I keep my research going, looking for sentiments in the world.
– Renee Gladman
In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear.
– Alasdair MacIntyre
. . There is never a shortage of opportunity to step out of the small self and embrace the universal self of all sentient beings. On our meditation cushion, we always have the chance to practice exchange. And in our lives, there are endless opportunities to benefit others. If we are creative and don’t dismiss any chance as too small or insignificant, we can live like bodhisattvas.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted outside philosophy and they die if these roots decay.
– Karl Popper
Blame it or praise it,
there is no denying
the wild horse in us.
– Virginia Woolf
We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!
– Thomas Merton
Members of labor unions, and un-organized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers – themselves desperately afraid of being downsized – are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and post modernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion… All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
– Richard M. Rorty (1931-2007)
The privilege of possessing the earth entails the responsibility of passing it on, the better for our use, not only to immediate posterity, but to the Unknown Future.
– Aldo Leopold
If it’s reality you want, I suggest you look out the window.
– Peter Stamm
We actually contain a built-in ability to rise above restriction, incapacity, or limitation and, as a result of this ability, possess a vital adaptive spirit that we have not yet fully accessed. While this ability can lead us to transcendence, paradoxically it can lead also to violence; our longing for transcendence arises from our intuitive sensing of this adaptive potential and our violence arises from our failure to develop it.
– Joseph Chilton Pearce
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
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.
But hope for me has never been optimism. Optimism is “everything will be fine,” which invites people to kick back and wait for “fine” to arrive of its own accord.
Hope for me is always that there are possibilities. And we have a responsibility to try to realize them, and to not realize the worst possibilities. The future is being made in the present. So hope for me is not about prophesying a future that everything will be fine. It’s reminding people that we’ve changed the world before, and that we can again: we know how it works. And in a crisis like this, we better get on with it.
– Rebecca Solnit in an interview with Rachel Maddow
There is a limited elite that understands the secrets of their own techniques, but not necessarily of all techniques. These men are close to the seat of modern governmental power. The state is no longer founded on the ‘average citizen’, but on the ability and knowledge of this elite. The average man is altogether unable to penetrate technical secrets or governmental organization and consequently can exert no influence at all on the state.
– Jacques Ellul
Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class.
– Giuseppe Prezzolini
To intrust power to the very rich is to court widespread ruin and starvation.
– Bertrand Russell
[W]e have large amounts of unpaid karmic debt, or ‘lenchak’ in Tibetan. In our past lives, and even in the present one, we have harmed countless beings, knowingly and unknowingly. Each harmful action sows a seed in our mind stream. Later – perhaps many lifetimes later – this seed ripens into some form of pain for us when the appropriate conditions come together.
We may think, ‘Why is this person harming me as opposed to harming someone else?’ The reason is that we have inflicted pain on that being in the past. This is the only explanation that could account for why we are now the ‘victim,’ whether or not we can remember what we did. Most likely, we have gone back and forth with each other, alternating as victim and aggressor, over many lifetimes. We are equal in this: both parties are equally at fault, equally vulnerable, and equally ignorant. By acknowledging our part in this drama, we can release ourselves from the need to react with a new round of aggression. This is the only way the mutually harmful cycle will ever come to an end.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Peaceful Heart
There is no such thing as an experienced meditator. Every breath must be as if it is the first, every step a fresh event. A beginner’s mind leads to a sense of gratitude for everything, whether or not the desires of my ego have been granted or life is going smoothly. A grateful heart for the rushing currents as well as for the still pools puts the ego in its place. This attitude that grows out of increased awareness does not come easily in the face of difficulties, but it is worth cultivating over a lifetime.
– Patricia Hart Clifford
DARK SO DEEP
If deepest grief is hell,
When the animal self
Wants to lie down
In the dark and die also. . .
If deepest grief is hell,
Then the world returning
(Not soon, not easily)
Must be heaven.
The joke you laughed at
Must be heaven
Or the funny thing
The cat did
At its food dish.
Whatever
Guides you back
To the world.
That dark so deep
The tiniest light
Will do.
– Gregory Orr
For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.
– Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey
People think you’re only supposed to heal good people, but actually you’re supposed to heal everyone. There are no sides in the healing. […] No one’s excluded. It’s a very hard place for people to go because everybody’s on a side. But things have to heal on both sides for anything to happen, really.
– Alice Notley
[…] that peculiar loneliness that comes from knowing and seeing a lot that you can’t do much about.
– John le Carré
If this tree crown didn’t exist, we wouldn’t sit here and talk about God; if the wood didn’t exist, we would never have met […].
– Umberto Eco
[There is a] need for a philosophy that will… set Reason itself in harmony with nature, not by having Reason renounce itself or become an insipid imitator of nature, but by Reason recasting itself into nature out of its own inner strength.”
– Hegel
The person looking for ‘me’ (a fixed identity) is also the same person looking for (a vapory word) ‘God.’ This split search can only be folded into one process of working on something—whether it is writing, digging, planting, painting, teaching—with a wholeheartedness that qualifies as complete attention.In such a state, you find yourself depending on chance or grace…. Your work is practical, but your relationship to it is illogical in the range of its possible errors and failures. You align yourself with something behind and ahead and above you.
People who are destabilized by historical forces are more intelligent than the secure ones who have got the formulas in place. The safety of received tastes and opinions, confirmed in furniture and inherited artworks, stops the true brain, the brain of the seeking blind. When people are uprooted and insecure, their tables are alive with the conversation of prophets—philosophy, music, literature, God. But when the people are safe, the repetition of a formula goes around and around.
– Fanny Howe
Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world
– Salman Rushdie
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, and germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
[ FOOL: O nuncle, court holy-water in a dry house is better than this rain-water out o’ door. Good nuncle, in, and ask thy daughters’ blessing: here’s a night pities neither wise man nor fool. ]
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join’d
Your high engender’d battles ‘gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! ‘tis foul!
– William Shakespeare, King Lear
I don’t think anybody ever knows what another person means when they speak, frankly. It’s more than translation, it’s just throwing yourself into the dark. Language is so very, very personal, private. Weird. I guess you could think of it as translation, that seems like a kind of euphemistic metaphor. It’s probably a lot more hopeless than that. But the effort of speaking as a human is the effort to get past that hopelessness with every sentence.
– Anne Carson
Woolf: “Stand at the window and let your rhythmical sense open and shut, boldly and freely until one thing melts into another, until the taxis are dancing with the daffodils, until a whole has been made from all the separate fragments.”
– Break Every Rule, Carole Maso
We say: ‘I enjoy nature’, and what is it in nature that we enjoy? It is its music. Something in us has been touched by the rhythmic movement, by the perfect harmony which is so seldom found in this artificial life of ours. It lifts one up and makes one feel that it is this which is the real temple, the true religion. One moment standing in the midst of nature with open heart is a whole lifetime, if one is in tune with nature.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan
Like the terrestrial crust of the earth / which is proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul / is a miracle of mutual pressures.
– Anne Carson
All men, at one time or another, have fallen in love with the veiled Isis whom they call Truth. With most, this has been a passing passion: they have early seen its hopelessness and turned to more practical things. But others remain all their lives the devout lovers of reality: though the manner of their love, the vision which they make to themselves of the beloved object varies enormously. Some see Truth as Dante saw Beatrice: an adorable yet intangible figure, found in this world yet revealing the next. To others she seems rather an evil but an irresistible enchantress: enticing, demanding payment and betraying her lover at the last.
Some have seen her in a test tube, and some in a poet’s dream: some before the altar, others in the slime. The extreme pragmatists have even sought her in the kitchen; declaring that she may best be recognized by her utility. Last stage of all, the philosophic skeptic, has comforted an unsuccessful courtship by assuring himself that his mistress is not really there.
– Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism
If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion and peace.
– Eckart Tolle
That which secures life from exhaustion lies in the unseen world, deep at the roots of things.
– Rudolf Steiner
Don’t Worry
by Anna Kamienska
Translated by Grażyna Drabik & David Curzon
Don’t worry there’ll still be a lot of suffering
For now you have the right to cling to the sleeve
of someone’s blunt friendship
To be happy is a duty which you neglect
A careless user of time you send days like geese to the meadow
Don’t worry you’ll die many times
Until you learn at the very end to love life
There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops…when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living…
– T.H. White
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
It is not time or opportunity
that is to determine intimacy;
it is disposition alone. Seven
years would be insufficient to
make some people acquainted
with each other, and seven
days are more than enough
for others.
– Jane Austen
It stung God. They say his spinal cord ran straight out of the sun.
– Anne Carson
Slowly I dance out of the burning house of my head.
– Mark Strand
To all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace.
– Patricia Highsmith
What no one ever talks about
is how dangerous hope can be.
Call it forgiveness
with teeth.
– Clementine von Radics
People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.
So let us rather not be sure of anything…
Then miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence,
Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.
– Rumi
Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.
Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
– Anne Carson
I believe in pink
— after Audrey Hepburn
Pink, as in protest. Pink like a pussy
hat, circa 2017. Pink blows the whistle.
Pink lights a candle. Writes poetry. Says
their names. Remembers Breonna’s soft
heart and Gianna’s unicorn and Liam’s
fever-bitten, five-year-old cheeks. Pink
as ballet slippers as a form of resistance.
Pink as Midwestern marrow. The kind
that doesn’t shy away from ice and bitter
cold. Pink as a fetal pig. Pink as newborn
skin, freshly thrust from the womb. Pink
as a lung. A tongue. A scream. Pink puts
pressure on the wound. Wants to know
What did you do?
Pink as a Minnesota sunrise. Pink as snow
on pavement and the site of an early grave.
Pink stands at the front lines, armed with
a smart phone and a tattoo that reads
Love thy neighbor. Pink as the eye
of the goddamn storm. Burns sharp as
the light of a northern star. As a woman
in a pink coat who refuses to look away.
– cora finch
How do you know love is gone? If you said that you would be there at seven and you get there by nine, and he or she has not called the police yet – it’s gone.
– Marlene Dietrich
If there is a secret to writing, I haven’t found it yet. All I know is you need to sit down, clear your mind, and hang in there.
– Mary McGrory
There is an ocean where all of our little
nodes of life work through
the language of love.
The price of admission is daring to feel
the truth of being real.
– George Gorman
Because a song is a mountain put into
Words and landscape is the feeling that
Enters something so big in the harmony
We are always in danger of blowing up
With passion.
– Victor Hernández Cruz
It seems like a city built on precipices, a perilous city. Great roads rush down hill like rivers in spate. Great buildings rush up like rockets.
– G.K. Chesterton
The day is winter bright. I blink against it.
Each time the sun glints in my eyes,
each time I close my lids & let them go
orange & freckled with light.
– Maggie Smith
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
You know, Jews, when they drop a prayer book are supposed to kiss it. This is what they teach you when you’re very little. It seemed entirely reasonable to me that you would do that. When I was a child I would kiss any book I dropped. When I was a very little child, after I’d read a book I really liked, I’d kiss it. Love is really the word. I think Children’s books are a human emotional experience rather than an intellectual one. You have a human relationship with them. Children have emotional relationships with inanimate objects, which it would be wise to carry on into adulthood. The way a child makes a person out of a doll, which I never did, I made people out of books.
– Fran Leibowitz
I converse with the man who is always with me
—he who speaks alone hopes to speak to God one day—;
my soliloquy is a conversation with that good friend
who taught me the secret of philanthropy.
– Antonio Machado
You get used to the dark,
you realize the ghosts
are all friendly…
– Jack Kerouac
Suffering is a universal experience. All living beings are subject to ignorance, karma, and pain. Instead of turning away from this or seeing it as useless, tormenting, or destructive, we can use this pain to develop compassion.
Of course, if we felt only ‘our’ pain and not the pain of others, we would be self-absorbed. If we saw only ‘their’ pain without recognizing our own, our compassion would remain abstract. And if we saw both our own and others’ pain without understanding that suffering is the nature of samsara, we might simply conclude: Life is suffering and the best we can do is help each other get through it. But there is no vision in this approach. Instead, seeing that the nature of samsara is suffering, we must look to the cause.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
Listening to talks about the dharma, or the teachings of Buddha, or practicing meditation is nothing other than studying ourselves. Whether we’re eating or working or meditating or listening or talking, the reason that we’re here in this world at all is to study ourselves. In fact, it has been said that studying ourselves provides all the books we need.
– Pema Chödrön
Dharma talks aren’t the truth. The true Dharma exists in the mind of the students as seeds and the Dharma talks are just like a little cloud that releases rain and causes the seeds in the mind of the practitioners to sprout and manifest.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove,
the poem must ride on its own melting.
– Robert Frost
I tell people, especially if I’m giving a reading, it’s okay to let the words wash over them, the way one experiences abstract art.
– Carl Phillips
Yoga is a way of moving into stillness in order to experience the truth of who you are.
– Erich Schiffmann
When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people.
– John Steinbeck
Say what you will about the sweet miracle
of unquestioning faith.
I consider the capacity for it terrifying.
– Kurt Vonnegut
We must recognize that ethics requires us to risk
ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness,
when what forms us diverges from what lies before us,
when our willingness to become undone
in relation to others constitute our chance
of becoming human.
To be undone by another is a primary necessity,
an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance—
to be addressed, claimed,
bound to what is not me,
but also to be moved,
to be prompted to act,
to address myself elsewhere,
and so to vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’
as a kind of possession.
If we speak and try to give an account
from this place, we will not be irresponsible,
or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven.
– Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself
Two years I’ve lived as if in a cul-de-sac,
a flat sun bathing me in cold blue glare,
my griefs orbiting like silt-faced moons.
– Rachael Mead
Perhaps my only real
expertise, my only talent,
is to endure beyond the
endurable.
– Jeff VanderMeer
I feel suddenly very untalented
as I look at my slump of work
in art & writing. Am I destined
to deteriorate for the rest of my life?
– Sylvia Plath
It is much more difficult to explain to yourself what you are than what you are not.
– Mikhail Iossel
And we will lie down together
and we will rise up together
and we will raise the roof together
and we will bring all the rivers
to the door of this great house
– Rebecca Cook
In keeping your awareness inside your body, don’t try to imprison it there. In other words, don’t try to force the mind into a trance, don’t try to force the breath, or hold it to the point where you feel uncomfortable or confined. You have to let the mind have its freedom. Simply keep watch over it to make sure that it stays separate from its thoughts. If you try to force the breath and pin the mind down, your body is going to feel restricted, and you won’t feel at ease in your work. You’ll start hurting here and aching there, and your legs may fall asleep. So just let the mind be its natural self, keeping watch to make sure that it doesn’t slip out after external thoughts.
The mind sheds light in all directions. The breath is radiant, the mind fully radiant, due to the focusing of mindfulness.
The focus is strong; the light, aglow… The mind has power and authority. All four of the frames of reference are gathered into one. There is no sense that, “That’s the body… That’s a feeling… That’s the mind… That’s a mental quality.” There’s no sense that they’re four. This is thus called the great frame of reference, because none of the four are in any way separate.
– Ajahn Lee
If adventures will not befall a
young lady in her own village, she must seek
them abroad.
– Jane Austen
Suffering doesn’t
make my writing
better; it makes it
harder to produce
at all.
– Quinn Que
what is a gentle way
to imagine this reckoning?
We who speak
the language of home
know wildly what we must do.
There is no flowering
into the hereafter
if suddenly we perish
with a calmness. Listen.
– EL WILLIAMS III
Ode to Psyche
by John Keats
O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung
By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,
And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
Even into thine own soft-conched ear:
Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see
The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?
I wander’d in a forest thoughtlessly,
And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,
Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side
In deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof
Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran
A brooklet, scarce espied:
Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,
They lay calm-breathing, on the bedded grass;
Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;
Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu,
As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,
And ready still past kisses to outnumber
At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:
The winged boy I knew;
But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?
His Psyche true!
O latest born and loveliest vision far
Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy!
Fairer than Phoebe’s sapphire-region’d star,
Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;
Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,
Nor altar heap’d with flowers;
Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan
Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.
O brightest! though too late for antique vows,
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
Yet even in these days so far retir’d
From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,
Fluttering among the faint Olympians,
I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d.
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees
Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!
Fascism is being afraid. Fascism is fear bossing you. Fascism is worse than all these things, and fascism is closer to you than I can make you see. I’m trying to wake you up to tell you that you’re sleeping with something ten times more dangerous than a poison-fang snake in your bed.
– Woody Guthrie
The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.
– Huey P. Newton
The tragedy in the lives of most of us is that we go through life walking down a high-walled lane with people of our own kind, the same economic situation, the same national background and education and religious outlook. And beyond those walls, all humanity lies, unknown and unseen, and untouched by our restricted and impoverished lives.
– Florence Luscomb
You have to write it until it shines.
Until it’s so brilliant that no agent,
no publisher, no reader ever wants
to put it down.
– Dionne Brand
If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.
– Antisthenes
Film lovers are sick people.
– François Truffaut
Sooner or later people believe writers rather than the government.
– Gabriel García Márquez
Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.
– Robert Greene
May what is written resound in the stillness, making silence resound at length, before returning to the motionless peace where the enigma still wakes.
– Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it.
– Charles Horton Cooley
I believe that the meaning of life lies in elevating our spiritual level in the time we’re given to live. Even if it’s just one iota compared to when we were born, our life won’t have been lived in vain.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Intellect and love are made of two different materials. Intellect ties people in knots and risks nothing, but love dissolves all tangles and risks everything. Intellect takes you to the door but love takes you inside the house.
