Mr. Nancy.
“It’s about what people think is. It’s all imaginary anyway. That’s why it’s important. People only fight over imaginary things.”
– Neil Gaiman
To live in the world of creation—to get into it and stay in it—to frequent it and haunt it—to think intensely and fruitfully-to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation-this is the only thing.!
– Henry James
The writer’s role is to menace the public’s conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle for social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.
– Rod Serling
I’m alive. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really.
– Ray Bradbury
…I floated on my back, trying to pick out constellations I knew in the confusing white spatter of stars: Lyra, Cassiopeia the queen, whiplash Scorpius with the twin stings in his tail, all the friendly childhood patterns that had twinkled me to sleep from the glow-in-the-dark planetarium stars on my bedroom ceiling back in New York. Now, transfigured—cold and glorious like deities with their disguises flung off—it was as if they’d flown through the roof and into the sky to assume their true, celestial homes.
– Donna Tartt
I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.
– Gaston Bachelard
Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.
– Robert Wright
If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously—as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.
– George Saunders
What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea.
It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.
– Joseph Campbell
Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes.
– Joan Didion
So, which is it: did you leave your little room because you’ve made a habit of getting drenched, or because you don’t know which you like more: rain on the windowpane or rain on your hair?”
– Danilo Kiš
…it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.
– Helen (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre)
The tribe, an extended form of a family of blood relatives, is exploded by print, and is replaced by an association of men homogeneously trained to be individuals.
– McLuhan
He Tells Her
He tells her that the earth is flat –
He knows the facts, and that is that.
In altercations fierce and long
She tries her best to prove him wrong.
But he has learned to argue well.
He calls her arguments unsound
And often asks her not to yell.
She cannot win. He stands his ground.
The planet goes on being round.
– Wendy Cope
I wanted to write a book that was beyond
what usually gets communicated in language.
– Claudia Rankine
Even the absence of language – the gaps between
or beside words – come to seem like glyphs.
– Maggie Millner
People will secretly learn from you and never
tell you how much you’ve influenced them.
Keep going.
– Rumi
get your dopamine from what you create not what you consume.
– @isabelunraveled
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
– John Steinbeck
So rapidly does the ‘common good,’ without God behind it, sink into a mere blown—up projection of each man’s private desire! So readily does ‘the welfare of society’ become a cloak for the seizure of power by an individual or a clique!
– Joy Davidman
You have to talk,
otherwise your
head turns into a
cemetery.
– Chuck Palahniuk
I simply do not believe this world anymore. Not the outrage. Not the distortions. Not the people in any of the positions. I believe only the call of the divine that steers me in a completely different direction.
– Nika Solé
You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares and I would not. I think it’s a bad bargain.
– Cormac McCarthy
Receive my instruction, and not silver; and knowledge rather than choice gold. For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it.
– Proverbs 8:10-11
Some of our most powerful emotions, especially those connected with loss, are not beautiful, and Apollo does not necessarily make them beautiful. He makes them bearable. The object is not to create something pretty, but to offer one’s grief to the god, naked and unashamed. This is different from wallowing in it, which is not an act of offering. Grief can be horrific, but expressing it in this way changes the way we experience it. Feelings of grief are not usually beautiful. They are more often savage and black and brutal.
– Liz Greene
No painter could show what Flaubert has the Queen of Sheba say to the hermit: “I am not a woman, I am the world.”
– Hans Blumenberg
Wake up. Become free. There is no one for you to attach yourself to. There’s no one for you to worship. There’s no one for you to be afraid of outside of yourself, for you have created all these things yourself, out of your mind.
– Robert Adams
Our greatest need is to be silent before this great God with the appetite and with the tongue, for the only language he hears is the silent language of love.
– St. John of the Cross
External crisis are the symptoms, the cause is unconsciousness and chaotic mind. The aim of meditation is not to cure the symptoms, but to resolve the cause. Meditation can transform human beings.
– Brahma Kumaris
What’s interesting to me is that so many people have such a shoddy knowledge of history.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
From the outside, you seem mature with a philosopher’s mind. But inside, you’re just a child lost in a sweet delusion.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Almost everything glows when it’s healthy. That’s when you know.
– Nika Solé
To meditate means to go home to yourself. Then you know how to take care of the things that are happening inside you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Using the mind to look for reality is delusion. Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness. Freeing oneself from words is liberation.
– Bodhidharma
Are you lost if you know where you’re going– just not how to get there?
– Uzodinma Iweala
The Fall Almost Nobody Sees
by David Budbill
Everybody’s gone away.
They think there’s nothing left to see.
The garish colors’ flashy show is over.
Now those of us who stay
hunker down in sweet silence,
blessed emptiness among
red-orange shadblow
purple-red blueberry
copper-brown beech
gold tamarack, a few
remaining pale yellow
popple leaves,
sedge and fern in shades
from beige to darkening red
to brown to almost black,
and all this in front of, below,
among blue-green spruce and fir
and white pine,
all of it under gray skies,
chill air, all of us waiting
in the somber dank and rain,
waiting here in quiet, chill
November,
waiting for the snow.
In Psychopolitics, Byung-Chul Han describes the digital age as a shift from passive surveillance to active control. Instead of being forced, people are seduced. Freedom slowly crumbles within, as even our own will turns into something controlled and dominated by neoliberalism.
One voice to talk to us.
Yes listen. It carries away
The second and the years
– W.S. Graham
When everything has gone to hell, there’s nothing to do but to play idiotic games.
– Simone de Beauvoir
I never mistook pleasure as the final cause of poetry; nor leisure, for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work… and, as work, I offer it to the public, feeling it’s faultiness more deeply than any of my readers.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
There is only attachment; there is no such thing as detachment.
The mind invents detachment as a reaction to the pain of attachment.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
You can’t expect anything.
Even dawn is a presumption.
More raptors this year after two
good monsoons. I found a lush
and hidden valley I couldn’t bear
to enter today. It frightened me
as if it might be home to new species
of creatures God had forgotten to invent.
The old man is also a timid boy.
– Jim Harrison
Your unresolved issues will continue to call-in experiences to teach you what you need to learn.
– Bryant McGill
He discovers himself in her presence, that’s the thing. It is a reflection all others must play against. He is pleased with himself.
– James Salter
How many dream-washed limits of earth
must be drawn out
till music comes
from an alien star—
– Nelly Sachs (translated by Michael Roloff)
The soul exists partly in time and partly in eternity.
– Marsilio Ficino
Like wildflowers; you must allow yourself to grow in all the places people never thought you would.
– E.V.
Idolatry lies not in the idol but in the worshipper. It is a psychological attitude that governs his whole life, and a very murderous attitude. We begin by offering others to the idol; we end by offering ourselves.
– Joy Davidman
All my own perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded upon Our Lady.
– Tolkien
It was years, really, before I learned to drive, which, like many other things one learns, consists of paying attention, looking in the rearview mirror, and not counting on others to play by the rules.
– Cynthia Zarin
Use a reader’s leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel his time has been wasted.
– Kurt Vonnegut
In times past, poets had a sixth finger on each hand
to better endure the ache of writing.
– Nasser Rabah
Gold and silver are not real treasures.
A mind that knows contentment — that is the true treasure.
– Ajahn Chah
Nowhere, Beloved, will world be but within us. Our life
passes in transformation. And the external
shrinks into less and less. Where once an enduring house was,
now a cerebral structure crosses our path, completely
belonging to the realm of concepts, as though it still stood in the brain.
Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power,
formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.
Temples are no longer known. It is we who secretly save up
these extravagances of the heart. Where one of them still survives,
a Thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt before-
just as it is, it passes into the invisible world.
Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance
to build it inside themselves now, with pillars and statues: greater.
– Rilke
The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. Just move to the side and live differently.
– Richard Rohr
Sibyl
Once upon a painted gate
Many words were written—
Some effusive and some cunning.
I stood there reading day and night,
Though my clothes frayed, and
I grew hungry,
The cold was fresh
And fair and lovely, and
I ate the words like
They were curds and
Drank the air like
Honey
– Krikmöklet Egelanaard
Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.
– Erich Fromm
A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings: on condition that each being, each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess – in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and, in turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return.
– Gilles Deleuze
I can look back and see that I’ve spent much of my life in a cloud of things that have tended to push “being kind” to the periphery. Things like: Anxiety. Fear. Insecurity. Ambition. The mistaken belief that enough accomplishment will rid me of all that anxiety, fear, insecurity, and ambition. The belief that if I can only accrue enough – enough accomplishment, money, fame – my neuroses will disappear.
– George Saunders
The Next War
It will take place,
it will take time
it will take life,
and waste them.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
The difference between theory and practice is larger in practice than the difference between theory and practice in theory.
– Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut
Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty read-ing, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.
– Italo Calvino
Oh, THE WORLD OVER THERE, it’s
So hard to explain!
Just-like, a dream’s-got, lost in yer brain!
– Thomas Pynchon
Only then (nearly out the door, so to speak) did I realize how unspeakably beautiful all of this was, how precisely engineered for our pleasure, and saw that I was on the brink of squandering a wondrous gift, the gift of being allowed, every day, to wander this vast sensual paradise, this grand marketplace lovingly stocked with every sublime thing.
– George Saunders
E.L. Doctorow said once said that ‘Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.
– Anne Lamott
There are only four stages to life: infant, child, failure, and dead. That’s all you have.
– Dylan Moran
We should know clearly before we discuss a matter; to guess is one thing, to know clearly another.
– Aeschylus, Oresteia
[Lovingkindness] is a duplicate deliciousness. There are within it linked sweetnesses long drawn out. Lovingkindness. It is a kind of word with which to cast spells which should charm away all fears.
– Charles Spurgeon
Each day, acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes, as well.
– Seneca
No tyrant, however evil, has yet lacked ready hands to execute his most abominable will. To read how eagerly men have rushed to serve the despot is the bitterest, the saddest matter of history; it is the saddest sight in our own day.
– Richard Jefferies
Without meditation you don’t know the secrets of life, you know only the surface of life.
– Osho
Jung argued to an astonished scientific public that the mind functions best when it is connected to archetypal symbols, which free us from the literalism of reason and link us to the regenerative forces of the psyche.
– David Tacey
Breath-cloud. On cold mornings, that first white cloud of escaping breath is proof that we are living. Proof of our bodies’ warmth. Cold air rushes into dark lungs, soaks up the heat of our body and is exhaled as perceptible form, white flecked with grey. Our lives’ miraculous diffusion, out into the empty air.
– Han Kang, The White Book
In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
– William S. Burroughs
The greatest win is walking away and choosing not to engage in drama and toxic energy at all.
– Lalah Delia
Adopt new habits yourself: consolidate your principles by putting them into practice.
– Epictetus
Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity.
– Adam Phillips
The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
– Oscar Wilde
Whenever the powers of government are placed in any hands other than those of the community, whether those of one man, of a few, or of several, those principles of human nature which imply that government is at all necessary, imply that those persons will make use of them to defeat the very end for which government exists.
– James Mill, Essay on Government
Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them.
– Michel de Montaigne
The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle?
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus
Finger tracing the terrain, you hold me through autumn’s loss of color.
– Chloé Yelena Miller, Pop Rivet
Capitalism is obsessed with death. The unconscious fear of death is what spurs it on. The threat of death is what stirs its compulsion of accumulation and growth. This compulsion drives us towards not only ecological but also mental catastrophe.
– Byung-chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive
Encourage, lift and strengthen one another. For the positive energy spread to one will be felt by us all. For we are connected, one and all.
– Deborah Day
There are people whose whole life consists in always saying no. It would be no small accomplishment always to be able to say no properly, but whoever can do no more, surely cannot do so properly.
– Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments
When someone challenges dominating myths, the powerful strike back. This happened to the prophets. It happened to Jesus. It will happen to you, should you start poking at the myths that hold our society together. Poke anyway. God loves us too much for us to be enslaved by false myths.
– Maki Ashe Van Steenwyk
I am aware that there is a world out there that functions without regard to me. There are wars and budgets and bombings and vast dimensions of wealth and greed and ambition and corruption. And yet I don’t feel a part of that world, and I wouldn’t know how to join if I tried.
– Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!
To be an artist, you don’t have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It’s just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.
– Viggo Mortensen
the prayer is the earth shifting
continental spiritual drift
one tribe to another
exchanging nothing but movement
the functional traffic of energy
later this becomes known as war
– Ramsey Tawfick
Something I learned from writing about George Orwell is that authoritarians see truth, fact, history, science as rival powers. They want the only source of information of truth to be themselves, which is why they have to dismantle the deeply democratic nature of fact, truth, history, and science. And so that’s part of what’s going on.
– Rebecca Solnit
A problem is never solved on its own level; being complex, it must be understood in its total process.
– Krishnamurti
He knew that by confessing, one earned the subtle right to become confessor to the other, in his turn. A secret deserves a secret, and a tale deserves a tale; the gentle expectation of a response in kind was a pressure he knew how to apply.
– Eleanor Catton
Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.