– Rumi
Effortless doesn’t mean no effort; effortless means just enough effort to be vivid, to be present, to be here, to be now. To be bright…
My teacher used to call this “effortless effort.” We each need to find out for ourselves what this means…
Too much effort and we get too tight; too little effort and we get dreamy… Somewhere in the middle is a state of vividness and clarity and inner brightness…
– Adyashanti
The goal isn’t to be happy with my voice. What I want is simply to have one.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
My child reminds me there were once whales here in this expanse of sand.
– Matthew Shenoda
Jung said you can cure a psychotic patient if you can make him creative. In other words, if what is destroying him from within can be brought forth in writing or painting or some other form, then he can be cured. What we try to do is to help people bring forth the Self.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
This truly is the sky over things past.
– Rilke
The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop.
– Philip Roth
The passing from the ‘black Light,’ from the ‘luminous Night’ to the brilliance of the emerald vision will be a sign … of the completed growth of the subtle organism, the ‘resurrection body’ hidden in the visible physical body.
– Henry Corbin
tea speaks softly
yet insists
on being felt
– @BashoSociety
This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.
– Rumi
The recognition of our therapeutic limitations reinforces our determination to change other social factors so that men and women shall no longer be forced into hopeless situations.
– Sigmund Freud
Reality is not static—its properties are in constant flux, so perhaps we are as much in the world as we can ever be, and that’s the problem.
– Renee Gladman
At sixteen, I memorized Keats’s odes and wrote them out, to see how it felt to write incontestably great poetry. … His language—it’s right at the edge of the cliff.
– Robert Glück
All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’
– C.S. Lewis
This is what happens when you write books. There’s not just something that drives you to find out everything—something begins putting everything in your path. There is suddenly no such thing as a back road that doesn’t lead headlong into your obsession.
– Philip Roth
hiding under quilts
even dreams shiver
a cold night pressing close
– Basho
Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.
– Wallace Stevens
The hidden life of love, in its most inward depths, is unfathomable, and still has a boundless relationship with the whole of existence.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
– W. B. Yeats
The real meaning of initiation is that this visible world we live in is a symbol and a shadow, that this life we know through the senses is a death and a sleep, or, in other words, that what we see is an illusion. Initiation is the dispelling.
– Fernando Pessoa
What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts.
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere – on water and land.
– Walt Whitman
Either you think – or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today’s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Creator of all: without this, no exit will be illumined, and we shall seek it in vain.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
How do you make people see that everyone’s story is now a part of everyone else’s story? It’s one thing to say it, but how can you make a reader feel that is their lived experience?
– Salman Rushdie
The price an artist pays for doing what he wants is that he has to do it.
– William S. Burroughs
old tides recede
when inner gravity changes
– @BashoSociety
Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don’t love you or your work.
– Toni Morrison
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.
– Simone Weil
The Dharmas,
With no exceptions,
Do not hold to any I or self.
We are all inseparable.
Everyone is equal.
This has nothing to do with our understandings and analyses.
– Tantra on Bodhicitta Meditation
Psychoanalysis has long insisted that psychic change depends not simply on insight, but on relationship—specifically, on the presence of an other who can be affected.
– Karyne E. Messina
God has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. You are as much alone with him as if you were the only being he had ever created.
– C.S. Lewis
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end with doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
– Francis Bacon
Freeing oneself from words is liberation.
– Bodhidharma
We entered alone and we left alone. And most of us lived lonely and frightened and incomplete lives.
– Charles Bukowski
Spirituality is nothing but caring and sharing; offering oneself in service.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
I wrote silences, nights, I noted down the inexpressible. I fixed dizzy spells.
– Arthur Rimbaud
In the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.
– Hermann Hesse
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.
– Evelyn Waugh
When we engage the present, we engage the whole of our lives. When we plunge into the world, we accept the whole of what is.
– Jack Petranker
Be aware of the ‘I’ so intensely that no other thought can arise. If you are truly watchful, each thought will dissolve at the moment that it appears.
– Annamalai Swami
If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it.
– @naval
Unless I discover the alchemical trick of turning this muck into gold, I am lost.
– Nietzsche
You may eventually forgive and befriend someone who harmed you, never someone who bored you.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Be courageous & discipline yourself. Work. Keep digging your well. Don’t think about getting off from work. Submit to a daily practice. Your loyalty to that is a ring on the door. Keep knocking, and the joy inside will eventually open a window & look out to see who’s there.
– Rumi
There are a great many poems I love and admire written by poets I personally dislike.
– Bernard T. Joy
Privacy is essential for maintaining a free and independent mind.
– Carl Sagan
The challenges of living life on earth constantly demand heroic behavior of us, the [Beowulf] poet seems to say, even if this means no more than getting up early in the morning to feed the pigs, even if it means no less than going out to fight a fiery dragon.
– Dick Ringler
some apologies
arrive after the tide
has already turned inward
– @BashoSociety
as the moon thins
something quietly releases
without announcement
– @BashoSociety
Love is a travel. All travelers, whether they want or not, are changed. No one can travel into love and remain the same.
– Shams Tabrizi
You don’t ‘observe’ the Earth orbiting the Sun. You infer it from evidence. Evolution works the same way.
– Richard Dawkins
The notion of symptom, as I indicated on several occasions, and it is very easy to locate by reading the one who is responsible for it, namely, Marx.
– Jacques Lacan
If there was a moment when Freud was revolutionary, it was in the way that he highlighted a function that Marx also brought out – it’s even the only element that they had in common: that of considering a certain number of facts as symptoms.
– Jacques Lacan
Thelonious Monk apparently once left the stage in a morose mood. He was very dissatisfied with the music he had just played. On being asked why this was so he replied that he had made all the wrong mistakes.
– Greil Marcus
So you have swept me back I who could have walked with the live souls above the earth, I who could have slept among the live flowers at last.
– H.D.
HORATIO.
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.
HAMLET.
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
– William Shakespeare
We spend the first year of a child’s life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There’s something wrong there.
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
If concentration is made with the brain, hot sensations and even headache ensue. Concentration has to be made in the heart, which is cool and refreshing. Relax, and your meditation will be easy.
– Ramana Maharshi
Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.
– Rebecca Solnit
That one is in despair is not a rarity; no, it is rare, very rare, that one is.. not in despair.
– Søren Kierkegaard
A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere.
– Kierkegaard
It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.
– Voltaire
The big change is the proximity to death. I am a tidy kind of guy. I like to tie up the strings if I can. If I can’t, that’s OK. But my natural thrust is to finish things that I’ve begun. i don’t think I’ll be able to finish those songs. Maybe, who knows? And maybe I’ll get a second wind, I don’t know. But I don’t dare attach myself to a spiritual strategy. I don’t dare do that. I’ve got some work to do. Take care of business. I am ready to die. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable. That’s about it for me.
– Leonard Cohen
People think of compassion as, like, kindness. The image comes to mind of some nice New Age guy bending to something with a look on his face like he’s about to cry. And I don’t think that’s it. I think of it more as a quality of openness that comes with being in a state of unusual attentiveness.
– George Saunders
Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar’s vile tongue be cut out!
– Mikhail Bulgakov
without any assistance or guidance from you
i have loved you assiduously for 8 months 2 wks & a day
i have been stood up four times
i’ve left 7 packages on yr doorstep
forty poems 2 plants & 3 handmade notecards i left
town so i cd send to you have been no help to me
on my job
you call at 3:00 in the mornin on weekdays
so i cd drive 27 ½ miles cross the bay before i go to work
charmin charmin
but you are of no assistance
i want you to know
this waz an experiment
to see how selfish i cd be
if i wd really carry on to snare a possible lover
if i waz capable of debasin my self for the love of another
if i cd stand not being wanted
when i wanted to be wanted
& i cannot
so
with no further assistance & no guidance from you
i am endin this affair
this note is attached to a plant
i’ve been waterin since the day i met you
you may water it
yr damn self
– ntozake shange
When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
– Louise Erdrich
All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerrilla warfare, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise.
– Milan Kundera
Personality encloses us like a shell. We like to believe that inside that shell is our ‘true self’, the ‘real me’. In fact, says Guidjieff, we are full of thousands of little ‘I’s. They could be compared to the crystalline fragments that a windscreen shatters into when struck with a hammer. But every time we make some tremendous effort, two of the crystals fuse together. If we could make enough efforts, we would finally obtain one solid block of crystal. If that could happen, man would be virtually a god.
Our aim, then, is to make the kind of effort that will create enough ‘friction’ to fuse two crystals together. These efforts Gurdjieff calls ‘intentional suffering’. This does not mean flogging ourselves or seeking out misery, but simply making efforts of will instead of drifting along in a robotic or mechanical state.
– Colin Wilson
Two passing temporarinesses developed feelings for one another. Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond.
– George Saunders
The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.
– Rebecca Solnit
Whoever wants to achieve something great must not seek to satisfy or please anyone but himself in his work: as soon as he fishes for the approval of others, it will not be anything great.
– Nietzsche
Always remember that the worst among us will always hate the finest. The Obamas are wonderful people–loving, good, educated, intelligent and classy. So, don’t be surprised when the very worst among us attacks the very best.
– Michael Branda
The Town Who Banned Unpleasant Pie Talk
A story by Krikmöklet Egelanaard
CRAM BROOK PUBLISHING
This story is dedicated to the late Michael Parenti. Bless you forever for your lifelong cri de coeur, nostro amico.
In the days after monarchies fell, town criers, that is, people previously employed by the king or queen, who stood in prominent locations and yelled Royal news, announcements, and decrees so that all townspeople could hear, became either self-appointed, paid for with tax-payer revenues, or funded by either corporate or private interests. The townspeople of Little Cowrie, being out of the way and having little to boast of, were endowed with the self-appointed variety.
Their benevolent crier was not quite old, but not wholly young. He ate with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, and attended church on Sundays. On that day his hair was washed and combed, and he shouted no news again until Monday.
That crier had a name and it was Tom. When he came to the end of his announcements, Tom liked to bellow out rhymes. Because he loved the s, p, and b sounds, Tom returned to his favorite nursery rhyme day after day, crying little tittles of it until he had the whole thing memorized.
The verses were mysterious: a song that cost sixpence plus a pocket of rye, about a grim baker who baked blackbirds into a pie for a wealthy king who needed pies of such creative magnitude that they would surprise and delight the king and his luminaries, with a queen who ate only bread and honey in the parlor—either forced to, or by her own preference—and a poor maid who, while laboring at some washing, sadly lost her nose to one of those enraged blackbirds who may have had more than a few feathers singed. Despite the vast particulars of the story, no one knew precisely what it meant.
Tom grew more and more pleased with himself the more he cried. His voice boomed so large everyone could hear him, from the townspeople doing their shopping in the high street market, all the way down to the crews and passengers standing on the decks of the vessels docked where the road curved and dipped into the sea. For a while, the people seemed pleased with Tom’s orations. Those inside their apartments, offices, and public houses would step outside in Tom’s familiar lead-up to “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” and could be seen with big grins, clapping and mouthing the words along quietly.
Until one day someone grumbled. A stranger pulled into the parking lot, stepped into the Purple Peacock, and ordered a pint of pale ale. As he sat sipping, slumped slightly and staring through his pint, Tom’s voice rained down on that newcomer’s dry ears. And just like a patch of dry, cracked earth can’t hold a heavy rain, that stranger couldn’t take in dear Tom’s bright, bellowing lines without cracking his face into a twisted grimace.
When all the patrons returned to their tables after watching and listening to Tom, they instantly registered the displeasure on the newcomer’s face, and his tightened, pinned-up shoulders that looked as though if they’d had the ability to be lifted but an inch or two more, they’d have succeeded in sealing off the man’s ears.
“Is something troubling you, friend? You look to be in great discomfort?” Old Barley Biggs, the sign maker, asked the stranger.
“Discomfort and displeasure, sir, to be sure. Why, that upstart’s voice sends a frozen flow of sharp glass through my veins, and I regret terribly, for the first time ever in my life, that I cannot remove my own ears.”
“Do you mean to say that our crier, Tom, his bellowing has brittled your blood so? Oh, get over. He likes to hear himself riddle out the rhymes after he speaks his business.”
“You must be a strange folk here to call that fool “a man of business?” Do you really think that bloke possesses the solemnity needed to broadcast who’s been born and who’s died, and whose old Aunt Mary’s barn burned down, when he goes blabbing on about blackbird pies all ringy-dingy, jingle-jangle like a jarring jester? If you ask me, people don’t want to hear all that noise and weirdo blackbird babble.”
Well, Big Barley, as he was called, had never considered Tom and Tom’s crying in that light. Neither had Janey O’ Cullens, nor Harper Jug, nor Leslie Kessler, nor the publican, Rod Rodigan, who all stood there soaking up the stranger’s insights.
“I dare say,” interposed Barley, “Tom isn’t one of those professional criers who’s well-groomed in the trade. He may just not know how it’s supposed to be done. But a man, such as yourself could bring us up in standards. Why don’t you tell us what we should do?”
A few moments after this was said, Janey, Harper, and Leslie all agreed with nods of their heads in the affirmative. And Rod Rodigan brought out five clean glasses, poured out a thoughtful measure of cherry brandy, and they all raised a welcome to their valued new friend and his authoritative expertise.
It didn’t take long for the new views to spread. Townspeople, who had never once before considered Tom’s crying either a hardship or a nuisance, stopped stepping out when they heard Tom begin to bellow. Instead, they stayed indoors and made uncomfortable side-glances at one another. They were comforted when their new friend nodded in approval, and made an affirming fist over his heart, as if saying “Stay strong. We’ll get through this together.”
Soon, they had no compunction about expressing their critiques openly. Indeed, complaining about Tom became a frequent pastime for townspeople, and everyone seemed eventually to join in in relishing the vitriol.
“I guess any idiot thinks he can yell out, these days.” Chided Earnest Pickering, the ciderist.
“His voice is so grating. Will he ever shut up?” Barked Charlie Torpski, a bus driver.
“Baking blackbirds into a pie—it’s so cruel! He should be fined for inciting cruelty to animals!” Joni Monraker shouted through a bullhorn rallying an enthusiastic handful of picketers outside the courthouse.
“He makes me so uncomfortable. In a public space, can’t he just say nice things? Samantha Weller’s cat just had kittens. He could announce that instead of all this pie claptrap. He’s just so unsavory.” Helen Westbroom thoughtfully posed to all the attendees of the Little Cowrie Elementary PTA meeting.
Gunther Weistheimer, Little Cowrie’s pie monger, was perhaps the most impacted. Between Tom’s unappetizing poesy and the public outcry, Gunther’s pie sales had dropped to next to nothing, and with unpaid bills piling up to his flour-dusted elbows, he was seriously having to consider filing for bankruptcy. Despite his hardships, however, Gunther refrained from criticizing Tom, who was his sole pie-buying customer.
The economic impact of Tom’s crying wasn’t isolated to the pie monger. Steady declines in spending had become apparent everywhere, from the outdoor markets to the high street shops, to the restaurants that lined the pier, people just weren’t coming out to shop or dine. The only establishment that saw an increase in patronage and profits was the Purple Peacock. Rod Rodigan had hung a sign in the pub window that read The only SOUND-OASIS in Little Cowrie! So people flocked inside where they were sheltered from any outside noise by soundproof boards hung on all the walls and ceilings.
Since other businesses in town were flailing, business owners banded together and descended on Town Hall. It was the Town Council’s meeting night, and townspeople, too, flooded into the aisles and sat on the bench seats making such a clamor that no one noticed that Town Hall, too, was, and had always been, soundproofed to the public.
Besides the ten minutes devoted to talking about roadside weeding, the whole of the meeting addressed the issue of town crier. Should anyone be able to say what they want in a public area? Of course there were things one should never say, like “fire!” if there was no fire, or “I’m definitely going to put poisonous snakes in the Town Councilman’s bed tonight, mark my words!” It was against the law to say those things. But what about blackbirds in pies? What about having a voice that rubs some people the wrong way? Or even just not possessing the professional standards that, say, a Town appointed crier would? After all, Tom was a free-lancer and often cried without getting paid. How could he be subject to anything but his own standards?
But clearly, people didn’t like what Tom said or the way he said it. And what’s more is that it was hurting businesses. So, after hearing the testimonies of business owners and townspeople, the town council decided that community standards had to be set. A town crier must have a pleasant voice. He or she must treat births, deaths, and all other matters with appropriate solemnity and so should not mix in trivial rhymes. Matters of public crying of the crier’s discretion should be limited to positive, feel-good news like kittens and ice cream socials, and should never include any mention of cruel acts. And so, new words that absolutely could not be said were added to the list, which had, until then, been comprised only of “fire” and “poisonous snakes” or threatening words of that ilk. The new words were decried and written in the law books. They were as follows:
sing; song; sixpence; pocket; rye; four; twenty; blackbirds; baked; pie
Now that there were more words that could absolutely not be said without fear of punishment, the town council appointed a crier monitor to enforce community standards. And don’t you know it, that new man in town, the stranger that wandered into the Purple Peacock that fortuitous day, was unanimously decided to be the man for the job. The decision met with cheers and hurrahs from townspeople, and much sober handshaking and patting on backs by business owners. Everyone seemed to walk out of the hall happily, except for Gunther, the pie monger, who could no longer ask Tom to announce his pies. His pie shop was doomed. And where was Tom, anyway? Off somewhere practicing for the next day’s crying, no doubt.
Townspeople were filled with confidence that the new crier monitor would enforce the new laws, and that the town square, the uptown markets, the high street shops, all the way down to the docks would be safe spaces to walk freely. Tom was pleased to see so many people out and about that glorious morning that he laid right into “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” Before he finished the first two lines, Tom felt a tug at his left big toe and was hoisted into the air. As he hung there upside down with his crier frills flapping in the breeze and his bell clabber silenced by gravity, two strong men wheeled out a large steaming vat on a plywood trolley.