– Martha Nussbaum
My mother used to tell me that poverty is not a sin, it is sin to be rich and humiliate others.
– Dostoevsky
Light is only possible through dialogue between cultures, not through rejection of one or the other.
– James McBride
The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.
– Michael Parenti
There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another.
– Rene Descartes
There are no incurable diseases — only the lack of will. There are no worthless herbs — only the lack of knowledge.
– Avicenna
Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.
– Dostoevsky
It’s so easy to look around and notice what’s wrong. It takes practice to see what’s right.
– Melody Beattie
As Jung discovered, the absence of a spiritual approach to life was in many cases the root cause of the psychological and existential problems his patients were experiencing.
– Keiron le Grice
Poems and stories are the whisperings of angels we cannot see.
– Jayne Anne Phillips
It is solely on the basis of common interest that every society should be governed.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
– Adrienne Rich
I live in a loving, abundant, harmonious universe, and I am grateful.
– Louise Hay
The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out.
– Irwin Shaw
The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.
– Albert Camus
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
– Sandra Cisneros
Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must recall that the basic principle is freedom of choice, which saying many have on their lips, but few in their minds.
– Dante
Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.
– Mary Shelley
The world is good natured to people who are good natured.
– William Makepeace Thackeray
Fun is good.
– Dr. Seuss
We don’t abandon our pursuits because we despair of ever perfecting them.
– Epictetus
There is an intelligence to the universe (of which we are fractal) and that intelligence has a character and that character is benign. Intends well toward all things. How could it not?
– Cormac McCarthy
Large angels take a long time unfolding their wings, but when they do, soar out of sight.
– Bessie Parkes
My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.
– Graham Greene
To make life a little better for people less fortunate than you, that’s what I think a meaningful life is.
– Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
The Irish way of telling a story is a complex and elaborate one, complete with wild exaggerations, a certain delight in improbable fantasy, and a heightened sense of drama.
– Rashers Tierney
Suspicion often creates what it suspects.
– C.S. Lewis
Let’s be poets first -all else is unessential.
– Anne Sexton
Poetry is not the change directly. — …I view it more as a signifier of change, the ‘poet of the picket line’ needs to write about the world around them in a way that makes movement but not be deluded enough to think that this alone can be their contribution, or at least that’s how I look at it to hold myself accountable.
– Ramsey Tawfick
The reader is an impatient bird, perched on the thin edge of distraction or sleep.
– William Zinsser
The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.
– Thucydides
Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other.
– John Steinbeck
People are divided by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love.
– bell hooks
Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression, because power, real power, comes from our conviction which produces action, uncompromising action.
– Malcolm X
The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.
– George Bernard Shaw
I hope death will be a great happiness, a happiness as great as that of love, fulfilled love.
– Hermann Hesse
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
– John Updike
I’ve always considered Christ to be one of the greatest revolutionaries in the history of humanity.
– Fidel Castro
When I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough women on the Supreme Court and I say: ‘When there are nine.’
– Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.
– Robert A. Humphrey
Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.
– Omar El Akkad
Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.
The ultimate rulers of our democracy are the voters of this country.
– FDR
We have to call this what it is: cultural — and sometimes physical — genocide by design. Hoffman’s eugenics, Reagan’s homophobic hate, and Trump’s xenophobia are all the same disease in different generations. They rely on public apathy, and on the willingness of good people to look away. Each time, the target group changes, but the mechanism remains: withhold care, strip rights, justify suffering, and declare it “justice”.
– Thom Hartmann
One of the great gifts you can give yourself and others is refusing to believe that you must agree with a person to like or respect them. Don’t burden friendship with the obligation of agreement. Kindness, patience, and generosity are transcendent. Agreement is transient.
– David French
The Universal Law is impartial. It will give you anything you believe. It will throw you garbage or roses depending on the energy you put in. You are the one in charge.
– Stuart Wilde
It’s hard to say which came first: our so-called media illiteracy or the dumbing down of the media. Complaints about our inability to read, interpret, or discern irony, subtlety, and nuance are as old as art. What feels new is the expectation, on the part of both makers and audiences, that there is such a thing as knowing definitively what a work of art means or stands for, aesthetically and politically.
– Namwall Serpell
We grieve whenever an anchor in our understanding of our identity is lost.
– Sameet Kumar
It is easy to be a communist in a free country… The difficult thing is to be free in a communist one.
– Santiago Soler Bernabeu
No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.
– Audre Lorde
I do not want you to hear that I LOVE you, but I want you to feel it without me having to say.
– Khalil Gibran
Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepy by turns; oftentimes rising to the clouds; oftentimes challenging the heavens.
– De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis
Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable.
– Rosa Luxemburg
The center of the Buddha’s teachings lies not in a grim confrontation with absurdity and futility but in the sublime pleasures of the contemplative path and the liberated mind.
– Matthew Gindin
If you sleep in a democracy, you wake up in a dictatorship.
– Lauri Elbing
Do you still perform autopsies on conversations you’ve had lives ago?
– Donte Collins
It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.
– C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
To be free is to be capable of thinking one’s own thoughts, not the thoughts merely of the body, or of society, but thoughts generated by one’s deepest most original, most essential and spiritual self, one’s individuality.
– Rudolf Steiner
One cannot be angry at one’s own time without harming oneself.
– Robert Musil
We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
It’s autumn in the country I remember
How warm a wind blew here about the ways!
And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber
During the long sun-sweetened summer-days.
It’s cold abroad the country I remember.
– Trumbull Stickney
It is only by being shameless about risking the obvious that we happen into the vicinity of the transformative.
– Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
I used to advertise my loyalty and I don’t believe there is a single person I loved that I didn’t eventually betray.
– Albert Camus
It doesn’t make sense to continue wanting something if you’re not willing to do what it takes to get it.
If you don’t want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. To crave the result but not the process, is to guarantee disappointment.
– James Clear
Now Ovid is weeping. Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing. In his spare time he is teaching himself the local language (Getic) in order to compose in it an epic poem no one will ever read.
– Anne Carson
…those in despair are mystic — adhering to the preobject, not believing in Thou, but mute and steadfast devotees of their own inexpressible container.
– Julia Kristeva
Nothing surrenders itself so completely as the word.
– Javier Marias
This November there seems to be nothing to say.
– Anne Sexton
To watch a horror movie is to know that something bad is going to happen. To have a body is really the same thing.
– Julia Armfield
Everyone wants healing until medicine shows up in the form of discipline.
– Hippocrates
One has to be a total outsider. Then the world has a meaning, and the beauty of the heavens and the earth is constant.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.
Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
– Anne Carson
You said to imagine a great big sphere, and inside is all of time and space. All of it. And outside are these intelligent entities, and all they are is curious; all they want to do is experience.”