The vat was positioned directly below Tom. The steam from the boiling water fogged up Tom’s glasses and he could no longer see the gathering crowds. Then, he heard a loud, bellowing voice to rival his own.
The Crier Monitor, though his proclamation was addressed to Tom by name, was clearly spoken, with such a touch of panache they were unaccustomed to, and with perfect formality that was not distant or cold, but carried with it an authoritative air, that it was understood to be expressly for the sake of townspeople.
“Tom, by the power vested in me by the esteemed Town Council of Little Cowrie, in upholding public virtue for the good of the people, I hereby find you in violation of community standards having uttered words that absolutely never must be said without swift retribution of severe punishment!”
And the rope that held poor Tom up by his toe was cut, and Tom plopped into the boiling vat never to cry again.
That evening, the usual customers gathered at their favorite watering hole.
“I never liked that boy. So vulgar! I’m disgusted—I’m actually sickened that we listened to him for so long!” Said Janey O’Cullens to her compatriots who sat round the darts table at the Purple Peacock.
“Yeah. Good riddance,” said Harper Jug, with an involuntary shudder.
“I bet we’ll all sleep easy tonight.” Said Leslie Kessler, with a sigh of relief.
And a shout emanated from the publican, Rod Rodigan, that everyone’s next round was on the house!
For the next few days the Crier Monitor made all the town announcements until a suitable replacement could be found. Townspeople and visitors from ships from other places shopped on the high street and ate at the restaurants that lined the pier. Children played at the park, while their parents sat on benches and gossiped. Millers milled. Bakers baked. Samantha Weller’s cat’s kittens mewed, and Big Barley Biggs’ big dog barked. The sun rose and set, and the Earth rotated on its axis in space, dependably, like an old friend who knew exactly what to do.
Chloe Weller was Samantha Weller’s twelve-year-old daughter. Chloe was tall for her age, was athletic and strong, and had a voice that could fill an auditorium. She had asked her mom if she could, instead of taking jazz dance lessons, audition for town crier. Once it was discussed that Chloe could cry before and after school, once on Saturday mornings before soccer practice, and would have Sundays off, her mother agreed. And when Chloe auditioned she bellowed out her oyesses beautifully, and so impressed the crier monitor with a pronouncement of the grande opening of Little Cowrie’s premier chestnut pudding shoppe, so positively brimming with positivity, that he hired her on the spot.
The Town Council, business owners, and townspeople all were over the moon having Chloe as their new crier. She looked neat, always smiled, and had such a pleasing and bright tone that everyone looked forward to her twice daily announcements—except for once on Saturdays and not again until Mondays—that they’d all run to gather outside along the sidewalks at every first “Oyez!”
Gunther Weistheimer had shuttered his pie shop after Tom’s execution. He’d no reason to stay open since his one repeat customer would return no more. So Gunther packed a small suitcase with only the necessary toiletries, a clean pair of pajamas, and a few changes of clothes, and went to visit his sister, Gilda, in New West Haver.
Chloe’s father was Little Cowrie’s only physician. He was also somewhat of an herbalist and grew many of his own medicinals that he apothecated into remedies. Doctor Weller kept Chloe’s vocal chords healthy with his homemade herbal sprays of horehound root and wild cherry bark extracted in grain alcohol and vegetable glycerin, and sent her with thermoses of slippery elm and chamomile tea to hydrate and sooth her sonorous, hardworking voice.
Most of Chloe’s cries were for daily lunch specials at the newly opened Sweet and Savory Chestnut, where people would wait in lines out the door to experience the various chestnut puddings and specialty coffees on offer. But the town would also pay her for announcing upcoming public meetings, reminders about local ordinances, such as “remember to license your dogs by next Monday,” or “remember all trash must be deposited in a receptacle or you risk a $300 fine,” and reminders about elections. The Classic Motorcycle Collectors Club hired her to remind townspeople of the upcoming classic motorcycles show at Chiffen Park. Because she was so young, too young to legally work, Chloe earned educational credits for her work as crier, and the payments she received from the town, businesses, organizations, and individuals, were put into a trust that she could use only for education expenses when she turned eighteen.
One Saturday morning, as Chloe finished her announcements, she noticed a couple staggering to their car after leaving the Sweet and Savory Chestnut, where they, presumably, had eaten breakfast. A moment later, another couple staggered out toward their car. But before they got there, they both collapsed on the pavement. The man of the first couple stood leaning against his driver’s side door, fumbling with his keys, then collapsed too. His female companion, who had also been leaning herself against the car, emitted a small cry, then down she went.
At that moment, a man with a small suitcase got off the bus at the stop down the street behind her, and Chloe ran after him.
“Stop, stop!” She cried. Her voice bellowed, and the man stopped. “Please call 9-1-1! Do you have a phone?”
The man pulled out his phone, dialed the numbers, and handed it to the panting girl dressed in crier’s livery. Not five minutes later, two ambulances arrived, and both couples were rushed to Little Cowrie Medical Center where they all recovered.
After soccer practice, Chloe went home exhausted after such an eventful morning. The mother cat and kittens, who had grown big and plump, sat licking their paws and slowly blinking in the sun on the front lawn. But once she went inside, Chloe found her mother frazzled answering the house phone and her father’s cell phone, sometimes simultaneously. Her father, her mother said to Chloe with her hand over the house phone receiver, was in his office (that adjoined their house) on the phone with the hospital.
Apparently, the phones had been ringing all morning and afternoon—emergency calls for Doctor Weller with complaints of stomach upset, dizziness, fainting spells, and loss of motor function. Doctor Weller ordered ambulances for those callers who had no one unaffected by the mysterious illness to drive them to the hospital. Not knowing the cause for their suffering, the doctor couldn’t diagnose nor prescribe any remedy, so he urged them to the hospital where they would at least receive fluids and testing. It was only that evening, when the phones stopped ringing, that Chloe was able to tell her father about the four staggering patrons outside the Sweet and Savory Chestnut.
All day Sunday, the Wellers waited for news. A few calls from those who were Doctor Weller’s regular patients, thanked him for his urgent help with getting to the hospital. Everyone said the same thing: the hospital ran tests, but found nothing conclusive—it could have been something they ate, or else a new strain of flu—and after being hydrated, they were sent home for bed rest and broth.
Monday morning, Chloe dressed in her red and gold crier’s livery with frilly jabot flowing from her neck, and rode her bike to the high street. Her leather baldrick holstered her bell, and the side pouch of her backpack held her only announcement for the day:
Today’s lunch specials at the Sweet and Savory Chestnut are maple-braised mandarin orange and sautéed leek and smoked trout chestnut puddings; enjoy half-priced lattés to chase the Monday blues away.
She pulled her bell from the baldrick and gave it a good clappering. She unfurled her scroll. “Oyez, oyez, oyez!” She cried. Then her voice froze. She was unable to cry out the words before her. She swallowed and opened her mouth wide. Nothing but air in the form of a sigh came forth. Chloe looked up and saw, standing across the street watching her, was the man with the suitcase who had lent her his phone. He gave her, what seemed to be, an encouraging smile. But someone was behind her at the top of the concrete steps—she heard his boot scuffing in place, like he was snuffing out a number of miscreant insects.
Without turning to see who it was, Chloe re-rolled and pocketed her scroll. And with a cry that felt like the only true cry she’d ever done, Chloe bellowed out her bold and billowing cri de coeur. Like an elephant mother’s bombardic blow, or the rolling of a storm cloud filled with reverberating thunder, Chloe pronounced:
“On Saturday morning, I saw four people leaving the Sweet and Savory Chestnut collapse with illness! They were rushed to the hospital where they were treated with fluids! All day long Doctor Weller’s phones rang with emergency calls from people experiencing the same symptoms as the four I saw collapse! The hospital could not determine the cause of illness, but my father said the patients he spoke with had all eaten baked chestnut puddings! I repeat, there may be a correlation between the sudden illness afflicting dozens this weekend, and the baked chestnut puddings!”
Huge crowds had formed. Early shoppers, office workers, and civil servants lined the sidewalks, many rubbing their stomachs and nodding their heads in commiseration with their fellow sufferers. Chloe felt a presence close behind her. She saw, in her peripheral vision, two strong men pushing a steaming vat on a plywood trolley. She felt a tug at her left big toe, and found herself hanging upside down in the air from a portable scaffold. Her jabot frills floated in the breeze.
A sudden shout rang out from across the street. It was Gunther Weistheimer, the old pie monger—the man with the suitcase and the warm smile. “She’s just a child!” He shrieked. “Untie her! Let her go!”
An unbearable moment of silence passed. Then a wave of shrieks from the crowds crashed over Chloe and the Crier Monitor, the two strong men, and the steaming cauldron. Their shrieks reached the open windows above the draperies shop, where the owner, Mrs. Rod Rodigan was having her blood pressure measured by Doctor Weller after experiencing prolonged dizziness from her sudden illness over the weekend.
The wave of shrieks flowed into a unified chant. “Untie the child! Untie the child!” Doctor Weller, bent out the window, scanned the scene. His eyes bulged and his heart pulsated dreadfully at the sight of his daughter in her red and gold livery lethally dangling over the boiling vat. “Stop! Stop, I beg you!”
Doctor Weller flew down the flight of stairs and out into the high street, pushing his way through the alert crowds. “Step aside!” Many voices shouted. “Let the man through!” The wave parted like the Red Sea, and Doctor Weller stood before the Crier Monitor and his own dangling daughter.
“Untie Chloe, now!”
“Your daughter has violated community standards by using forbidden speech in a public space. She has forfeited her position as crier, and, by the power vested in me by the Town of Little Cowrie, she will undergo swift punishment befitting her crime.”
Doctor Weller’s arm flew up to meet the Monitor’s, blocking the man’s ability to cut the rope. The Doc struggled to subdue the man’s powerful resistance. Chloe’s father feared his strength would be overcome.
“Isn’t actually harming someone a worse crime than saying some unpleasant things?!” The doctor grunted as he forced all his weight against the Monitor’s. “Aren’t you breaking the law right now, violating my daughter’s sovereignty as a living being free to express herself in this world?! I don’t care what you say is an unlawful word, you sir, are a deviant, murderous felon!”
At these words, a faint cry arose from across the street. “The Monitor’s the real criminal! He already killed Tom! He bullies and kills for money saying it’s all for our sake, but it’s for his own power and profit he does it! He doesn’t make us safe from each other, he puts us in danger from himself!”
“Tie up the man! Tie up the man!” The new wave swelled with fury. Crowds started to rush at the Doctor and the Monitor still standing in their deadlock of wills and quaking muscles. At that moment, a bell rang out, suspended in the air.
“Denizens of Little Cowrie! Take my baldrick, this leather sash, and bind the Monitor!” Chloe’s voice filled the high street and everyone froze. Except for Gunther Weistheimer, who crossed the street, carefully removed Chloe’s baldrick, stepped behind the Monitor still grunting and pressing to overcome the Doctor, and tickled him right in his Town Official armpit.
The Monitor reactively retracted his arm that held the blade to try to block the tickle, but the pie monger had him in his tickling grip. The doctor picked up the fallen baldrick and quickly bound the angry laughing man, cinching up the buckle until his arms were securely pinned. The two strong men had disappeared at the onset of discord in the crowds, so several townspeople rolled the boiling vat out from under her, and Gunther carefully untied Chloe’s toe.
The publican, Rod Rodigan, shouted “boil the Monitor!” And there was a movement in the crowds that seemed like they would make a rush at the bound man and toss him into the cauldron. But Chloe cried again.
“If you all boil him, will someone have to boil you?!”
A hushed murmur of recognition swelled and faded.
Chloe turned to the Crier Monitor and bellowed. “By the power vested in us as free peoples of Little Cowrie, we hereby place you under citizen’s arrest for the murder of poor Tom, my predecessor, for the attempted murder of myself, and for violating the right that every person, free or incarcerated, is endowed—the right to speak, whether or not it suits his or hers, or your liking—you severely warped authoritarian henchman!”
Doctor Weller, with a large group of townspeople, escorted the bound Monitor to the courthouse, where he was arrested on suspicion of the crimes he was accused of, jailed, then arraigned, and held again without bail to await trial, due to the severity of his alleged crimes. Chloe was taken home in the car by her mother, Samantha, who had pushed her way through the crowds to reach her husband and daughter. Gunther unshuttered his pie shop and baked one hundred and thirteen pies for the next day’s lunch crowd.
The Sweet and Savory Chestnut was ordered to cease food service while undergoing an investigation into possible food contamination as the cause of the sudden illness of dozens of denizens of Little Cowrie. After a few days’ rest and a good many pies, Chloe readied herself to return to her post, not as a town appointed crier, but as a free one—she loved the work that much. Oftentimes, passersby and avid listeners would give her cash tips, or sometimes eclairs, or fizzy drinks. And she always felt as if she could see right into the heart of the community from where she stood on the high steps where so many innocent bugs might have been scuffed by the boot of some malfeasant hypocrite down to all of eternity.
In the Purple Peacock, Big Barley babbled to his rosary. Janey O’Cullens sometimes sat sullenly. Harper Jug often drank one too many jugs. Leslie Kessler seemed unaffected, but brooded on her and the town’s ethical transgressions in the silence of her home, and took to watching too much YouTube. Rod Rodigan found business to be steady, but never to surpass the weeks of poor Tom’s ostracization. Nevertheless, he could once again prop the pub door open and invite in the sounds and smells of Little Cowrie, including Chloe’s welcomed bell.
That fall, a cloud of blackbirds descended on Farmer Huskin’s four and twenty hectares of chestnuts and every fruit was devoured. It was Chloe who first broke the news to the Townspeople. The investigation revealed that the food contamination at the Sweet and Savory Chestnut was due to contaminated jars of pre-cracked eggs bought cheaply through a connection of Council Woman Josephine Bow, who was the neighbor of Dustin Cartlow, the owner of the pudding shoppe. It came to light that the Council woman owned stock in the Pergue Poultry Corporation that supplied the eggs. The popular pudding eatery closed, but was reopened under new management. Everyone said they’d eat there again, but then came the trouble with all the blackbirds. So it was that everyone in Little Cowrie that winter ate crow.
Epilogue
Fifteen years later, twenty seven-year-old Chloe Weller sat down with a hot vanilla latté at a small pop-up café near her creative welding class. She opened the newspaper left on the table. She read mostly with disinterest until she came upon this headline:
Small Town Probate Clerk Exposes 16 Year Old Clandestine Federal Social Nudging Program To Encourage Censorship
She read on.
Gilda Weistheimer, a retired probate clerk from West New Haver, spent the last fifteen years filing Freedom of Information Act requests, digging up evidence that a secret government program was conceived almost twenty years ago. The program named Operation Cry Out, proposed using trained agents to infiltrate small town official offices and steer local populations toward embracing censorship. Though she didn’t find evidence the program was in fact ever deployed, Ms. Weistheimer details an almost forgotten incidence that occurred in Little Cowrie that involved the killing of a middle-aged town crier, an unsuspecting town’s people, and an unknown man who came to town.
Chloe closed the paper. She knew the rest of the story.
The End
everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale;
– Salman Rushdie
…it is natural to feel anxious at the start of a great project, ambition is never easy.
– Sarah Brooks
You need to step outside of your culture to see the shackles it has placed on your thinking.
– Michael Lipsey
The quickest method for understanding and living your purpose is to ask yourself if you’re thinking in loving ways.
– Wayne Dyer
We all find a way to love & live interdependently.
Or we all die.
The whole of humanity.
– Tinu Abayomi-Paul
All too often, it is audacity and not talent that moves an artist to centerstage.
– Julia Cameron
As I face these difficult situations, help me to reject anger that morphs into wrath and welcome the anger that rectifies injustice. Give me discernment that I may not confuse the two.
– Grace Hamman, Ask of Old Paths
Failure to read what is happening in another’s soul is not easily seen as a cause of unhappiness: but those who fail to attend the motions of their own soul are necessarily unhappy.
– Marcus Aurelius
When you’re not sure what side to be on, maintain a bias for the poor, the weak, the persecuted, the marginalized and despised.
– Brian Zahnd
Racism is a theological issue.
It is a denial of the imago Dei, the God-given dignity stamped on every human being.
And when you knowingly align yourself with it, excuse it, minimize it, or strategically ignore it, you are complicit.
– Sean Dreher
They know if we ever stand together their whole system falls apart. Our unity is their greatest fear.
– Malcolm X
We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
There have been times when kindness has opened doors to the core of my existence.
– Myrtle Heery, Tracking Kindness
We are sitting in the audience, still.
Silence, like the bullet that’s missed us, spins.
– Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it.
– Charles Bukowski
The recollection that God raised this crucified Christ and made him the hope of the world must lead the churches to break their alliances with the powerful and enter into solidarity with the humiliated.
– Jürgen Moltmann
What comparison between the unbought satisfaction of conversation, society, study, even health and the common beauties of nature, but above all the peaceful reflection on one’s own conduct: What comparison, I say, between these, and the feverish, empty amusements of luxury and expense? These natural pleasures, indeed, are really without price; both because they are below all price in their attainment, and above it in their enjoyment.
– David Hume
Wisdom is a weapon to ward off destruction; it is an inner fortress which enemies cannot destroy.
– Thiruvalluvar, (Indian Poet)
Truth be told there is not one day that has gone by where I have not fallen in love with someone, with something.
– Carole Maso
…you meditate and you got the candles, you got the incense and you’ve been chanting, and all of a sudden you hear this voice: ‘Write this down’
– Carlos Santana
I like revisiting, at certain times, the places where I was once happy; I like to shape the present in the image of the irretrievable past.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Most people in the course of their lives come to realize that they cannot control the external world, but fairly few become conscious that inner psychic processes are not subject to ego control either.
– Murray Stein
Knowing what must be done does away with fear.
– Rosa Parks
Everyone wants to fill the hole in our heart that could draw us back into our inner nature, instead of helping us to make it bigger.
– Peter Kingsley
If only we overcome cruelty to human and animal, with love and compassion, we shall stand at the threshold of a new era in human and spiritual evolution, we may realize, at last, our most unique quality, humanity.
– Jane Goodall
Though winter is represented in the almanac as an old man, facing the wind and sleet, and drawing his cloak about him, we rather think of him as a… warm-blooded youth, as blithe as summer. The unexplored grandeur of the storm keeps up the spirits of the traveler. It does not trifle with us, but has a sweet earnestness. In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends…We enjoy now, not an Oriental, but a Boreal leisure…
– Henry Thoreau, A Winter Walk
Emily Dickinson is one of the greatest poets we have, and I don’t mean ‘we’ merely in America. I mean she is one of the greatest of poets.
– Susan Howe
The measure of our humanity, we will discover, is not found in isolation, but in relationship.
Not in dominance, but in solidarity.
Not in what we possess, but how we care.
May we actualize this with and through each other.
– Roshi Joan Halifax
The question is no whether there is intelligent life out there, the question is, whether there is intelligent life down here. As long as you have war, police, prisons, crime, you are in the early stages of civilization.
– Jacque Fresco
The society whose modernization has reached the stage of integrated spectacle is characterized by the combined effect of five principal factors: incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalized secrecy, unanswerable lies, and eternal present.
– Guy Debord
Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Transformation rarely happens where we were taught to look for it. We imagine growth as ascent—clarity, light, resolution, transcendence—but the deeper movements of the soul unfold differently.
They draw us downward, into the places that feel heavy, wet, and dark, into grief that has no clear story, into longing that cannot be solved, into the body’s quiet holding of what was never able to be lived.
From the outside, this descent can look like failure, regression, or falling apart. Yet in the language of the psyche—and in the symbolic vision of alchemy—this is often where real transformation begins.
What has been split off, silenced, or left behind does not heal through escape. It heals through contact, through warmth, through the slow, compassionate willingness to remain.
In this way, the downward movement is not the opposite of awakening. It is one of its most honest forms.
Transformation happens downward. Into the dark, wet, heavy places of the soul.
– Matt Licata
If man is to survive, he will learn to take a delight in the essential differences between cultures. To learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life’s exciting variety, not something to fear.
– Gene Roddenberry
In our unconsciousness we take credit where no credit is due, oblivious to the real source of everything we pretend is ours—the sacred origin not just of religion but also of everything else, of science and technology, education and law, of medicine, logic, architecture, ordinary daily life, the cry of longing, the excruciating ache of the awakening love for wisdom.
– Peter Kingsley
‘Slow’ and ‘down’ are modes of the soul; they are connective modes, ways of keeping connected to oneself and to one’s environment. ‘Slowing downwards’ refers to more than simply moving slowly, it means growing down towards the roots of one’s being. Instead of outward growth and upward climb, life at times must turn inward and downward in order to grow in other ways. There is a shift to the vertical down that re-turns us to root memories, root metaphors, and timeless things that shape our lives from within. Slowing downwards creates opportunities to dwell more deeply in one’s life, for the home we are looking for in this world is within us all along. The lost home that we are seeking is ourselves; it is the story we carry within our soul.
– Michael Meade
No matter how much you keep encouraging someone who is blindfolded to stare through the cloth, he still won’t see a thing.
– Franz Kafka
What is it all for, this poetry,
This bundle of accomplishment
Put together with so much pain?
Twenty years at hard labor,
Lessons learned from Li Po and Dante,
Indian chants and gestalt psychology;
What words can it spell,
This alphabet of one sensibility?
The pure pattern of the stars in orderly progression,
The thin air of fourteen-thousand-foot summits,
Their Pisgah views into what secrets of the personality,
The fire of poppies in eroded fields,
The sleep of lynxes in the noonday forest,
The curious anastomosis of the webs of thought,
Life streaming ungovernably away,
And the deep hope of man.
The centuries have changed little in this art,
The subjects are still the same.
– Kenneth Rexroth
When food brings joy, it reminds you that life can feel good. Finding joy in food isn’t shameful, it’s one of our birthrights as a human living in a body. So enjoy your food, relish it, be grateful for it…
– Marc David
The hermit keeps a window open onto the sky, without which the world would perish from suffocation, ugliness and boredom.
He is the only one, along with the poet, who still speaks the language of the beyond, who makes existence sacred, who gives life this verticality without which humanity is buffeted about beneath itself.
– Jean Ries
It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.
– Lytton Strachey
Want to know how vicious a system is? Try showing hospitality to someone that the system says you should exclude.
– Brian McLaren
Over and over again I have had to conquer infinite hopelesssness.
– Rilke
There is no true interpretation without embodiment.
– Michael Gorman
Evil is relatively rare. Ignorance is very common. But the most dangerous is when evil meets ignorance and finds no resistance
– Matt Rogers
We know the predator, we see them feed on us, we are aware to starve the beast is our destiny.
– John Trudell
Being human is not a mistake, a test, or a punishment. It is how awareness, or the universe, or God, or Source, whatever you want to call it, becomes personal.
– Colleen Guenther
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Divine laws are simpler than Human ones, which is why it takes a lifetime to be able to understand them; only love can understand them. Only love can interpret these words as they were meant to be interpreted.
– Benjamin Sisko
Vision is not enough, it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.
– Václav Havel
America cannot mend if its wounds are constantly covered and not treated.
– Malika J. Stevely
Our power isn’t in a political system, or a religious system, or in an economic system, or in a military system; these are authoritarian systems… they have power… but it’s not reality. The power of our intelligence, individually or collectively IS the power; this is the power that any industrial ruling class truly fears: clear coherent human beings.
– John Trudell
All good government is life-affirming.
– Dr Bandy Lee
It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
– James Baldwin
You cannot give
your life more
time,
So give your
time more life.
– Healed Life
Whatever we give to our friends, we also receive.
– Seneca
Ignorance does not make you fireproof when the world is burning.
– Nelou Keramati
Democracy is not a gift of power, but a reservoir of knowledge.
– W.E.B. Dubois
Falsehood is not easily exposed when it has had an early start in advance of truth.
– Frederick Douglass
Earthly possessions dazzle our eyes and delude us into thinking that they can provide security and freedom from anxiety. Yet all the time they are the very source of anxiety.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Whatever we ain’t got, that’s what you want.
– John Steinbeck
There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn’t a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.
– Sinclair Lewis
We joined social media for connection. What we got was chaos. Deepfakes. Pretence. Truth blurred till lies feel normal. A world performing while burning. Some days it feels pointless, living these borrowed realities, trying to make words mean something. And yet…on real streets, not curated feeds, ordinary people are still fighting to keep the world sane. That’s where hope lives. Not in algorithms, but in human courage. Thank you for reading my poetry. Writing isn’t easy when the world is unravelling, but your presence reminds me why it still matters.
– J. Mann
One of the things I love most about writing is the constraints, the problem solving, the puzzle.
– Kate Milliken
If you live in a country where politics are oppressive and you write-or try to write—you can’t avoid being a political writer.
– Josef Skvoercky
The job is to ask questions— it always was-
and to ask them as inexorably as I can.
And to face the absence of precise answers
with a certain humility.
– Arthur Miller
I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
– Zora Neale Hurston to Countee Cullen
The mature response to the problem of existence is love.
– Erich Fromm
To those in whom the functions of command are vested it seems to be their duty to defend order, without which no social life can survive; and the only order they conceive is the existing one. Nor are they entirely wrong, for until a different order has been, in fact, established no one can say with certainty that it is possible. It is just for this reason that social progress depends upon a pressure from below sufficient to change effectively the relations of power and thus to compel the actual establishment of new social relationships.
– Simone Weil
Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth… Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of a blazing sun. But such objective evaluation seems to me a matter of secondary importance which can be safely left to posterity.
– Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times
Whenever oligarchs rule the state, the cities fill with beggars, and thieves haunt the neighborhoods and temples. And this is because where the oligarchs rule, all others are impoverished and desperation sets in.
– Plato
The anger was vast and it came out of nowhere. It was the rage of something not fitting; the frustration of trying to put something in a box that is slightly too small. You try moving the shape around in the hope that some angle will make it fit in the box. Slowly comes an apprehension that this might not, after all, be possible. And finally you know it won’t fit, know there is no way it can fit, but this doesn’t stop you using brute force to try to crush it in, punishing the bloody thing for not fitting properly. That was what it was like: but I was the box, I was the thing that didn’t fit, and I was the person smashing it, over and over again, with bruised and bleeding hands.
– Helen Macdonald
People think of compassion as, like, kindness. The image comes to mind of some nice New Age guy bending to something with a look on his face like he’s about to cry. And I don’t think that’s it. I think of it more as a quality of openness that comes with being in a state of unusual attentiveness.
– George Saunders
Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.
– William Faulkner
To experience conflicts knowingly, though it may be distressing, can be an invaluable asset. The more we face our own conflicts and seek out our own solutions, the more inner freedom and strength we will gain. Only when we are willing to bear the brunt can we approximate the ideal of being the captain of our ship. A spurious tranquillity rooted in inner dullness is anything but enviable. It is bound to make us weak and an easy prey to any kind of influence.
– Karen Horney M.D.
Listening is existing in the future of all utterance. So the future is full of listening, wanting, and understanding. But what a speaker intends to say is rarely fulfilled in the sentence; and if it’s attention is over intended, it losses its capacity for arousing attention in the hearer. Part of the force of speech comes with its emotional risk. One hears units or tones more than particular words or facts and attends to these. It is possible that people want to hear poetry whether they like it or not. Their brains and ears want it.
– Fanny Howe
Well, I am sort of ashamed of my way of working, it’s so scrappy. I don’t need a room at all. I know people I admire enormously who have rooms that they go to each day, where they construct their poems like paintings; it’s imagination and literature at work together, and it’s amazing to see that process in action if you are the complete opposite. My room is the road.
– Fanny Howe
If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down. And that’s the spirit of childhood, usually. Once you know that that’s what you’re doing, even when you’re walking through a war field, you’re carrying something to keep it safe. It’s invisible but you know it’s there, and it’s a kind of vision and a weight.
– Fanny Howe
The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
– Marcel Proust
If you dislike war, respect your neighbor. And cherish the person who comes from afar. . . Distance is like allusion to the infinite. Love the person in your neighbor. Love God in the person who comes from afar.
– Lanza del Vasto
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place… Nothing outside you can give you any place… In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
– Flannery O’Connor
Hope devoted to despair,
despair delivered from hope.
The leaves of this sea scattered,
its only tree
buffeted by a gale
that blew from an ancient manuscript.
The sea: hope embroidered with despair,
despair distilled from hope.
– Najwan Darwish, (tr. Kareem James Abu-Zeid)
I was always aware that I am a person in the west living in acute privilege compared with the rest of the world, and that there is an excess of information that creates mental suffering. It is almost as if it is created in order to counterbalance the luxury. […] In the old days, a brain was freed by education and information. Now this process has turned on itself. And one must select from all the words the ones that are openings.
– Fanny Howe
In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally but naturally alive … For the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into immediate felt contact, and so to derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion.
– D. H. Lawrence
The monk is essentially outside all establishments. He does not belong to an establishment. He is a marginal person who withdraws deliberately to the margin of society with a view to deepening the fundamental human experience.
Consequently, as one of this strange people, I speak to you as a representative of all marginal persons who have done this kind of thing deliberately. Thus I find myself representing perhaps hippies among you, poets, people of this kind who are seeking in all sorts of ways and have absolutely no established status whatever…
Are monks and hippies and poets relevant? No, we are deliberately irrelevant. We live with an ingrained irrelevance which is proper to every human being.
The marginal man accepts the basic irrelevance of the human condition, an irrelevance which is manifested above all by the fact of death. The marginal person, the monk, the displaced person, the prisoner, all these people live in the presence of death, which calls into question the meaning of life.
He struggles with the fact of death in himself, trying to seek something deeper than death; because there is something deeper than death, and the office of the monk or marginal person, the meditative person or the poet is to go beyond death even in this life, to go beyond the dichotomy of life and death and to be, therefore, a witness to life.
– Thomas Merton
The truths Phaedrus began to pursue were lateral truths; no longer the frontal truths of science, those toward which the discipline pointed, but the kind of truth you see laterally, out of the corner of your eye. In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can’t make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. That’s a word he later used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn’t move forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull’s-eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window.
Lateral knowledge is knowledge that’s from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that’s not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth.
– Robert M. Pirsig
How I Might Sound if I Left Myself Alone
by Lisa Russ Spaar
Turning to watch you leave,
I see we must always walk toward
other loves, river of heaven
between two office buildings.
Orphaned cloud, fish soup poppling,
book spined in the open palm. Unstoppable light.
I think it is all right.
Or do tonight, garden toad
a speaking stone,
young sound in an old heart.
Annul the self? I float it,
a day lily in my wine. Oblivion?
I love our lives,
keeping me from it.
The war which is coming
Is not the first one. There were
Other wars before it.
When the last one came to an end
There were conquerors and conquered.
Among the conquered the common people
Starved. Among the conquerors
The common people starved too.
– Bertolt Brecht
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
You are not a documentary film. You are a painting. No events are happening here so don’t expect anything. Inside the painting there is another painting and a faint ray of light passes through that frame to fall on a solitary book whose letters are tiny and wide open as your lungs. The same ray lights the knitting needle inserted by a woman into a skein of wool. A spider’s thread shines on a potted cactus; there’s no escaping fragility. There must be a breeze for you to see such tenderness […].
Very slowly the painting moves from screen to screen. The changes are slight. […] Had you slowed down you would have seen all of this. Don’t rush things. Don’t be the one on whom slowness is forced, don’t be the convalescent or the old man. Slow down exactly when you might be hurrying off. Put on your clothes without haste. Do everything in slowness. Perhaps you will find some sort of solution or hope.
– Golan Haji
We must recognize that just as there is a pool of sadness in everyone, so there is a mountain of anger. Anger is a legitimate reaction of the soul to its wounding. We may keep it unconscious precisely because its expression today reactivates the peril its expression once risked. We may turn it upon ourselves by somatising, depressing or damaging ourselves through our contaminated decisions. Or we may transfer this anger to others, thereby wounding those who are the silent surrogates for those we could not confront in the past. Anger, then, is a reflexive response to the constriction of the soul. As such, it is not only part of the defense system of the psyche, it is a vital intimation which, when tracked, may lead to the soul’s healing.
When transformed by consciousness, anger becomes vital energy which is available not only for healing but also for furthering the desires of the soul. As long as we are wound-identified, we remain stuck in our victimage, up to our ears in the sour soup of wrath.
– James Hollis
The simple step of the courageous individual is to not take part in the lie.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls.
– Robert Walser
It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses–and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware.
– Carl Jung
I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
– Annie Dillard
One of the most powerful examples of socially engaged Buddhism is that of the monks walking peacefully from Texas to DC. Please note… Buddhism in the streets, on the roads and highways, a Buddhism that does not turn away from the social ills of our time.
– Joan Halifax
One thing striking about them is: they are nonwhite, non-Christian immigrants venturing out non-protected being received with love and reverence as they go, and that upends so much that is better upended in this moment. Our walking itself cannot create peace. But when someone encounters us — whether by the roadside, online or through a friend — when our message touches something deep within them, when it awakens the peace that has always lived quietly in their own heart — something sacred begins to unfold.
– Rebecca Solnit
Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.
– William Butler Yeats
I climb up that ladder onto my room there, and I can just stare out at the hills. I’ve been known to spend weeks up there, looking at how they’ve washed into new shapes. You can go up there and feel how good the world is.
– Georgia O’Keeffe
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
– Bertrand Russell
Your entire experience will change when you learn to understand that being able to say “I don’t know” is not only an acceptable answer but is also closer to truth than you have been willing to accept and being able to say “I was wrong” is a sign of growth not weakness.
The shift will begin to heal your perception. Being freed from all your mistaken notions about everything is like crossing a threshold into new territory you could never see while living in the lowlands of certainty that kept you trapped and unable to see.
– Kent Burgess
Darkness could make you forget what was in front of your face. Darkness would swallow the caravan site, the old putting green, and St Rule’s Tower. It would swallow crimes and grieving and remorse. If you gave yourself to darkness, you might start to make out shapes invisible to others, but without being able to define them: the movement behind a curtain, the shadows in an alleyway.
– Ian Rankin, Set in Darkness
Not thinking about anything is zen. Once you know this, walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is zen. To know that the mind is empty is to see the buddha…. Using the mind to reality is delusion. Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness. Freeing oneself from words is liberation.
– Bodhidharma
It is a moral imperative for men to be in well-led groups focused on honesty and accountability and to be in spaces that help men holistically heal and grieve to become more whole and safe. It is a social hazard for this to not be an expected norm.
– Chelan Harkin
Ideas are easy. It’s the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats.
– Sue Grafton
Once up against the sky it’s hard
to tell them from the stars—
planets, that is—the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,
or the pale green one.