“Go on,” Alice said. Her eyes are so bright.…
“One might say: ‘I want the experience of being a seventeen-year-old girl in the fourteenth century who was burned at the stake.’ Or ‘I’d like the experience of being a four-month aborted fetus in 1994.’ And they just dive in and do it.” I looked at Alice. She was waiting for something. I thought about what I just said, and then I remembered: “They have to create what happens. Write a script.” She still waited, so I said, “Not only the experience itself; the house, the city, the country, the whole world where it happens. All of it.”
“Which makes that entity responsible for all of it,” she reminded me.
“So that’s who the ‘little man watching’ really is—that, that thing—”
“Not a thing,” she said, interrupting for the very first time. “It’s you. You’re living a script that you wrote. Which is why free will and predestination are the same thing.”
– Theodore Sturgeon
I am trying to rekindle my feeling of fondness for the world.
– George Saunders
None of it was real; nothing was real. Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now must lose them. I send this out to you, dear friends, before I go, in this instantaneous thought-burst, from a place where time slows and then stops and we may live forever in a single instant. Goodbye goodbye good—
– George Saunders
Touching hands are not like pharmaceuticals or scalpels. They are like flashlights in a darkened room. The medicine they administer is self-awareness. And for many of our painful conditions, this is the aid that is most urgently needed.
– Deane Juhan
The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.
– Margaret Atwood
What a beautiful country this must have been once, when you could hop in a coupe and buy a bag of burgers and drive, drive, drive, stopping to swim in a river or sleep in a grove of trees without worrying about intaking mutagens or having the militia arrest you and send you to the Everglades for eternity.
– George Saunders
…we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things.
– William James
Mastery of a skill, no matter how small—a step, a bow, a bend, a note—will inhabit you forever. You can never again be the human being that you were.
– Alan Bowers
Forms within the universe, whether galaxies, human beings or trees, are generated as an expression of vast forces at work within a holistic framework. Separateness, fragmentation, and disconnection are all illusions … Wholeness is never lost, and the Health within the human system, which is a manifestation of this unity, is also never lost.
– John Upledger
In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world.
– George Saunders
Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.
The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.
I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield […]. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the place where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
– Thomas Merton
A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamor of Being for all beings: on condition that each being, each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess – in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and, in turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return.
– Gilles Deleuze
The Poet
by Mary Cornelia Hartshorne
Sunlight was something more than that to him.
It was a halo when it formed a rim
Around some far-off mountain peak. He called
It thin-beat leaf of gold, and stood enthralled
When it lay still on some half-sheltered spot
In gilt mosaics where the trees forgot
To hide the grasses carpeting the spot.
The sky to him was not just the blue sky,
But a deep, painted bowl with clouds piled high;
And when these clouds were tinted burning red,
Or gold and bacchic purple, then he said:
“The too-full goblets of the gods had over-run,
Nor give the credit to the disappearing sun
Who flames before he leaves the world in dun.”
Between his eyes and life fate seemed to hold
A magic tissue of transparent gold,
That freed his vision from the dull, drab, hopeless part,
And kept alive a fresh, unsaddened heart.
And all unselfishly he tried to share
His gift with us who see the harsh and bare;
But we refused. We did not know nor care.
When Do Dahlias Bloom?
by Jose Hernandez Diaz
A man in a “The World Is Burning” shirt darted into the public library on a midsummer’s day. It was 91 degrees in southern California. The library was a good escape for the locals; everyone was welcome.
The man in a “The World Is Burning” shirt read his favorite Spanish language poet, Vicente Huidobro. He loved the musicality and imagery of Huidobro’s fine work.
As he was eagerly reading Huidobro, a woman in a “Frida Kahlo for President” shirt came up to him and asked the time.
“It is 2:42 pm,” he said. “I have to go to my haiku writing workshop soon.”
“Can I go with you?” The woman in a “Frida Kahlo for President” shirt asked, on a whim.
“Of course!” he said. “Nothing would make me happier.”
They both had written dozens of haikus before. Both were odd-English-major-types. But this was their first haiku writing session together. Their first date.
They both wrote about flowers in an idyllic field. He wrote about marigolds; she wrote about dahlias.
The Search
by Jose Hernandez Diaz
A man in a “The World is Burning” shirt went outside of his cabin in the woods in search of his name. Was it Gaston? Was it Federico? Was it Jean Michel Basquiat? Was he named after a famous artist? Was he named after a peasant farmer? A communist revolutionary? The man in a “The World Is Burning Shirt” went to the public library next to the woods, to look for his forgotten name. He considered his name to be Petrarch. Miguel. David. Hakeem Olajuwon. Was he famous? Was he grand? Was he a champion? A beggar? Somewhere in the middle? When he finally found his name, it was written on the bottom of his bedroom slipper. His name, it turns out, was “Exist.” Exister. Existed. Existence. Existing. Exist.
The best films are about expanding our understanding of what it means to be human, they’re a journey into pushing the boundaries of form, an adventure beyond the clichés of commercial cinema, an expression of our deeper consciousness.
– Bernardine Evaristo
Jung understated the case when he said, “We have in all naivete forgotten that beneath our world of reason another lies buried. I do not know what humanity will still have to undergo before it dares to admit this.”
– Connie Zweig
It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
– George Eliot
Once it is concluded that Christianity is infected with ‘Whitianity,’ once it is granted that a racist doctrine of the tradition has been perpetuated, the tradition must be scrutinized in the most radical and comprehensive manner.
– William R. Jones
A wound heals, but a scar remains as a lesson.
– Turkish Proverb
Our motive in searching for the cause is the desire to be rid of the effect. This desire is another form of resistance or condemnation, and when there is condemnation, there is no understanding.
– Krishnamurti
My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.
– Salvatore Quasimodo
Nobody succeeds beyond his or her wildest expectations unless he or she begins with some wild expectations.
– Ralph Charell
Hunger is the first element of self-discipline. If you can control what you eat and drink, you can control everything else.
– Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah
Most of my inspiration, if that’s the word, came from books themselves.
– Shelby Foote
Conceived as the foundation of liberty, modern democracy paves the way for tyranny. Born for the purpose of standing as a bulwark against Power, it ends by providing Power with the finest soil it has ever had in which to spread itself over the social field.
– Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power
To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.
– F.A. Haye
When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?
– Mary Shelley
I don’t want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers.
– John D. Rockefeller
No place is safe if built on a foundation of hatred.
– Louise Penny
In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.
– Eugene Victor Debs
We shall then first be true persons when we have suffered ourselves to be fitted into our places. We are marble waiting to be shaped, metal waiting to be run into a mould.
– C.S. Lewis
God touches us with a touch that is emptiness and empties us. He moves us with a simplicity that simplifies us. All variety, all complexity, all paradox, all multiplicity cease. Our mind swims in the air of an understanding, a reality that is dark and serene and includes in itself everything. Nothing more is desired. Nothing more is wanting.
– Thomas Merton
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom…
– Michael Ondaatje
Every person understands God in different ways, but people fulfill His will in the same way.
– Tolstoy
As the cost of health insurance continues to climb, politicians debate how to control those costs and expand coverage. But the truth is, there’s already enough money in the system to cover everyone. It’s just being siphoned off by insurance corporations for profits, lobbying, and stock buybacks.
– Rachel Madley PHD
A bad deed which you regret in your heart is a thousand times better than the good deed that makes you feel proud.
– Imam Ali
Lessons in Trying To Save The World
If you name it hope instead of impossible.
If you hold it with tenderness.
If you call it the blessing of your ancestors.
If you look around and see the faces of everyone you love
trying to save the world with you.
Then this work becomes love.
And even mountains will move.
– Nikita Gill
You cannot avoid paradise;
You can only avoid seeing it.
– Charlotte Joko Beck
I often think that I don’t have a single new idea in my head. But the big mistake is to just wait for inspiration to happen. It won’t come looking for you. You have to start doing something: you have to build a trap to catch it. I like to do that by starting the very mundane process of tidying my studio. It may seem like it has nothing to do with the creative job in hand but I think tidying up is a form of daydreaming, and what you’re really doing is tidying your mind. It’s a kind of mental preparation. It’s a way of getting your mind in place to notice something. And that’s what being creative is really: it’s noticing when something interesting is starting to happen.
– Brian Eno
There is an old Eastern saying that every human being should play the role that is assigned to him, the king should play the king, the beggar the beggar, and the criminal the criminal-but always remembering the gods. That would mean that one should take one’s role in life as a sort of mask, not identifying with it, yet recognizing it as one’s task, and always reminding oneself of the divine being that cannot possibly be identical with the more or less incidental role.
– CG Jung
The diseconomies of capitalism are treated as the public’s responsibility. Corporate America skims the cream and leaves the bill for us to pay, then boasts about how productive and efficient it is and complains about our wasteful government.
– Michael Parenti, Against Empire
There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Most misunderstandings in the world could be avoided if people would simply take the time to ask, ‘What else could this mean?’
– Shannon L. Alder
In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory.
– Alfred North Whitehead
“Power,” wrote the political theorist Hannah Arendt, “always comes from men acting together, ‘acting in concert.’” Tyranny, by contrast, prevents concerted action by turning people against each other; it is characterized by “the fundamental inability to act at all.”
Finish something. Anything. Stop researching, planning, and preparing to do the work and just do the work. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad it is. You don’t need to set the world on fire with your first try. You just need to prove to yourself that you have what it takes to produce something. There are no artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, or scientists who became great by half-finishing their work. Stop debating what you should make and just make something.
– James Clear
If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.
– Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Inequality is a crisis in need of concerted action.
– Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
Likewise, people who are blinded by their own interests are poorly qualified to give counsel to their neighbors.
– Aesop
The level of collective psychosis gripping a human society that even entertains the notion of letting one human hoard $1,000,000,000,000 while people starve is impossible to express, but we need to do so in order to avoid normalizing it.
– Ethan Nichtern
I am not a materialist at all. I don’t like fancy cars, fancy dates, or big expensive houses. I want inner peace and flourishing, which cannot be achieved through external consumption.
– Saurav
Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia.
– Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout
I am going, friend, I am all but gone, I believe you prideful and wrong but I have no desire, now, to cure you. Your wrongness was an idea I had. I am all but gone. My idea of your wrongness will go with me. Your rightness is an idea you are having. It will go with you. For all of that, I hope you live forever, and if the place falls down around you, as it seems to be doing, I hope even that brings you joy. It was always falling down around you, everything has always been falling down around us. Only we were too alive to notice. I feel the truth of this in my body now. I am trying not to be terrified. But I am sometimes, in the night…
That letter exists in my mind. But I am too tired to write it. Well, that is not true. I am not too tired.
I’m just not ready.
The surge of pride and life and self is still too strong in me.
But I will get there. I will. I will write it yet.
Only I must not wait too long.
– George Saunders, Liberation Day
The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
– Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature
Whatever I had read as a child about the saints had thrilled me. I could see the nobility of giving one’s life for the sick, the maimed, the leper…. But there was another question in my mind. Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place?… Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?
– Dorothy Day
The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.
– Richard Rohr
….politics and governing demand compromise….
– Barry Goldwater
We are in danger of forgetting that God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and light and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him.
– Joy Davidman
Like a spider that produces a web out of itself and then goes and lives in it, Consciousness creates all these beings and dwells in the heart of them.
– Mooji
thirty years of this
thirty years of that . . .
the blue-green mountains
– Patrick Sweeney
Soul, mind or ego are mere words. There are no entities of the kind. Consciousness is the only truth.
– Ramana Maharshi
Every individual must ultimately become desperate enough to change himself.
– Manly P. Hall
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
– W. B. Yeats
I say I want to save the world but really
I want to write poems all day
– Dorothea Lasky
But the delight of Earth, the wonder of it; the essential feeling as of the necessity for magic; that juggling with the golden moon and silver sun (such are they) that is man’s universal pastime: these are the things to seek in the Kalevala.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
You want to be full of ease and spontaneity? Stop trying to become something in a dream. When you are completely empty of the unreal, you become a vessel for the real.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
You must stand alone without any support, without friends, without guru, without hope, completely and inwardly naked and empty. Then only, as the cup which is empty can be filled up, so the emptiness within can be filled up with that which is everlasting.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Reality is the basis of all great art. Without it there is no life, no substance. Reality is the ground under our feet and sky over our head. Everything the artist creates has its point of departure in nature.
– Yvan Goll, Surrealism Manifesto
Destroy my desires,
eradicate my ideals,
show me something better,
and I will follow you.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
– Adrienne Rich
doctor’s waiting room
the Buddha statue has been sitting here
for three years now
– Elisabeth Kleineheismann
Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.
– Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
All our attempts [to solve problems in world] have proved to be singularly ineffectual, and will continue to do so as long as we try to convince ourselves and the world that it is only they, our opponents, who are all wrong, morally and philosophically.
– CG Jung
Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone, who tend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.
– Audre Lorde
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
– Jorge Luis Borges
It’s your privilege to find me incomprehensible. I gave you
my minutes; let them remain ours. I hope I haunt you.