– Elizabeth Bishop
Shakespeare wrote: “There is nothing more confining than the prison we don’t know we are in.” In other words, whatever we are not conscious of can have a deep hold on us. In critical moments, we can wind up doing its bidding while believing we are making our own choices in life. We are in just such a prison of our own making when we act as if the common world of fact and figures is not only the “real world,” but also the only world.
The prison of the modern mind is partly created by the common belief that “reality” can be limited to logic, statistics, and provable facts. Not that the literal world is “unreal,” rather that it is the first level of reality and can never depict all that is truly Real. Restricting all modes of presence to a single plane of being leads to being trapped in a narrow view of life and imprisoned in the linear trap of time. Too much “hard reality” and the world becomes as if flat again; we lose touch with all that makes this earth a place of wonder and beauty and hidden possibilities.
Our world is a reflection of our own soul. Because we have learned to deny the world its soul and therefore its connection to the divine, it, too, can seem to be dying. Under the spell of literalism and the tyranny of facts and statistics, the modern legacy becomes an increasingly diminished world that has been overly quantified as well as thoroughly exploited.
The rise of literalism signals the loss of imagination underlying both the fixation with measurable facts and the fundamentalism of fanatic beliefs. Literalism reduces the world to fixed ideas and rigid dogmas while isolating people at extremes of thought, feeling, and belief. Literalism takes the mystery and the natural sense of awe out of the world and eventually takes the meaning out of life. If there is no otherworld of spirit and imagination, there can be nowhere to turn when the real world becomes disorienting, when everything around us becomes both more irrational and increasingly chaotic. When life has lost its wonder and nature has lost its living halo, imagination is the missing ingredient and the necessary remedy for the disease of literalism.
– Michael Meade
There’s some stuff you just can’t know till you are older; till you have lived a bit, realized you are not immortal, and had time to accumulate―if not regrets, then at least a retrospective sense of the determining power of choices and events.
– Lucy Underwood
nobody can save you but
yourself.
you will be put again and again
into nearly impossible
situations.
they will attempt again and again
through subterfuge, guise and
force
to make you submit, quit and/or die quietly
inside.
nobody can save you but
yourself
and it will be easy enough to fail
so very easily
but don’t, don’t, don’t.
just watch them.
listen to them.
do you want to be like that?
a faceless, mindless, heartless
being?
do you want to experience
death before death?
nobody can save you but
yourself
and you’re worth saving.
it’s a war not easily won
but if anything is worth winning then
this is it.
think about it.
think about saving your self.
your spiritual self.
your gut self.
your singing magical self and
your beautiful self.
save it.
don’t join the dead-in-spirit.
maintain your self
with humor and grace
and finally
if necessary
wager your life as you struggle,
damn the odds, damn
the price.
only you can save your
self.
do it! do it!
then you’ll know exactly what
I am talking about.
– Charles Bukowski
I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.
– Tennessee Williams
Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises
– William Shakespeare
Jung said in a letter once that life is a short pause between two great mysteries. Beware of those who offer answers. They may be sincere, but their answers are not necessarily yours.
– James Hollis
My only new thing:
The penalty of light forever
Over the heads of those who were there
And back into the night, the cough of the finishing petal.
– John Ashbery, To Redoute
You know, just like mountains stick out of the Earth and there’s a fundamental Earth underneath them, so all of us, as different things, we stick out of reality and there’s a continuity underneath.
– Alan Watts
Look round at the courses of the stars, as if you were going along with them; and constantly consider the changes of the elements into one another; for such thoughts purge away the filth of the earthly life.
– Marcus Aurelius
Death cancels every thing but truth, and strips a man of every thing but genius and virtue.
– William Hazlitt
If you would experience a landscape, you must go alone into it and sit down somewhere quietly and wait for it to come in its own good time.
– Paul Gruchow
Narrative is never a straight line. When it is – it’s something else: manipulation, denial, cowardice or our being on automatic pilot.
– Betsy Warland, Presence of Mind
I knew that I was dying.
Something in me said,
Go ahead, die, sleep, become as them, accept.
Then something else in me said, no,
save the tiniest bit.
It needn’t be much, just a spark.
– Charles Bukowski
To Locke man is his natural body, a mirror or tablet upon which impressions are received from an external world. To Blake ‘the true Man’ is ‘the Poetic Genius’ or ‘the Spirit of Prophecy’
– Kathleen Raine
From arrow flying in the light,
From demon wiles which lurk at noon
And things unclean that move at night
In stealthy mist beneath the moon,
God save, and hold us—waiting, sleeping—
– A. E. Waite
This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.
– Albert Camus
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
– William Shakespeare
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Grieved like, pined like… Why must there always be a simile? Why must you drive always to first questions, way beyond the goalposts every time. Well, what do you keep sacking our quarterback for, when it comes to that.
– Renata Adler
Through Chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across the seas.
– Thomas Wolfe
A poem that doesn’t get out of hand isn’t a poem.
– John Hollander
There is a film, an image stored in your consciousness. Every time your mind goes back to the past and you look at that image or watch that film, you suffer again.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
It has already come to pass that the demon of evil, like a whirlwind, triumphantly circles all five continents of the earth…
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
His enemy was time. Or perhaps it was his friend. One never knows for sure.
– Thomas Wolfe
I was conscious that I knew practically nothing
– Plato (Socrates)
The hidden attunement is better than the open.
– Heraclitus
Insofar as the American public creates a monster, they are not about to recognize it.
– James Baldwin
Do I disrespect myself?
I disrespect myself.
Do I self-esteem my ‘self’?
Nah, I don’t esteem that monster of capitalism known as “myself.”
I don’t esteem yr monster either. I just want to write the mirrors that destroy us.
– Alina Stefanescu
Difference and every kind of variety of differentiation is the way through which unity is discovered.
– Alan Watts
We have made this world what it is. The world has not been made by wisdom, by truth, by God; we have made it, you and I.
– Krishnamurti
I am an out-of-control patriotic folklorist in a country of degenerates, lackeys, and bastards!
– Louis-Ferdinand Céline
To expound and propagate concepts is simple, to drop all concepts is difficult and rare.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
I have just realized that the stakes are myself
I have no other
ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life
my spirit measured out, in bits, spread over
the roulette table.
– Diane di Prima
Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.
– Carl Jung
River of Students
Everything in my life seems vague and elusive, yet for the most part,
my sense of impermanence has turned out to be rather solid.
How else is it possible that for almost forty years I’ve been teaching — sitting in any number of nondescript rooms, in front of blackboards I never write on, exchanging pleasantries with the students as if we were simply passing time by talking about books we happen to be reading.
I think of all their names, the papers they’ve handed me, the papers I’ve handed back, and together we form a current – a kind of river that has drawn me – drawn us – forward toward I’m not sure what.
Perhaps the larger ocean of language itself.
– Elaine Equi
We have reached a place of deepest emptiness and sorrow. We look at the destruction around us and perceive our collective poverty. We see that everything truly needed by the world is too large for individuals to give. We find we have only ourselves. Our experience. Our dreams. Our simple art. Our memories of better ways. Our knowledge that the world cannot be healed in the abstract. That healing begins where the wound was made.
Now it seems to me we might begin to understand something of the meaning of earnest speaking and fearless listening; something of the purpose of the most ancient form of beginning to remake the world: remembering what the world we once made together was like.
– Alice Walker, The Way Forward is With A Broken Heart
And if all that is meaningless, I want to be cured
Of a craving for something I cannot find
And of the shame of never finding it.
– T.S. Eliot
Your life is not a cosmic puppet show rigged by a micromanaging deity. You’re here to inhabit your own skin, claim your own agency, and express the full, unedited truth of who you already are—a conscious being woven into a vast, messy, beautiful web of relationship and responsibility. Your task is not to wait for divinely assigned characters to enter your story, but to engage others in ways that call forth mutual depth, honesty, and dignity. Life is the raw material you were handed. What you sculpt from it is your rebellion against every system that told you you were powerless.
– Jim Palmer
Being a good citizen during hard times
does not mean agreeing with everyone.
It means refusing to abandon one another.
– Marilyn Turkovich
our fingers are fast
on the keyboard
though the music is
just poetry and taxes
– Alec Finlay
I have become the dust on the path of the lovers; this is my highest glory.
– Rumi, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi
Those who run to long words are mainly the unskillful and tasteless; they confuse pomposity with dignity, flaccidity with ease, and bulk with force.
– Henry Watson Fowler
The genius of the French language, descended from its single Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction – in simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint.
– Lytton Strachey
Incredible that anything could happen to take away this bubbling energy, the zest that fills everything I do. It’s as if all the knowledge I’ve soaked in during the past months has coalesced and lifted me to a peak of light and understanding. This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy.
– Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
“you say ‘amateur’ as if it was a dirty word. ‘amateur’ comes from the latin word ‘amare’, which means to love. to do things for the love of it.”
– Mozart In The Jungle
The truly great writer does not want to write. He wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.
– Henry Miller, The Rosy Crucifixion
You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.
– Don DeLillo
If he needs a million acres
to make him feel rich,
seems to me he needs it ’cause
he feels awful poor inside hisself,
and if he’s poor in hisself,
there ain’t no million acres gonna
make him feel rich.
– John Steinbeck
I’M nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell !
They’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody !
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
– Emily Dickinson
Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.
– Edward Abbey
All of the Dharmas,
Just as they appear,
Are broad ideas that cling
To individual enumerations.
We see how we are using
The logic of direct perception
For our ideas,
But no matter how things appear
They are not substantial.
– Tantra on Bodhicitta Meditation
Within each of us there is something that is big enough to solve our problem.
– Manly P. Hall
Active men are usually lacking in higher activity — I mean individual activity. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is, as generic beings, but not as quite particular, single and unique men. In this respect they are lazy.
– Nietzsche
we waste days like mad blackbirds and pray for alcoholic nights.
– Charles Bukowski
Being nice counts the most when you are nice to people ignored by others.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.
– Walter Benjamin
If you want to find an example to copy, look for it among simple, humble people. True greatness, which not only refrains from putting itself on display but isn’t even conscious of its own greatness, is only found among such people.
– Leo Tolstoy
If a man is to be liked, he must really be inferior in point of intellect.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
– Roland Barthes
Any asshole can chase a skirt,
art takes discipline.
– Charles Bukowski
Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind.
Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, & too many distractions lead to a heavy mind.
Time spent undistracted & alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation,
resolves the unresolved & takes us from mentally fat to fit.
– @naval
Regret is for your own sake, compassion is for the sake of others.
– Venerable Robina Courtin
The genre is dead. Invent something new.
a man and a woman
naked in a garden.
Invent a child who saves the world
– Lisel Mueller
Before fixing the world outside, tend to the mind within. Everything else follows its lead.
– Simdha Getul Rinpoche
What I can say for certain is that there is no case study in the world that could capture the whole animal of my brother, that could show how smart and kind and generous he was, how much he wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live. … It’s true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think, What a pity, what a waste. But the waste was my own, the waste was what I missed out on whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction.
– Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom
No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.
– Eugenio Montale
When you’re studying jazz, the best thing you can do is listen to records or live music. It’s not like you’re going to see a teacher. You just listen to everything you can and absorb it all.
– Carla Bley
I am a dreamer. I have so little real life that I look upon such moments as this now, as so rare, that I cannot help repeating these moments in my dreams. I shall be dreaming of you all night, a whole week, a whole year.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Imagine being so hateful that you can’t hear joy, just because it’s in Spanish.
– American Music Society
Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless… They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
The written word endures, the spoken word disappears.
– Neil Postman
All concerns of men go wrong when
they wish to cure evil with evil.
– Sophocles
I think of life itself, now, as a
wonderful play I’ve written for myself.
My purpose is to have
the most fun playing my part.
– Shirley MacLaine
People over forty can seldom be permanently
convinced of anything. At eighteen our
convictions are hills from which we look; at
forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one’s awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one’s personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
– Nabokov
I think if I keep working in the way that I am, from the heart and from passion and with love, well, the fruits of that will keep coming.
– Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio
I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.
– Daniel Keyes
Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.
– Lao Tzu
The question is, How do you get to an authentic emotional place?
– Claudia Rankine
You normally have to be bashed around a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
– Alain de Botton
Listen. You a wonder. You a
city of a woman. You got a
geography of your own.
Listen. Somebody need a
map to understand you.
Somebody need directions to
move around you. Listen
woman. You’re not a no
place, anonymous girl.
– Lucille Clifton
Freed from my story, I can feel the pulse of the world.
Trapped in my story, I can merely see my own reflection.
Yet silence and story emerge from the same source.
This source is the Deep Self. It is the Dark.
– Carlos G.
They have people repeat “he died for our sins” so often they forget that he actually died for standing up to an oppressive ruling class who used faith and fear to oppress, exploit, influence, and profit.
– Kalen Dion
That is the American story, not the sanitized, gated, English-only version that small and frightened people try to sell us. The REAL one. The messy, beautiful, multilingual, multicolored, courageous one. The one that has always been built by hands that speak every language and pray in every tongue and come from every corner of this hemisphere.
– Michael Garrett
The gold bit on your horse, the gold circlet on the wrist of your slave, the gilding on your shoes, mean that you are robbing the orphan and starving the widow. When you have passed away, each passer-by who looks upon your great mansion will say, ‘How many tears did it take to build that mansion; how many orphans were stripped; how many widows wronged; how many laborers deprived of their honest wages?’ Even death itself will not deliver you from your accusers.
– Chrysostom
What is offered for free is dangerous—it usually involves either a trick or a hidden obligation that enslaves you.
– Robert Greene
A faith of convenience is a hollow faith.
– Father Mulcahy, “M*A*S*H”
So if you like doing something, do it regularly; if you don’t like doing something, make a habit of doing something different.
– Epictetus
To change one’s life: 1. Start immediately, 2. Do it flamboyantly, 3. No exceptions.
– William James
A man is worked on by what he works on.
– Frederick Douglass
The sense of time and space, of separation and sorrow, is born of the process of thought.
– Krishnamurti
So, then, now you know your task: to become what the gods want, not what your parents want, not what your tribe wants, but what the gods want, and what your psyche will support if consciousness so directs.
– James Hollis, What Matters Most
The white man builds large fire and sits far away. The native man builds small fire and sits close.
– Stalking Wolf
Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.
– Reinhold Niebuhr
Breaking Up
Like the nomadic dollar
I pass to the cashier
behind the register
you are off to other hands.
– Billy Collins
Anything is of course inexhaustible, because at each moment the brain has a different pattern to construct.
– Guido Molinari
If living is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.
– Jane Smiley
Nothing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem.
– Toni Morrison, Beloved
You must be in good condition in order to create. If you were in training for the Olympics they’d understand. You are.
– Rita Mae Brown
By work, one does not become a noble person; by birth, one does not become a noble person. By one’s deeds and wisdom, one becomes noble.
– Gautama Buddha, Sutta Nipata
The old and rich will live on awhile,
As always,
Eating blood and gold,
Letting kids die.
– Langston Hughes
The vision of a champion is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion, when nobody else is looking.
– Mia Hamm
Every meaningful life is lived
in the hallway between
who we were and who we dare.
to become.
– Georges Bergès
Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.
– Peter Heller
Benefits should be conferred gradually and in that way they will taste better—but obligations from free things taste forever bitter.
– Niccolò Machiavelli
I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe—but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn’t be surprised if poetry—poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs—is how the world works. The world isn’t logical, it’s a song.
– David Byrne
Be like the promontory against which the waves constantly break, but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Man is asleep. He lives in sleep, he dies in sleep, and he is born in sleep.
– G. I. Gurdjieff
An artist spends himself like the crayon in his hand, till he is all gone.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I went to look up in the dictionary the word beatitude which I hate as a word and saw that it means spasm of the soul. It speaks of calm happiness — I would however call it transport or levitation.
– Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
THE GOAL OF YOGA
(No, it’s not the Handstand).
The yoga pose is not the goal.
Becoming flexible is not the goal.
Standing on your hands is not the goal.
The goal is to create space
where you were once stuck.
To unveil the layers of protection
you’ve built around your heart.
To appreciate your body and become aware
of the mind and the noise it creates.
To make peace with who you are.
The goal is to love, well… You.
Come to your yoga mat to feel; not to accomplish.
Shift your focus and your heart will grow.
– Rachel Brathen
WHOLE
Self is everywhere, shining forth from all beings,
vaster than the vast, subtler than the most subtle,
unreachable, yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat.
Eye cannot see it, ear cannot hear it nor tongue
utter it; only in deep absorption can the mind,
grown pure and silent, merge with the formless truth.
As soon as you find it, you are free; you have found yourself;
you have solved the great riddle; your heart forever is at peace.
Whole, you enter the Whole. Your personal self
returns to its radiant, intimate, deathless source.
As rivers lose name and form when they disappear
into the sea, the sage leaves behind all traces
when he disappears into the light. Perceiving the truth,
he becomes the truth; he passes beyond all suffering,
beyond death; all the knots of his heart are loosed.
– Mundaka Upanishad
Years Later
by David Palmer Grenell
In the dusty triangular attic
a box of old school books.
Inside, a worn volume of poems,
a page turned down at the corner-
my father and I, meeting again,
depending on The Red Wheelbarrow.
[Trickster gods] are the lords of in-between. A trickster does not live near the hearth; he does not live in the halls of justice, the soldier’s tent, the shaman’s hut, the monastery. He passes through each of these when there is a moment of silence, and he enlivens each with mischief, but he is not their guiding spirit. He is the spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of town. […]
In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser.
Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish—right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead—and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction.
Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox. That Trickster is a boundary-crosser is the standard line, but […] there are also cases in which trickster creates a boundary, or brings to the surface a distinction previously hidden from sight. In several mythologies, for example, the gods lived on earth until something trickster did caused them to rise into heaven.