– Theodore Roethke
“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,“ Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”
– Italo Calvino
This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh.
– Aaron Shurin
Love acts as the Immanent Divinity that unites the Creativity of the sun with the Intelligence of the earth.
– JG Bennett
I AM THOU,
THOU ART I,
HE IS OURS,
WE BOTH ARE HIS.
SO MAY ALL BE
FOR OUR NEIGHBOR.
– Gurdjieff
An impression of oneself is an organic phenomenon that is not at all intellectual. How is it that at one moment I don’t vibrate and at another, I do? How is it that I receive or do not receive a current of energy, allow it to feed me or not to feed me? How do I sing with it, or resonate with it like a musical instrument? Life keeps hitting us, producing only a dull sound. Yet suddenly, there is a pure, crystalline sound. How does that come about?
– Michel Conge, Inner Octaves
Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it. And it is grace itself which makes this void.
– Simone Weil
He lives in a small country of hope, which is his heart.
– Anne Carson
The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite.
– Jules Verne
My secret drug is death
I take it whenever I see you
And you don’t see me
– Leonard Cohen
I am sure now that life is not what it is purported to be and that nature, in the canny words of the Scotch theologue, ‘is not as natural as it looks.’
– Loren Eiseley
Let’s say there was a wrist-mounted meter that could measure energy output during dancing and the goal was to give off an energy level of 1,000 units. Or someone would (say) kill you. And you had a notion of how you wanted to dance, but when you danced that way, your energy level was down around 50. And when you finally managed to get your energy level above 1,000, you glanced up at a mirror (there’s a mirror in there, wherever you’re dancing off death) and—wow. Is that dancing? Is that me dancing? Good God. But your energy level is at 1,200 and climbing. What would you do? You’d keep dancing like that.
– George Saunders
and I thought I am so many! What is my name? What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us?
– Mary Oliver
But let us imagine RIGHT NOW that we find out about a world where there are artists who paint without brushes, make music without instruments, and write without pen and paper. The very thought makes me happy. That this world could be ours, right here and now.
– László Krasznahorkai
When I was young, there were very few elders willing to talk about the darkness; most of them pretended that success was all they had ever known. As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I felt I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked upon a journey toward joining the human race.
– Sharon Moon
In the healing of that wound, which never closes,
lies the invented, strange qualities of a man’s work.
– Lorca
…when you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. They hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen. With your death they do not die. Instead, they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves, something that had its own life, something they can hardly put a finger on.
– David Eagleman
Nothing which is ready-to-hand or present-at-hand within the world functions as that in the face of which anxiety is anxious.
– Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
The two most salient facts of our reality are ecological collapse and income inequality, and the response by every person with authority is a chaotic swing among denial (“it isn’t real”), defeatism (“it can’t be helped”), and sneering rationalization (“only the unworthy suffer”).
– Gerry Canavan
I doubt there is a more quotable man in the United States. (You can readily see this by reading the text of the talk, or by visiting this lovely page of Wendell Berry quotes.) Monday, he spoke of the “mechanical indifference” of a financial trust, that it had the “indifference of a grinder to what it grinds,” saying, “It did not intend to victimize its victims. It simply followed its single purpose of the highest possible profit, and ignored the ‘side effects.’” This from a poet and an essayist who, by following his love of the land and its people, describes the current state of affairs as accurately and succinctly as anyone on earth: “The two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment.”
– Wendell Berry, American Hero by Mark Bittman
As soon as we start looking through the outer and visible to the inner and invisible and trying to see how form and meaning relate, most of the old body/soul dichotomy vanishes. The soul then becomes the body’s meaning, and the body the expression of the soul.
– Karlfried Durckheim
You might be a bit like me,
rowing your boat
of murk
and curiosity,
bleak
and sudden clarity,
agony,
recovery,
surprise
and mediocrity,
fake
and authenticity,
decline
and synchronicity,
fears and beliefs
and pleasures
and griefs
and light
as a feather
autumn leaves.
– Wendy Videlock
If you can then understand the secret hints which are contained in a dream, your eyes are opened and you rediscover life and find it on a new level. Only the guidance of the unconscious can help at such a moment.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
I think both as poets and people we are taught how to perform constantly, to act for a series of invisible audiences and the poem was me imagining the internal apocalypse that would happen if there were no more stages to stand on.
– Ramsey Tawfick
I don’t do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.
– Allen Ginsberg
Poem [I do not always understand what you say.]
by James Schuyler
I do not always understand what you say.
Once, when you said, across, you meant along.
What is, is by its nature, on display.
Words’ meanings count, aside from what they weigh:
poetry, like music, is not just song.
I do not always understand what you say.
You would hate, when with me, to meet by day
What at night you met and did not think wrong.
What is, is by its nature, on display.
I sense a heaviness in your light play,
a wish to stand out, admired, from the throng.
I do not always understand what you say.
I am as shy as you. Try as we may,
only by practice will our talks prolong.
What is, is by its nature, on display.
We talk together in a common way.
Art, like death, is brief: life and friendship long.
I do not always understand what you say.
What is, is by its nature, on display.
“Our people have forgotten,” noted the wise and often prophetic Henry Adams, more than a century ago, “that any world exists outside America and their heads are excessively swollen.”
– Pico Iyer
It should be accepted as a most elementary human and moral truth that no man can live a fully sane and decent life unless he is able to say ‘no’ on occasion to his natural bodily appetites.
– Thomas Merton
In the denial of what love is not, love is. Don’t be afraid of the word ‘negation’. Negate all that is not love, then ‘what is’ is compassion.
– Krishnamurti
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
– W. H. Auden
Seeking happiness is a form of ignorance. You think you are lacking, something is wrong with your life but your own simple beingness needs nothing, it is completely at ease and content as is.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
The labour of the righteous tendeth to life: the fruit of the wicked to sin.
– Proverbs 10:16
We are always in one or another root-metaphor, archetypal fantasy, mythic perspective. From the soul’s point of view we can never get out of the vale of our psychic reality.
– James Hillman
The beginning of freedom is the realization you are not the thinker.
– Eckhart Tolle
Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, preaches endless forms of false happiness, false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.
– Terence McKenna
We cannot save each other, but we can make it easier for each individual to save himself.
– Manly P. Hall
Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
– Martin Heidegger
Too many people have resigned themselves to not reading because they fear they no longer have the focus for it. You only need to limit your screen time for a few days to begin feeling the effects on your brain. I promise you, you are capable of reading books again.
– @SketchesbyBoze
I saw you, and poems came back to me.