Trickster is thus the author of the great distance between heaven and earth. […] Boundary creation and boundary crossing are related to one another, and the best way to describe trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found—sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms.
– Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art by Lewis Hyde
The monk is not defined by his task, his usefulness. In a certain sense he is supposed to be ‘useless’ because his mission is not to do this or that job but to BE a person of God. He does not live in order to exercise a special function: his business is Life itself. This means that monasticism aims at the cultivation of a certain quality of life, a level of awareness, a depth of consciousness, an area of transcendence and adoration.
– Thomas Merton
Canada has one of the most accessible currencies in the world and many people do not realize just how thoughtfully it is designed.
Our Canadian bills use large, clear font, making the numbers easier to read for people with low vision and for anyone glancing quickly.
Each denomination is a different colour, which supports colour recognition and reduces confusion when handling money.
Strong colour contrast appears on both sides of the bills, helping the numbers and key features stand out in a variety of lighting conditions.
Braille is built directly into the design. A full braille cell consists of six dots. The $5 bill has one full cell. The $10 bill has two full cells, the $20 bill has three full cells, the $$50 bill has four full cells and the $100 bill has a full cell in the first and fourth position with a 3 cm space between the two cells. This allows people who are blind or have low vision to confidently identify our money independently.
Accessible design like this benefits everyone. When we build with inclusion in mind, we create systems that work better for all of us.
What country are you in and what accessibility features do you have on your currency.
– Gina Martin
The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but
because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities.
The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do.
The lover who never risks loving mocks romance.
The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself.
And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live.
– Carl Jung
There is no graded scale of essential worth; there is no divine right of one race which differs from the divine right of another. Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the Creator.
– MLK
On the days the world feels louder
than the small courage of the heart,
we should listen to the breathing of flowers,
They do not ask who we were yesterday,
they only open,
petal by soft petal,
and say,
I am colour,
you are day,
together we are enough
to begin again.
– j. mann
Sophisticated minds adopt simplified lifestyles;
simplistic minds are drawn to overly
sophisticated lifestyles.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
But the beauty is in the walking — we are betrayed by destinations.
– Gwyn Thomas
Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.
– Ram Dass
The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It’s unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what’s happening in the world. In fact, it’s undesirable – if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it.
– Noam Chomsky
REWARD
Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled
to leave the house and search for what
might lift me back to what I had fallen away from,
I stood by the shore waiting.
I had walked in the silent woods:
the trees withdrew into their secrets.
Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk
over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.
Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies
afloat on their element as I was not
on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.
But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again
to linger, to look North before nightfall – the expanse
of calm, of calming water, last wafts
of rose in the few high clouds.
And was rewarded:
the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying
widewinged toward me, settled
just offshore on his post,
took up his vigil.
If you ask
why this cleared a fog from my spirit,
I have no answer.
– Denise Levertov
Peace opens the doors of history, lets life pass!
– Natália Correia
But words are beings: the game will bewitch you until you become part of it; you will spend your life defending the right of the game to lure you into the maze, to lure you into humor. You read and you do not understand what you read, and so you read more, enjoying the power of words to differ from the mundane. Words are waves. You learn to swim out of the tempting wave which covers you with foam.
Words have the rhythm of the sea and the call of the mysterious: “Come to me, to me in search of what you know not,” the blue calls to you. Luck and the coastguard saved you from certain death with the sound of words. But the lamp of the sea still scratches, but you have not shunned your love to the sea, the source of the primal rhythm. How is the sea imprisoned in three letters, the second of them overflowing with salt? How do letters expand to make room for all these words? How do words expand to embrace the world?
– Mahmoud Darwish
Town of the Dragon Vein
If you wake up too early listen for it.
A sort of inverted whistling the sound of sound.
Being withdrawn after all where?
Does all the sound in the world.
Come from day after day?
From mountains but.
They have to give it back.
At night just.
As your nightly dreams.
Are taps.
Open reversely.
In.
To.
Time.
– Anne Carson
People are icebergs […]. Beneath the surface lies a huge mass of unspoken words, pains and secrets. No one is really what they seem.
– Bernard Minier
He knew suddenly that nobody, living upon the remotest, most barren crag in the ocean, could complain of a dull landscape so long as he would lift his eyes. In the sky there was a new landscape every minute, in every pool of the sea rocks, a new world.
– T.H. White
Every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.
– Pablo Neruda
This planet, this solar system, this galaxy is people-ing in exactly the same way that an apple tree apples.
– Alan Watts
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.
– Walt Whitman
I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.
– James Baldwin
Psychosis is an attempt at rigor. In this sense, I would say that I am psychotic. I am psychotic for the simple reason that I have always tried to be rigorous.
– Jacques Lacan
If you don’t feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn’t very vital. If you don’t feel like you are writing somewhat over your head, why do it?
– John Irving
The language by which we have been taught to dismiss ourselves and our feelings as suspect is the same language we use to dismiss and suspect each other.
– Audre Lorde
Conversation is when you don’t know what the next thing the person you are with is going to say.
– John Cage
Bolshevescent
You stand far from the crowd, adjacent to power.
You consider the edge as well as the frame.
You consider beauty, depth of field, lighting
to understand the field, the crowd.
Late into the day, the atmosphere explodes
and revolution, well, revolution is everything.
You begin to see for the first time
everything is just like the last thing
only its opposite and only for a moment.
When a revolution completes its orbit
the objects return only different
for having stayed the same throughout.
To continue is not what you imagined.
But what you imagined was to change
and so you have and so has the crowd.
– Peter Gizzi
Trying to be good to others, I often get my soul shredded in a kind of spiritual pasta.
– Charles Bukowski
…when consciousness is insufficiently differentiated from the unconscious, and the ego from the group, the group member finds himself as much at the mercy of group reactions as of unconscious constellations.
– Erich Neumann
Something was going to break, something has broken… the impression of belonging to or of being in the world, is starting to slip away from you.
– Georges Perec, A Man Asleep
Valentine’s
by Sasha Dugdale
I don’t quite say it anymore, now the kids
Are teens and there are sudden wars, threads
Of conversations that no longer want to pass
Through the needle’s eye of how we recast
Ourselves in new politics, new sadnesses, newspapers.
Irritability, like the substance left by vapors
That have long departed the alembic’s lung
And taste with a quetsch’s bitter tongue.
The hours and days mass themselves around
And harden like the filthy, frozen ground
On railway embankments on a mid-February day.
And that is in truth what I never quite say:
Those trashed slopes are home to the foxglove
An ancient restorer of the heart’s beat, my love.
So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.
– Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Any experience carried out deeply to its ultimate leads you beyond yourself into a larger relation to the experience of others.
– Anaïs Nin
Knowledge is a skyscraper. You can take a shortcut with a fragile foundation of memorization, or build slowly upon a steel frame of understanding.
– @naval
Whoever manages to write a pure comedy on his deathbed has achieved the ultimate success.
– Thomas Bernhard
I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn’d,
Or a dry wheel grate on the axletree;
And that would set my teeth nothing on edge,
Nothing so much as mincing poetry:—
‘Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag.
– Shakespeare
The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.
– Wallace Stevens
How much more time will you spend at a wayside inn? Don’t you want to go home? How exquisite it all is….One is, in his own Self, the wanderer, the exile, the homecoming and the home….Oneself is all that there is.
– Anandamayi Ma
The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse.
– Colson Whitehead
When it was discovered that information is a business, the truth ceased to be important.
– Ryszard Kapuściński
There’s a higher power that knows where your body is supposed to be & what work it’s supposed to do. Trust that power. That power is yourself. I call it, “The current that knows the way.” It’s a beautiful power, it only knows love. It wants you to merge with itself.
– Robert Adams
My great rival is music, it sticks in the bottom of my ear and rots . . . it never stops scolding . . .
– Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Every human mind risks becoming mechanical when it clings to memory, repetition, and habit.
Awareness is the antidote.
– Shai Tubali
A political art, let it be / tenderness
– Amiri Baraka, Short Speech to My Friends
It wasn’t that I thought I could be a good poet—I just knew I couldn’t be a good fiction writer.
– Sharon Olds
The Earth is not a big rock infested with living organisms any more than your skeleton is bones infested with cells. The Earth is geological, yes, but this geological entity grows people. And our existence on the Earth is a symptom of the solar system and its balances as much as the solar system, in turn, is a symptom of our galaxy—and our galaxy, in its turn, is a symptom of the whole company of galaxies. Goodness only knows what that’s in.
– Alan Watts
Not recognizing is the magic of mind.
Recognizing is the magic of pure awareness.
The mind is as different from the state of rigpa
As dreams are from being awake.
– Jigme Losel Wangpo
I hadn’t told them about you. But they saw you bathing in my eyes. I hadn’t told them about you. But they saw you in my written words. The perfume of love cannot be concealed.
– Nizar Qabbani
You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
– Bukowski
Stress is an ignorant state, it believes that everything is an emergency.
Nothing is that important.
– Zen wisdom
spring leans close
and calls the soul
by its older name
– @BashoSociety
See what you are. Don’t ask others, don’t let others tell you about yourself. Look within and see.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Appear at points which the enemy must hasten to defend. March swiftly to places where you are not expected.
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
– Joan Didion
The point of analysis is to get over yourself.
– Don Carveth
Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.
– DH Lawrence
What is the point of this leaving and returning, this old circle from the Flats to the peak it doesn’t recognize, and then back?
– Gabeba Baderoon
You haven’t always been the mug you are today, bogged down by circumstances, work, and thirst, the most disastrous of servitudes … Do you think that, just for a moment, you can revive the poetry in you?
– Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Whoever cannot attack the thinking attacks the thinker.
– Paul Valéry
The sky was so full of stars, so bright, that looking at it one could not help but wonder: but is it really possible that under a sky like this so many violent and capricious people can live?
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.
– Sofia Kovalevskaya
Don’t feel qualified? Nobody does.
You can only be qualified to do that which you have already accomplished or trained for.
Anything new is accomplished by unqualified people.
– James Clear
Do not move, do not go. Sink within this moment. Hold it for ever.
– Virginia Woolf
When I met Jung, he told me to be true to myself, and true to my type. And that is what I wish for you. If you go against your typological makeup, you go against your grain, and you will get splinters. Go with it, and your life will have ease, flow, and purpose.
– Robert A Johnson
To revoke a wrong view requires more character than to defend it.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
When your mind is quiet, the world appears peaceful and joyous.
– Haemin Sunim
Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
– Aristotle
it’s so funny when someone can’t stand you being silly and having fun. and it’s not just jealousy. it’s clear they think you’re not taking life seriously enough, when pure joy is one of the most serious things you can do or be.
– @chenchenwrites
Continuous search for what the mind is results in its disappearance. That is the straight path.
– Ramana Maharshi
I wanted to be a revolutionary, and so I broke with art, which nearly undid me.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
In those regions, that were almost slums, what a modest existence, abject, if you please, but delightful, nourished by tranquillity and happiness, he would have consented to lead indefinitely.
– Marcel Proust
Success lies in doing not what others consider to be great but what you consider to be right.
– John Gray
If I had to boil down creativity, I’d say it’s reaction. I crank out some crap in the morning, doesn’t matter what, and the next day, I look at it, and I react to it with a pencil in my hand. That seems to me where creativity actually happens.
– George Saunders
If you are angry or in pain, separate yourself from anger and pain and watch them. Externalization is the first step to liberation. Step away and look. The physical events will go on happening, but by themselves they have no importance. It is the mind alone that matters.
– Nisarga
A courage which looks easy and yet is rare: the courage of a teacher repeating day after day the same lessons -the least rewarded of all forms of courage.
– Honoré de Balzac
If you want to look into the human soul and know a man, don’t take the trouble to analyze his ways of being silent, of speaking, of crying, to see how much he is moved by noble ideas; you’ll get better results if you just watch him read.
– Dostoyevsky
Courage
by Lee Herrick
I almost stopped believing in the ocean.
Imagine that. I almost stopped believing
in the music of such massive natural splendor.
I had lost sight of it, lost sight of hope
because innocent people were killed
by people in masks, hiding their faces,
their shame parading as providence,
their weakness posing as policy.
But then, I remembered the tides.
I was restored by the courage of poets
whose songs sounded like ocean waves
guided by the moon. Even now, there is music.
Children laughing on the swings, a student
learning the saxophone, a woman reading
her rough draft by the lake, a father whistling
a love song in his native language.
Courage is from the Latin word cor,
which means heart, which means we are a heart of poets.
As in, take courage, take heart. As in, the widow
was grateful for your encouragement, your giving heart.
As in, the heart of your convictions.
What I mean is: we are made of love
and therefore larger than their terror.
As a great poet said, they can cut back all of the flowers,
but they cannot hold back spring.
We are a massive natural splendor, too.
In the end, all we are is love and love and love.
In the end, the ocean and the music might save us.
Meet me at the beach. Bring your light.
Bring your songs. I’ll wait for you.
The Walk for Peace ends on Day 108. Rather than being just another number in the journey, 108 has long been used to describe a range of human experience and mental reaction.
Desires: There are said to be 108 earthly desires in mortals.
Lies: There are said to be 108 lies that humans tell.
Delusions: There are said to be 108 human delusions or forms of ignorance.
Heart Chakra: The chakras are the intersections of energy lines, and there are said to be a total of 108 energy lines converging to form the heart chakra. One of them, sushumna leads to the crown chakra, and is said to be the path to Self-realization.
Sanskrit alphabet: There are 54 letters in the Sanskrit alphabet. Each has masculine and feminine, shiva and shakti. 54 times 2 is 108.
Pranayama: If one is able to be so calm in meditation as to have only 108 breaths in a day, enlightenment will come.
Upanishads: Some say there are 108 Upanishads, texts of the wisdom of the ancient sages.
Sri Yantra: On the Sri Yantra there are marmas where three lines intersect, and there are 54 such intersections. Each intersections has masculine and feminine, shiva and shakti qualities. 54 times 2 equals 108. Thus, there are 108 points that define the Sri Yantra as well as the human body.
Pentagon: The angle formed by two adjacent lines in a pentagon equals 108 degrees.
Marmas: Marmas or marmasthanas are like energy intersections called chakras, except have fewer energy lines converging to form them. There are said to be 108 marmas in the subtle body.
Time: Some say there are 108 feelings, with 36 related to the past, 36 related to the present, and 36 related to the future.
8 extra beads: In doing a practice of counting the number of repetitions of the mala, 100 are counted as completed. The remaining are said to cover errors or omissions. The 8 are also said to be an offering to God and Guru.
Chemistry: Interestingly, there are about 115 elements known on the periodic table of the elements. Most of those, around or higher than the number 100 only exist in the laboratory, and some for only thousandths of a second. The number that naturally exist on Earth is around 100.
Astrology: There are 12 constellations, and 9 arc segments called namshas or chandrakalas. 9 times 12 equals 108. Chandra is moon, and kalas are the divisions within a whole.
River Ganga: The sacred River Ganga spans a longitude of 12 degrees (79 to 91), and a latitude of 9 degrees (22 to 31). 12 times 9 equals 108.
Planets and Houses: In astrology, there are 12 houses and 9 planets. 12 times 9 equals 108.
Goddess names: There are said to be 108 Indian goddess names.
Gopis of Krishna: In the Krishna tradition, there were said to be 108 gopis or maid servants of Krishna.
1, 0, and 8: Some say that 1 stands for God or higher Truth, 0 stands for emptiness or completeness in spiritual practice, and 8 stands for infinity or eternity.
Sun and Earth: The diameter of the Sun is 108 times the diameter of the Earth.
The distance from the Sun to the Earth is 108 times the diameter of the Sun.
Moon and Earth: The average distance of the Moon from the Earth is 108 times the diameter of the Moon.
– Kusala Bhikshu
Too many philosophers posing as wise.
Too many political pundits posting poison.
Not enough poets
…swinging swords.
– Shinzen
The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.
– Neil Gaiman
There’s always that first storytelling impulse: I want to tell you something …
– Grace Paley
Begin the poem like you’re talking to a friend, end it realizing you’re talking to the dead.
– Harmony Holiday
We often complicate things by overthinking techniques and huffing and puffing our way through our practices, but the truth is very simple: the art of meditation is about love.
– Jack Kornfield
morning glories too
out to make money
a transient world
– Issa
The world breaks every one… But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
– Ernest Hemingway
The central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself. The moment its isolation breaks down, and there comes an actual mixing and confusion, death sets in. This is true of every individual organism, from man to amoeba.
– DH Lawrence
You think I’m insane, don’t you? I am insane. All American authors are insane. You have to be crazy to be a writer in this country.
– Jack Kerouac
Never Offer Your Heart
to Someone Who Eats Hearts
Alice Walker
Never offer your heart
to someone who eats hearts
who finds heartmeat
delicious
but not rare
who sucks the juices
drop by drop
and bloody-chinned
grins
like a God.
Never offer your heart
to a heart gravy lover.
Your stewed, overseasoned
heart consumed
he will sop up your grief
with bread
and send it shuttling
from side to side
in his mouth
like bubblegum.
If you find yourself
in love
with a person
who eats hearts
these things
you must do:
Freeze your heart
immediately.
Let him—next time
he examines your chest—
find your heart cold
flinty and unappetizing.
Refrain from kissing
lest he in revenge
dampen the spark
in your soul.
Now,
sail away to Africa
where holy women
await you
on the shore—
long having practiced the art
of replacing hearts
with God
and Song.
But I suppose the major English vice is sloth.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Our blustering civilization has completely robbed us of a concentrated inner life, dragged our souls out into a bazaar, whether of commerce or of party politics.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I always say don’t discard the past completely because you have to bring with you the most valuable elements of experience, to be sort of like a flashlight. A flashlight into the unknown.
– Wayne Shorter
Prayer is the Study of Art. Praise is the Practice of Art.
– William Blake
A spiritual practice should overflow into the world and help us to transcend illusion and journey toward enlightenment and truth.
– Ben Okri
We must always change, renew and rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We cannot change the world unless there is a change in our state of consciousness.
– Eckhart Tolle
Usually, the better someone does their job, the easier it looks. You rarely realize how hard it is until you try it yourself.
– James Clear
The sage with spiritual understanding looks within, distracted by nothing.
Since a clear mind is the Buddha, they attain the understanding of a Buddha without using the mind.
– Bodhidharma
The whole of contemporary politics oppresses me with a continuous physical horror like the feeling of growing madness in one’s brain.
– T.S. Eliot
If nature has made you a bat, you shouldn’t try and be an ostrich.
– Hermann Hesse
The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness or fear, will never know what happiness is.
– Nietzsche
All metaphysical discussion is profitless unless it causes us to seek within the Self for the true reality. All controversies about creation, the nature of the universe, evolution, the purpose of God, are useless. They are not conducive to our true happiness.
– Ramana Maharshi
The meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. As children, everything amazes us, but as we grow up, the fear of death steals that purity from us. Life confronts us with loss, with pain, with the indifference of the universe. But if we are strong enough, we can pass through that darkness and be reborn with a purpose of our own. We will not recover the innocence of wonder, but we will build something more solid: a reason to keep going. Because no matter how vast the darkness may be, our mission is to project our own light.
– Stanley Kubrick
You don’t always find closure from talking things through. Sometimes closure comes when you accept that someone isn’t willing or able to really hear you or be honest about their part.
– Lori Deschene
Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.
– Søren Kierkegaard
The imagination… dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All great literature is one of two stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town — but every heart in it is broken.
– Leo Tolstoy
In the evolution of language, metaphor is not a late and ornamental development but the very stuff of which language is made.
– Owen Barfield
For me, writers are what the priest has been throughout history, this person we pay to talk about spirituality.
– Dany Laferrière
Every period in history has its own punishments, and ours has a multitude.
– Cees Nooteboom
Before cancer, God was something I tried to fit into my life as much as possible. After cancer, I feel like a connection to God, whatever that is, is kind of the whole point of this exercise on this planet.
– James Van Der Beek
Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum, a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I’m watching over it for no one but myself.
– Haruki Murakami
Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.
– Sylvia Plath
A meaning is not a thing which is attached to a word like a ticket to a coat.
– Owen Barfield
Man, that strange creature: with his feet in the mud, with his head in the stars.
– Else Lasker-Schüler
I would rather discover one true cause than gain the kingdom of Persia.
– Democritus
Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.
– C.S. Lewis
One can’t write unless one lives, and living means also dealing with the post-office employees, driving in the rush hour, facing up to the demands of daily life.
– Tahar Ben Jelloun
Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.
– Sylvia Plath
Books and writing are capable of changing the entire world.
– Alan Moore
Insomnia is when both sides of the pillow feel hot.
– Anna Akhmatova
All these years you’ve been searching and looking and trying to change things, trying to add things onto yourself, trying to acquire things, when you have been the source of everything to begin with. Everything you’ve been looking for has been within yourself.
– Robert Adams
The rewards for being sane may not be very many, but knowing what’s funny is one of them.
– Kingsley Amis
Being that can be understood is language.
– Hans-Georg Gadamer
How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It’s sad, really.
– Philip Larkin
To be a monk is to have time to practice for your transformation and healing. And after that to help with the transformation and healing of other people.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Still I say, Here I am, world! Let’s make relaxation look like a crime we’ll never get busted for. Let’s hyperventilate like it’s 1999.
– Andrea Gibson, Ode to the Public Panic Attack
When one wants to be profoundly oneself, which is the case in a poem, one puts oneself on a plane that is at least partly incommunicable to others.
– Yves Bonnefoy
There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.
– Terry Pratchett
Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
– Albert Camus
Don’t leave anything for later.
Later, the coffee gets cold.
Later, you lose interest.
Later, the days turn into night.
Later, people grow up.
Later people grow old.
Later, life goes by.
Later, you regret not doing
something when you had a chance.
– T. Kawaguchi
The full meanings of words are flashing, iridescent shapes like flames—ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them.
– Owen Barfield
If you really know how to ask the question, ‘Who am I?’ you will be delivered into that state of silence and pure consciousness that is your true Being. The question ‘Who am I?’ will ultimately deliver you into the ‘I am’ that you are.
– Leonard Jacobson
I think that’s the gig for the poet: to stand right in the middle of all these contradictions and resolve all of them. It’s absolutely impossible. But that’s the gig.
– Li-Young Lee
real love
does not confuse you
about yourself
– @BashoSociety
The world opens up only with language.
– Hans-Georg Gadamer
The world impoverishes itself by spending a trillion dollars a year on preparations for war. And by employing perhaps half the scientists and high technologists on the planet in military endeavors. How would we explain all this to a dispassionate extraterrestrial observer? What account would we give of our stewardship of the planet Earth? We have heard the rationales offered by the superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species?
– Carl Sagan
The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what’s going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called ‘true enough.’
I think that’s a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.
– Rupert Sheldrake
Alliteration and repetition is key to spells because a good spell is a poem just as a good poem is a spell.
– Kapka Kassabova
The stars know everything,
So we try to read their minds.
As distant as they are,
We choose to whisper in their presence.
– Charles Simic
So many of earth’s grievances could be soothed by a little consideration.
– Marilynne Robinson
When asked about the difference between Loving-Kindness and Compassion… Loving Kindness is the thought and compassion is the doing.
– Kusala Bhikshu
To find a new world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Teeming city, city full of dreams, Where spectres in broad day accost the passer-by! Mystery flows everywhere like sap In the narrow channels of the mighty giant.
– Charles Baudelaire
golden birthday
When there are waterfalls to admire
& dogs to go on long walks.
When there are chords to learn
& friends to kiss on the forehead.
There should be smash cakes for grown-ups.
I want to push my mistakes out like frosting through my fingers.
Healing isn’t linear: It’s a long dandelion making its longer way
towards a rabbit’s mouth. I want to live, I want to live, I want to live.
– Adrienne Novy
The esoteric system is all based upon the ultimate motive. Ultimate motive is the service of Truth itself, a complete dedication to the service of the realities of existence.
– Manly P. Hall
In the Morning, Before
Anything Bad Happens
The sky is open
all the way.
Workers upright on the line
like spokes.
I know there is a river somewhere,
lit, fragrant, golden mist, all that,
whose irrepressible birds
can’t believe their luck this morning
and every morning
I let them riot
in my mind a few minutes more
before the news comes.
– Molly Brodak
Sufis say we are sons and daughters of the moment. The practice of remembrance brings us back to NOW, the only place where we actually are, and in which we have a chance to flourish. Moment by moment aren’t we asked to grow and learn, to be what life meant us to become?
– Gunilla Norris
A crowd in its very concept is the untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Isn’t it sad that you can tell people that the ozone layer is being depleted, the forests are being cut down, the deserts are advancing steadily, that the greenhouse effect will raise the sea level 200 feet, that overpopulation is choking us, that pollution is killing us, that nuclear war may destroy us – and they yawn and settle back for a comfortable nap. But tell them that the Martians are landing, and they scream and run.
– Isaac Asimov
I have a simple philosophy: Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches.
– Alice Roosevelt Longworth
The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say. Then he uses the old language in his urgency and the old language is transformed from within.
– Boris Pasternak
in a place so utterly reckless? How
masterful and mad is hope.
– Ada Limón
let me radiate
only love
only light
only healing
– Xan Oku
Nature and God – I neither knew
Yet Both so well knew Me
– Emily Dickinson
There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties. … The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. Happiness is never better exhibited than by young animals, such as puppies, kittens, lambs, &c., when playing together, like our own children. Even insects play together.
– Charles Darwin
None are so empty as those who are full of themselves.
– Benjamin Whichcote
WHAT TO DO IN THE DARKNESS
Go slowly
Consent to it
But don’t wallow in it
Know it as a place of germination
And growth
Remember the light
Take an outstretched hand if you find one
Exercise unused senses
Find the path by walking it
Practice trust
Watch for dawn.
– Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
HARMONY
My daily affairs are quite ordinary;
but I’m in total harmony with them.
I don’t hold on to anything, don’t reject anything;
nowhere an obstacle or conflict.
Who cares about wealth and honor?
Even the poorest thing shines.
My miraculous power and spiritual activity:
drawing water and carrying wood.
– Layman Pang
Always be joyful, no matter what you are. With happiness you can give a person life. Every day we must deliberately induce in ourselves a buoyant, exuberant attitude toward life. In this manner, we gradually become receptive to the subtle mysteries around us. And if no inspired moments come, we should act as though we have them anyway. If you have no enthusiasm, put up a front. Act enthusiastic, and the feeling will become genuine.
– Rabbi Nachman of Bratslau
…The orthodox presume to know, whereas the marginal person is trying to find out.
…To accommodate the margin within the form, to allow the wilderness to thrive in domesticity, to accommodate diversity within unity – this graceful, practical generosity toward the possible and the unexpected… offers reconciliation by which we might escape the endless swinging between rigidity and revolt.
– Wendell Berry
There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds.
I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.
– Wallace Stegner
It must be made intelligible to people that they have an implicit but true knowledge of God – perhaps not reflected upon and not verbalized; or better expressed, they have a genuine experience of God ultimately rooted in their spiritual existence, in their transcendentality, in their personality, or whatever you want to call it.
– Karl Rahner
In our happiest moments, what sustains us more than pleasure is the mystery itself, not knowing who this is in us. The blind riddle of existence is what makes it possible to live at all, in darkness, at the heart of dancer. Being full and happy occurs only in a glimmer-spark floating through an eternity of star-masses.
– Richard Grossinger
I think it is frightening. Staying completely open to what might happen and trying not to prefigure what is coming at you is frightening. The imagination is in jeopardy. Belief is bold. There’s a philosopher I like called Gianni Vattimo and he’s written a book called Belief (he is a nihilist) and in it he talks about the secularization of belief and turns it into a positive event, being the collapse of hierarchical structure; and he says that Christ was attempting to secularize belief, to return it to the ground. And one of the terms he uses is infinite plurality, that the relations and contingencies that mark your movement through time are always taking place in ways that are outside judgment and imagination. That is sort of where I would like to stand, without being terrified. It involves an openness.
– Fanny Howe
Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there—where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.
– Ocean Vuong
Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history is in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.
– Chuck Palahniuk
Time’s Thought
by Fanny Howe
The ordeal of dying must be memory, so much seeing and losing forms.
Friends whacking at invisible ankles and you.
The action is done in a dream. Who did what?
The closed book, the feet
asleep.
Proof that you lived is that you kept notebooks.
Are you collecting material for dreams, she asked the audience.
None of them remembered collecting or dreaming.
Nothing specific, that is.
For a book, no.
They lay down that night not looking for a real thing but for a way back.
A dream broke time apart.
You’re allowed to fear the coming hallucinations, she added.
You met me at the subway
where tracks led east to
North Station and on
up to Cape Ann.
We were almost romantic
Not knotted but erect side by
side passively waiting f
or an apocalyptic collision to rupture
the grave tension between wholly conscious
ontological thinking
and the steel pebbling motion of tracks
parked into action by a fiery touch.
We smiled our way forward perfectly even.
To be described as a note that separates from a song and blows away.
When you are down to nothing more to call on
OR you can say I walked Manhattan from sundown to dawn.
So I have traveled the world.
I walked by foot all over dungeons to see a film starring friends—Americans.
The ceiling collapsed from heavy rain and artificial colors condensed along the sidewalk.
One puddle looked just like the world-marble.
Time had thinned for gravity and a speeding apple
Since time was lightweight and invisible.
Manifest, unbelievable.
A faraway land And a hotel I never visited
In a ghost-book half-erased
You could tell I was in love with a non-entity.
This was the hardest part assigned to me.
During my brief tenure I loved loving best
One who didn’t exist.
In the early days, it was the opposite.
Nature (all of it)
Did exist and loved itself.
Clouds doted on the sea, amorousness
Was in the air returning every wave and sigh.
The squirrels told the oak
To shake its acorns down
For the poor dirt to eat.
Kiss of the Sun
by Mary Ruefle
If, as they say, poetry is a sign of something
among people, then let this be prearranged now,
between us, while we are still peoples: that
at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry
(and wheat and evil and insects and love),
when the entire human race gathers in the flesh,
reconstituted down to the infant’s tiniest fold
and littlest nail, I will be standing at the edge
of that fathomless crowd with an orange for you,
reconstituted down to its innermost seed protected
by white thread, in case you are thirsty, which
does not at this time seem like such a wild guess,
and though there will be no poetry between us then,
at the end of time, the geese all gone with the seas,
I hope you will take it, and remember on earth
I did not know how to touch it it was all so raw,
and if by chance there is no edge to the crowd
or anything else so that I am of it,
I will take the orange and toss it as high as I can.
Migrating creatures ~
According to the Buddhist tradition, we are on a journey whether we like it or not, because we are always in a state of transition. Sentient beings are referred to as drowa in Tibetan, which means ‘migrating creatures’. This is because we can never be in a particular place without moving physically, psychologically or spiritually. Whether we are thinking or sensing or experiencing emotions, everything is constantly being propelled or drawn forward. Emotions are “emotions in motion”, because even a state of agitation is a form of movement.
However, if we are not in a state of transition, we could not talk about transformation. Our life would be a closed book. But according to the Buddhist teachings, our lives are not closed books because of this constant forward movement. If we feel that we are stuck, that is only our misunderstanding of what is really going on, for something is always happening even if we do not notice it.
– Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche
Better if only the young and beautiful would love.
But love in those aging aspics, those monstrous, flopping bodies, desire housed in the bodies of cripples, the legless, the blind—that is humanity.
– Anna Kamienska
I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.
– Kurt Vonnegut
He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next
– Kurt Vonnegut
The Second Going
Again the
day begins, only
no one wants its sanity
or its blinding clarity. Daylight is
not what we came all this way for. A
pinch of salt, a drop of schnapps in our cup
of tears, the ticket to the life to come, a short life of
long nights & absent dawns & a little mercy in the tea.
– Philip Levine
This goes right to the heart of it. Our culture is fundamentally averse to thinking about systems of power. Every conflict is examined as an interaction between individuals, or groups of individuals. Always about the apples, never the trees, or the orchard.
– Peter Birkenhead
Sacrificed so that I could be uncertain, the dead were not me.
It was the end of the suburbs, Vietnam. Sprinklers on the lawn,
sunlight in large rooms with wooden floors, the anxiety of having
things “just so” — that sweet package was finally opened. But my
dreams will not punish me enough, nor can I blame Calley, who
thought if he could kill them all, he could go home. I think it’s
good to want to go home.
The scare leaks now into little, patient countries where the
U.S. chases ghosts, where heroes fight and heroes refuse. I can’t
imagine the pain: I cannot feel the United States of America. I
know I lost the war, but to what does knowledge bring me? An
open field with no trail and cries for help from all directions? If
bad is only sickness and the wrong are just misunderstood, it was
a war to sap the Big Fear and there will be no answer. Like being
awake all the time.
– Killarney Clary, Who Whispered Near Me?
The real choice isn’t “pragmatism” or “idealism.” It’s either allowing these trends to worsen – destroying what’s left of our democracy and turning our economy into even more of a playground for big corporations, Wall Street, and billionaires – or reversing them. And the only pragmatic way of reversing them is through a “political revolution” that mobilizes millions of Americans.
– Robert Reich
In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature – or go insane.
– Charlie Chaplin
You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that you have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is not only vital for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself – a point that seems to escape many people.
– Gerald Durrell
Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality.
– Bessel A. van der Kolk
Close your mouth,
block off your senses,
blunt your sharpness,
untie your knots,
soften your glare,
settle your dust.
This is the primal identity.
– Lao Tzu
There is a certain tone in the things that matter, an architecture of delayed light or slow sounds from long ago. Fragments for the after-silence, the sorting of a garden. Things in their essence. Spiritual forms, an invisible geometry of objects that gives strength to us through music … Whispered petitions to show us the way or to destroy us completely. Every word a last word. Every sound a revenant.
– Herbert Pföstl
One of the greatest human spiritual tasks is to embrace all of humanity, to allow your heart to be a marketplace of humanity, to allow your interior life to reflect the pains and the joys of people not only from Africa and Ireland and Yugoslavia and Russia but also from people who lived in the fourteenth century and will live many centuries forward. Somehow, if you discover that your little life is part of the journey of humanity and that you have the privilege to be part of that, your interior life shifts. You lose a lot of fear and something really happens to you. Enormous joy can come into your life. It can give you a strong sense of solidarity with the human race, with the human condition.
It is good to be human.
– Henri Nouwen
I am a place, a place where things come together, then fly apart. Look at the fields disappearing, look at the distant hills, look at the night, the velvety, fragrant night, which has already come, though the sun continues to stand at my door.
– Mark Strand
Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings.
– Edward O. Wilson
Bless everyone you can think of.
– The Rev. Spencer Reece
The winter is coming when I shall walk the sky. The ice is a solid sky on which we walk. It is the inverted year. There is an annual light in the darkness of the winter night. The shadows are blue, as the sky is forever blue. In winter we are purified and translated. The earth does not absorb our thoughts. It becomes a Valhalla.
– Thoreau’s Journal
If everyone’s a writer, then nobody’s a writer, and I think it’s very evident right now.