– Yanis Ritsos
Tr. Paul Merchant
There is no such thing as enlightenment. The real is ever-present. All that is necessary is to drop the false.
– Nisaggadatta Maharaj
he is not a God of the dead, but of the living
– @KJVnocontext
The telephone is the writer’s devil, the dictionary his guardian angel.
– Octavio Paz
A nation of dunces can be safe only in a world of dunces.
– C.S. Lewis, Democratic Education
All the concepts you have formed in the past must be discarded and replaced by void.
– Huang Po
Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn, or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.
– Denis Waitley
I see the symbolism of our lives. I live on two levels, the human and the poetic.
– Anaïs Nin
Through psychedelics we are learning that God is not an idea, God is a lost continent in the human mind.
– Terence McKenna
Overflow gently – don’t drown.
– Albert Camus
I like to think that at the end of each story another begins for each one that can be much better.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
Above all, we must realize that each of us makes a difference with our life. Each of us impacts the world around us every single day. We have a choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place – or not to bother.
– Dr. Jane Goodall
To become like the sea –
Vast, wise, an empire of royal blue
quietness, rage tasting like salt.
That was her goal.
– Odyssey, The Cynical Idealist
The whole world can love you, but that love will not make you happy. What will make you happy is the love coming out of you.
– Don Miguel Ruiz
Some people awaken spiritually without ever coming into contact with any meditation technique or any spiritual teaching. They may awaken simply because they can’t stand the suffering anymore.
– Eckhart Tolle
Time is a sluice set open
And through it, we mourn, too fast
All beauty shown or spoken,
Apprehended, runs to the past.
Yet what quells my mind the most
Is not the loved and known
But the unregarded un-
Apprehended constantly flowing.
– E. J. Scovell
To experience the peace of your soul you must enter a state of consciousness in which you are unattached to the past, present, or future.
– Debbie Ford
I want to get all the content down so that I can then move on to the fun part, which is sorting out the sentences.
– Geoff Dyer
In every person of whatever station look not for things to criticize, but for something you adore in your Creator.
– Edgar Cayce
If we’re completely honest, not sentimental or nostalgic, we have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is one unending thread, not a life chopped up into sections out of touch with one another.
– P. L. Travers
Your real home is not the house you live in, but the stillness and peace in your heart.
– Ajahn Brahm
Modernity is a totalitarianism of nothingness: globalization, indifferentization, homogenization… Modernity isn’t in crisis, modernity is a crisis.
– Pierre-Émile Blairon
The prime virtue, in one who gives an answer, is to know the mind of him who asks the question.
– St. Jerome
When we hear that we are blessed, we should hear as well a sense of responsibility. A blessing given, a talent bestowed, if unappreciated and unused, is wasted.
– Amy-Jill Levine
It is in the standpoint created by consciousness, when you are in pain, or find yourself obligated, that value lives. … From outside of that standpoint, we can recognize the fact of value, but we cannot recognize value itself.
– Christine M. Korsgaard
I’ve probably overstayed. Once you’re tenured you never leave… Meanwhile, the gap between you and your students widens. You get older, while they stay the same age, year after year. Like vampires.
– Ling Ma
All conservative ideologies justify existing inequities as the natural order of things, inevitable outcomes of human nature. If the very rich are naturally so much more capable than the rest of us, why must they be provided with so many artificial privileges under the law, so many bailouts, subsidies and other special considerations – at our expense?
– Michael Parenti
Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.
– Dr. Seuss
So when I think of Autumn, I think of someone with hands who does not want me to die.
– Toni Morrison
I just don’t think it’s possible ever to be fully conscious. I see it as the tip of an iceberg. . .and then there’s this vast world down below. And I think we are meant to live with mystery. It opens up the dimensions that keep us human and compassionate.
– Marion Woodman
He had become almost inured to death; his frailty had reinforced his conviction that he must do something of consequence while he had the time.
– Min Jin Lee
You seek the path. I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you. May each go his own way.
– CG Jung
Errors do not cease to be errors simply because they’re ratified into law.
– E.A. Bucchianeri
Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions.
– James Allen
The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.
– Julius Nyerere
Nobody escapes age and gravity.
– Harlan Ellison
Blindly following ancient customs and traditions doesn’t mean that the dead are alive, but the living are dead.
– Ibn Khaldun
NOURISHMENT
– for Tara
As soon as I heard the wise librarian say
that she asks the young people in her life,
How have you nourished yourself today?
I knew I’d be asking the same question
from now on, as often as I could remember.
I knew the care behind those words
was enough to slow the blood, and pause
the restless feet. I knew the asking itself
was a form of nourishment, like someone
holding out a warm and steaming bowl
of soup to soothe a throat parched from
too much talk about the things that
don’t matter. I think you must have
clear and strong eyes, a clear and strong
heart to be a librarian, to lead people
toward the knowledge they didn’t know
they needed, to help them ask the right
questions, and then answer each one.
– James Crews
You felt she’d done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have been for her a city of smoke, its streets the courtyards of limbo, its bodies like wraiths. Smoke seemed to be in her voice, in her movements; making her all the more substantial, more there, as if words, glances, small lewdnesses could only become baffled and brought to rest like smoke in her long hair; remain there useless till she released them, accidentally and unknowingly, with a toss of her head.
– Thomas Pynchon
But sometimes it’s too much to ask
a person to inhabit
the strange region of a foreign heart.
Once, when I was in a glut of pain,
I said to a friend,
Just take an hour and imagine
this is happening to you.
She looked straight ahead
and said, I don’t want to.
– Ellen Bass, Experiment in Empathy
The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It’s a miracle that it exists at all.
– Lauren Groff, Arcadia
Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes a seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response … Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia—em (into) and pathos (feeling)—a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?
– Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams
Please Let Me Flourish
Somewhere on earth where as in heaven
desert doesn’t matter.
The inalienable right to fail.
To flourish is to play.
Insurance against two things: failure and success,
that is to say, being made a fool of by either or of making too much of either. Philosophy is that insurance. So is an inner circle of friends and lovers. We must have those we can be merely whimsical with, unguarded and undesigning.
– Robert Frost
A bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I’m vexed to love you,
– Li-Young Lee
One night I dreamed of such a world. I rowed upon the surface of the moon and there was no wind, there were no moments, for the moon is as empty as the inside of an eye and not even the sound of a shadow falling falls there.
– Anne Carson
A Man and a Woman Sit Near Each Other
by Robert Bly
A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long
at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born
in any other nation, or time, or place.
They are content to be where they are, talking or not talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.
The man sees the way his fingers move,
he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.
They obey a third body that they share in common.
They make a promise to love that body.
Age may come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and a woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,
someone we know of, whom we have never seen.
FREE ELECTIONS
When the slaves reelected their executioner entirely of their own accord and without any pressure from anyone, I understood that it was still very early to be talking about democracy and human dignity.
– Syrian poet and refugee, Osama Alomar
There is a stubbornness to it. The beauty of the world even now, even soaked in the sound of despair. Still the magpie holds onto its midnight blue sheen and its velvet dark wings. And try as we might, there is nothing cliché about noticing the magic of birdsong. Even in grief, the winter sun finds every blade of glass eventually, the result a diamond-like rhapsody. The august stag still visits the frosty, hushed forest and this will continue till the day his body gives itself back to where he was born. It is a reminder that so much of what withers and dies was once a sublime beauty. That though it may seem obscene, it is necessary to witness all of it, the beauty and the terror. To remember even in despair, how to be alive.
– Nikita Gill
It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.
– Thomas Merton
Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism – you learn this as you go on.
– Will Self
A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.
– Thomas Moore
Some people … hate happy endings. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Deer should not jam. The avalanche, stopping in its tracks, a few feet above the cowering in village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically…
– Vladimir Nabokov
Yesterday we obeyed kings
and bent our necks before
emperors.
But today we kneel only to
Truth, follow only Beauty,
and obey only Love.
– Khalil Gibran
Enlightenment is totalitarian when it refuses to recognize anything outside itself.
– Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno
(Dialectic of Enlightenment)
The real master creates masters, not followers.
– Osho
Don’t let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.
– Toni Morrison
Unbroken prosperity cannot bear a single blow.
– Seneca
Awareness opens up responsibility, which is why I think most of the world would rather be unaware. Because it’s easier to be in ignorance, in innocence and naive than to be with the truth of the experience.
– Raj Jana
If I don’t feel like writing today or for a few days, I don’t. And I don’t think about it. It is not an obligation-it is the greatest privilege.
– Jonathan Carroll
A man’s learning is like the branches
and leaves to a tree;
he cannot be without it.
Learning, however, is not just in reading something,
but rather is something we integrate with our own various ways.
– Takeda Shingen
True mastery begins when learning stops being borrowed and starts being lived.
Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
– Marshall McLuhan
Mind is the master weaver, both of the inner garment of character and the outer garment of circumstance.
– James Allen
Detachment is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you.
– Ali ibn Abi Talib
The test of a democracy is not the magnificence of buildings or the speed of automobiles or the efficiency of air transportation, but rather the care given to the welfare of all the people.
– Helen Keller
The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
– Ray Bradbury
The Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. ‘He sees too deep and too much,’ and what he sees is essentially chaos. He is the one man who knows he is sick in a civilization that doesn’t know it is sick.
– Colin Wilson
The great poems, plays, novels, and stories teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress.
– Harold Bloom, Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles
Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place, we are swept up, suddenly, between the body’s smooth, functioning predictability, and the need for disruption. We do irrational things, outrageous things. Or else something will come along and intervene, an unimaginable foe.
– Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
A mountain’s fame lies not in its height,
but in the immortals who make it their home.
A river’s sanctity lies not in its depth,
but in the dragons who dream beneath its waves.
– Liu Yuxi, Tang Dynasty
What could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout?
– Ben Lerner
The shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends.
– Cicero, Laelius De Amicitia
Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don’t ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it.
– Howard Zinn, Marx in Soho: A Play on History
The Perfect Man is godlike. Though the great swamps blaze, they cannot burn him; though the great rivers freeze, they cannot chill him; though swift lightning splits the hills and howling gales shake the sea, they cannot frighten him. A man like this rides the clouds and mist, straddles the sun and moon, and wanders beyond the four seas. Even life and death have no effect on him, much less the rules of profit and loss!
– Zhuangzi
So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.
– Roberto Bolaño
The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.
– Aristotle
I cannot write my native language and have no native home any more and am amazed by that horrible homelessness all French- Canadians abroad in America have.
– Jack Kerouac
sitting upright
through it all
a Buddha
– Joan Halifax
Let my lusts be my ruin, then,
since all else is a fake
and a mockery.
– Hart Crane
Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.
– T.S. Eliot
By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets—the sickness is out there.
– Hillman
Or like it said at the end of a labor song I liked a lot when I was a kid: what I mean is, take it easy, but take it.
– Charles Mingus
Reconciliation
by Else Lasker-Schüler
translated by Babette Deutsch
and Avrahm Yarmolinsky
(To My Mother)
A great star will fall into my lap. . .
We would hold vigil tonight,
Praying in languages
That are carven like harps.
We would be reconciled tonight—
So fully God overwhelms us.
Our hearts are only children,
Eager for weary-sweet slumber.
And our lips would kiss each other,
Why are you fearful?
Does not your heart border upon mine—
Your blood always dyes my cheeks red.
We would be reconciled tonight,
If we clasp each other, we shall not perish.
A great star will fall into my lap.
No gain in social efficiency can save a community that offends against the little ones. And let us be honest about it: our modern cities have created a society in which children are in the way.
– Joy Davidman
Nothing can die in a universe in which there is nothing but life.
– Manly P. Hall
tea steam wafting
over wildflowers
autumn festival
– Ogawa
This transformation of an experience into language, this possibility of a relationship between our sensibility and a world that reduces it to nothing, can today be seen as the most perfect example in French contemporary writing of what literature can be.
– Georges Perec
There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
– Hermann Hesse
she is neither
by the sea nor the sea by her . . .
she’s just a poet
– Mohammad Hoghughi
Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.
– Marcus Aurelius
We loved the songs around the fire in the big stone fireplace or under the darned stars, where every girl merged her own spirit of happiness with the voice of the group.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Behind the silence are His higher thoughts. He is fitting stone to stone in His plan for the world and our lives, even though we can see only a confused and meaningless jumble of stones heaped together under a silent heaven.
– Helmut Thielicke
Those who have a hungry heart and broken spirit are the favorites of God.
– Helmut Thielicke
Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic…Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?
– Tolkien
the first bite
is all I want
wild pear
– S. M. Abeles
William of Aquitaine Returns
by Luis Alberto de Cuenca
I’m going to make a poem out of nothing.
You and I will be the protagonists.
Our emptiness, our loneliness,
the deadly boredom, the daily defeats:
all these things will go into the poem,
which is bound to be short, since they
fit in a few lines, maybe as few as seven,
or perhaps eight, if this last line counts.
– Translated from the Spanish
by Gustavo Pérez Firmat
A birdsong can – even for a moment –
make the whole world into a sky within
us, because we feel that the bird does
not distinguish between its heart and
the world’s.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, The Inner Sky