– Cristin Culver
I think it’s insane that Christians can have ‘spiritual discernment’ about Bad Bunny but not Trump.
– Yadhira Cordero
[Melville] was a deep, great artist, even if he was rather a sententious man. He was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him. But when he ceases to be American, when he forgets all audience, and gives us his sheer apprehension of the world, then he is wonderful, his book commands a stillness in the soul, an awe.
– DH Lawrence
We cannot assuage our cravings by pursuits in the material world, no matter what their nature and scope. Nothing short of the experience of mystical unity with the divine source will quench our deepest longing.
– Stanislav Grof
All things are living because their ‘place’ and their being participates in the life of the Imagination, the supreme Person.
– Kathleen Raine
I can no longer bear the aggressiveness of poetry,
and I do not wish my deeds to be investigated.
I would like to be an opened knife: the inscrutable.
– Szilárd Borbély, (tr. Ottilie Mulzet)
Don’t lie in bed reading as long as you did in Prague! It’s best to read only poems, not novels that keep you awake.
– Franz Kafka, 1913.
Don’t bully yourself. Violence will make you hard and rigid. Do not fight with what you take to be obstacles on your way. Just be interested in them, watch them, observe, enquire. Let anything happen — good or bad. But don’t let yourself be submerged by what happens.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Who knows whether the sea heals or corrodes?:
what the sun burns up of it, the moon puts back.
– Alan Dugan
The vast mass are these middling souls. They have no aristocratic individuality, such as is demanded by Christ or Buddha or Plato. So they skulk in a mass and secretly are bent on their own ultimate self-glorification.
– DH Lawrence
Whitman would not have been the great poet he is if he had not taken the last steps and looked over into death. Death, the last merging, that was the goal of his manhood.
– DH Lawrence
In reality, freedom is aristocratic, not democratic. With sorrow we must recognize the fact that freedom is dear only to those men who think creatively. It is not very necessary to those who do not value thinking.
– Nicholas Berdyaev
Literature rescues language from tyranny’s attempt to empty it of its ability to witness truth. In this way, every story, every poem—even every love note, every word between lovers, every remark about the quietest blossom opening in the morning—is an act of redemptive power.
– Joseph Fasano
He who sleeps in the grave of the millennia dreams a wonderful dream. He dreams a primordially ancient dream. He dreams of the rising sun.
– Jung
People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.
– G. K. Chesterton
I’ve lived to bury my desires,
And see my dreams corrode with rust;
Now all that’s left are fruitless fires
That burn my empty heart to dust.
– Alexander Pushkin
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
– Joan Didion
The constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to attain them imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Know then that the body is merely a garment. Go seek the wearer, not the cloak.
– Rumi
The movement of the poem should be like a canal, with a volta that surprises the reader.
– Henri Cole
Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
– Alan Watts
I think that overambition kills. I think that trying to be a writer kills. Writing simply has to be a sickness, a drug.
– Charles Bukowski
If you try to hold on to life, you lose it. You can’t hold your breath and stay alive; it becomes extremely uncomfortable to hold your breath. And so in exactly the same way, it becomes extremely uncomfortable to spend all your time holding on to your life.
– Alan Watts
I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days – three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.
– John Keats
Since your mind is with you wherever you go, you need to sit down and start unwinding your ball of yarn.
– Jakusho Kwong-roshi
take the morning
before the world
remembers your name
– @BashoSociety
(…) look at things again and again until they start to speak for themselves.
– Freud quoting Charcot in 1914.
To put it as pithily as possibly—and as accurately—the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal.
– Cormac McCarthy
remember you are free to wander away.
– John Ashbery
I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.
– Frank O’Hara
A time may come soon, when none will return. Then there will be need of valor without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defense of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
what is holy
includes the
broken
– @BashoSociety
When I first read Nabokov I said to myself, Well, you might as well quit.
– James Salter
Words are there to capture thoughts; once the thought is captured, the words fall into oblivion. Where can I find a person who has forgotten the words and yet speaks with me?
– Zhuangzi
Fear is really based on the memory of past experiences and not on the experiences themselves, because those are dead.
– Ramesh Balsekar
We need both the immense beauty and gratitude for blessings in life to keep us afloat, and the deep sadness and grief to urge us to action.
– Oren Jay Sofer
When I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors,―a few men that I discovered by accident―I do this because they look at things in a broader, milder and more affectionate way than I do and because they know life better, so that I can learn from them.
– Van Gogh
Of all the animals in creation, man is the only one who drinks without thirst, eats without hunger, and speaks without having anything to say…
– John Steinbeck
All pain needs investigation. The mind is nothing else but the Self. Assumption obscures reality without destroying it. All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false. Your being a person is due to the illusion of space and time.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
The free man is the one who can say ‘no’ when everyone expects him to say ‘yes’; because dignity begins in the act of resisting the pressure of the herd.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
In the name of equalizing personalities, you are ready to destroy every personality, to cut off the possibility of its flowering.
– Nicholas Berdyaev
You must become a fire so fierce that it destroys the fire of your opponent. Otherwise, you will be destroyed.
– Yukio Mishima
It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence…
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
– Joan Didion
Because you imagine yourself to be out of it, you raise the question, “Where is the Source?”
– Ramana Maharshi
If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, that’s not progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. They haven’t pulled the knife out; they won’t even admit that it’s there.
– Malcolm X
Life is oddly wild, full of miracles as well as horrors.
– Charles Bukowski
I would have liked to tear out the pain, but I had it everywhere.
– Annie Ernaux
The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.
– Cormac McCarthy
The epochē is no longer an intellectual method, a skilled procedure. It is an anguish that imposes itself on us and that we cannot avoid, it is at one and the same time a pure event of transcendental origin and an accident that is always possible in our daily lives.
– Sartre
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
– H. P. Lovecraft
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
– H.L. Mencken
The unconscious system of guidance is millions of years old, speech less than a hundred thousand. The brain had no idea any of this was coming.
– Cormac McCarthy
Meditation is the art of remembering that you are not what happens — you are the silence in which everything happens.
– Shai Tubali
carry less
and notice
more
– @BashoSociety
There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Many people are too polite to speak with their mouth full, but they don’t mind doing it with their head empty.
– Orson Welles
It can’t be that we’re here in order not to be.
– Julio Cortázar
Zen is often imagined as strict and serious, but there is a lot of joy underneath it.
– Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara
The mask, when worn for a long time, never wants to be removed from the face.
– Leone Ginzburg
How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones?
– E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
– George Eliot
Unless one is happy, one cannot bestow happiness on others.
– Ramana Maharshi
Look, anyone seeking ontological meltdown can easily find it in the attempt to write.
– Jonathan Lethem
When I have been hungry or scared or broke, I called on my friends—agents of the Lord, you might say—and I received from them food and drink, comfort and kindness, money or a bed to sleep in for a time. I would have discarded—as you should also—anyone who heard a plea from a friend or a fellow human and offered only a prayer. We are, as Martha Graham always stated, the answered prayer. We are here to move the mountains and heal the sick and raise the dead—in spirit, of course.
Stop praying, except to call on your God for the strength and the courage to move forward, to help those who need your help, and to fill the space you’re taking up with things of honor and beauty and worth.
We are always capable of doing something to help people, without relying on the spiritual cop-out of a prayer. Talk to someone. Feed someone. Make them laugh. Offer a hand or a shoulder. Pray only when you are exhausted from your efforts and are asking for more strength to keep doing your work.
Do not make prayer an evil thing.
– Tennessee William
Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.
– Pema Chodron
Tell your story as though you are trying to keep people awake.
– Jesse Lee Kercheval
What the right fears is the blacks, browns, yellows and white uniting ‘kinda like one nation under God’.
– Robert Snow
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting.
– Aldous Huxley
Why go to the mountain or the desert? The one you seek is sitting right in the center of your chest.
– Kabir
Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
– Thomas Sowell
I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.
– Abraham Lincoln
Unexpressed emotions will never die—find those buried emotions in others and you hold the key to their entire will.
– Sigmund Freud
A leader is a dealer in hope—and hope sold to the heart creates loyalty that rational argument never achieves.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
What did I see? I don’t know what words to use. The words are never there. But between the useless words you’ll see what I saw.
– John Berger
In this age of censorship, I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced-writers’ voices, teachers’ voices, students’ voices-and all because of fear.
– Judy Blume
That which is not good for the swarm, neither is it good for the bee.
– Marcus Aurelius
The life and power of poetry consist in its ability to step out of itself, tear off a fragment of religion, and then return into itself and absorb it. So too with philosophy.
– Friedrich Schlegel, Ideas
Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is.
– Voltaire
All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses—but movement comes from the heart.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The world belongs to those who understand appearances.
– Niccolò Machiavelli
More and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.
– Virginia Woolf
Much of the evil in this world is due to the fact that man, in general, is hopelessly unconscious.
– CG Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Society has three stages: savagery, ascendance, decadence. The great rise because of savagery. They rule in ascendance. They fall because of their own decadence.
– Pierce Brown
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear—identify their leader and you know where to strike.
– Sun Tzu
Even the most thorough
change happens one
choice at a time.
– Charles Eisenstein
The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
– George Orwell
The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced.
– Jean Baudrillard
The Waiting Place…for people just waiting. Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or the waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting.
Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for the wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, or Another Chance… Everyone is just waiting.
– Dr. Seuss
When your barometric pressure drops
and the thunderheads gather,
he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with
the stubby little pencils he steals from the public library.
He asks me to look out for you.
– Vijay Seshadri
Poetry […] it consumed Sappho’s young
years, it nourished Goethe’s old age.
Drug-the Greeks called it-both poison
and medicine.
– Umberto Eco
The most clichéd Native images used to be suggested for the cover design, so I fought to have some say.
– Louise Erdrich
Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
– Neil Postman
What liars poets and everybody were!
They made one think one wanted sentiment.
When what one supremely wanted was this
piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality!
– D.H. Lawrence
To be interested in the changing seasons
is a happier state of mind
than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
– George Santayana
At the moment when desire ceases and contemplation, pure seeing, and self-surrender begin, everything changes. Man ceases to be useful or dangerous, interesting or boring, genial or rude, strong or weak. He becomes nature, he becomes beautiful and remarkable as does everything that is an object of clear contemplation. For indeed contemplation is not scrutiny or criticism, it is nothing but love. It is the highest and most desirable state of our souls: undemanding love.
– Hermann Hesse
The foundation of the body is the heart, which is the residence of essence… By assembling essence in its residence, it will by and by enter into the blood …
– Dong Zhongshu
This description of essence as being first assembled in the heart and then passed on into the body allows the concrete understanding of the blood as energy and of the mind as energy in ancient Chinese thought. The mind is consequently thought of as fluid residing in one or the other organ and circulating freely around the body—carried, perhaps, by the energy of the blood.
– Hidemi Ishida
Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.
– Anne Carson
I once had a friend who practiced blackmail: perhaps we have all had one. Mine would sometimes ask me to cancel an engagement in order to type a manuscript for him, then arrive toward midnight, the piece still unwritten, and explain that I could type it between four and six A.M., and why was I pulling that long face; not only upon me but upon anyone who would play along, he made demand after absurd demand. “Just this once,” he would say, hinting darkly at “emergencies,” “deadlines,” “saving my life.” Our occasional protests would draw forth no retractions but only impassioned apologies, colored with vivid intimations of his undiagnosed ulcers. (Other times it was angina, and on his most imaginative days it was cirrhosis.)
Some of us loved him and some of us did not, but whether we did or not we all acquiesced, helpless before the undertone his every plea carried: I need you. We acquiesced neither because he was charming (most of the time he was notably not) nor because he was a good and generous man (I think he probably was), but simply because he was bold enough or amoral enough or scared enough to make use of what exists in almost every heart: the potentially disabling fear of failure—in some cases neurotic, in others well-founded. I can’t count on you, he would complain if thwarted, salting what was for some of us an ugly raw wound. We would see in his reproachful eyes, suddenly, the sister we had failed, the friend we had hurt—all the opportunities for goodness or glory or marks in heaven we had ever muffed, miserably. In brief, he could expose us to ourselves, and we quite flatly bought him off.
– Joan Didion
Resurrection is the magical operation—divine and human at the same time—in which divine love and human love overcome forgetfulness, sleep and death. For love never forgets; it is always vigilant; and it is stronger than death. At the resurrection the human spirit and soul descend from above and unite with their immortal body which ascends to meet them.
– Valentin Tomberg
Last night I heard hints of the coming day in a branch tapping on a drainpipe. What matters is the letters delivered in the space after the period. A message clear beyond the wavering glass: love-alone, love-alone.
– Rachel Dacus
I don’t think a person can live without a philosophy. What is philosophy? ‘Philos’ in Greek means ‘friend’ or ‘love’, ‘love’ and ‘friend’ is synonymous. The study of any ‘ophy’ is the study ‘of’. So it’s the study of love, and to have a philosophy is to know how to love and to know where to put it. Because you can’t put it everywhere you’d walk around; you’d have to be a minister or priest saying ‘yes, my son’ or ‘yes, my daughter’, ‘bless you’.
But people don’t live that way; they live with anger and hostility and problems and lack of money…tremendous disappointments in their life. So what they need is a philosophy. What I think what everybody needs is a way to say: ‘Where and how can I love, can I be in love, so that I can live. So that I can live with some degree of peace.’ And I guess every picture we have ever done has been in a way to try to find some kind of philosophy for the characters in the film. So that’s why I have a need… for the characters to really analyze love: discuss it, kill it, destroy it, hurt each other, do all that stuff, in that war — in that word polemic and picture polemic of what life is. And the rest of the stuff really doesn’t interest me. It may interest other people, but I have a one-track mind. That’s all I’m interested in: is love.
– John Cassavetes, I’m Almost Not Crazy
Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each other’s bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in love – think what deep though invisible tracks they must leave, everywhere, behind them.
– Christopher Isherwood
To be alive on Earth is to inhabit a paradox so poignant and confounding it threatens to split us open every morning we wake.
The same world that breaks our heart with injustice also staggers us with beauty. The body that will betray us with age and illness is also the instrument of every pleasure and embrace.
We are trapped in time and blessed with consciousness. This cursed blessing is simultaneously the cruelest joke and the most extravagant gift in all of creation.
So we make up names for it. We string together contradictions like prayer beads, fashioning phrases that acknowledge both the impossible burden and the unspeakable privilege of incarnation.
There’s magic in the naming. When we call it “the breathing, bleeding, beautiful mess” or “the glorious carnage of conscious existence,” we’re not trying to solve the paradox. We’re living inside it without going mad.
– Rob Brezsny
Really, this world of ours, the scheme of things as they call it, is quite intolerable. That’s why I want the moon, or happiness, or eternal life — something, in fact, that may sound crazy, but which isn’t of this world.
– Albert Camus
Even without love
Even after all this time
My body continues to generate real, healthy, human emotion.
– Ariana Reines
The world, I started to see, was a different world, depending on what you said about it, and how you said it. By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.
– George Saunders
Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise.
– Bill Evans
You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact not at all a warming—yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the colour blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes— the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.
– Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the dust.
– T. S. Eliot
People who don’t organize into tribes get wiped out by people who do.
– @naval
When writing a poem, I feel like I’m translating. And when I’m translating, I feel like I’m writing.
– Peter Cole
Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.
– Henry David Thoreau
To one who thus drinks the nectar of immortality in the shape of Self-knowledge (abidance in pure Consciousness), the delights of sense-pleasures become painful.
– Sage Vasishta
We can complacently watch life from the sidelines, or we can risk our pride, our ideas, and whatever else we use to separate ourselves from others and leap fully into our life.
– Michael Wenger
All modesty is false modesty
when it comes to poems,
or to the silence
in which poems begin
before they are words,
when they are still daisies
at the foot of the dead Christ
– Jim Moore
The Ruling Class are not Human. / But the food they steal from our mouths is real.
– Sean Bonney
Wagner is the first who has recognized the disease of language as a disease of civilization, and who has therefore sought to cure it by returning to the primitive sources of language—music and myth.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The Universe, based exclusively on nerve-stimuli, is a structure of imagination, of image-making in mind, itself forever unknowable, and its very existence at best a conjecture.
– Wei Wu Wei
The traditional literary forms — the novel, the short story, the poem — although they evolve, do not disappear.
– Lydia Davis
Nothing can be done except little by little.
– Charles Baudelaire
My revolution is a one-man revolution and almost everybody is the enemy. I may not be doing a great deal of damage, but at least I’m not bullshitting.
– Charles Bukowski
When you appeared it was as if
magnets cleared the air.
I had never seen that smile before
or your hair, flying silver.
– Rita Dove
In criticism as in art, the false is most often the boring; and after all, the critic’s unforgivable sin is to be dull.
– Leslie Fiedler
Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. It will cost you your innocence, your illusions, your certainty.
– Carl Jung
When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.
– Charles Bukowski
Jung believes that alcoholism and drug addiction, for instance, have become such huge problems because we look in vain to drugs to deliver a transcendence that normal life can no longer provide.
– David Tacey
I don’t think any culture ever degraded without damage being done to its language.
I don’t think any culture can be saved without reestablishing the health of its language.
If a people can’t speak to one another then they can build nothing together.
– Bernard T. Joy
I may not have amazing victories, but I can amaze you with defeats that I came out of alive.
– Anton Chekhov
For the thinking person there is no such thing as idleness… By contrast, one might say that the thinking person is at his most active when he is supposedly doing nothing. This is beyond the comprehension of genuinely idle people.
– Thomas Bernhard
Try, as far as you can, to get rid of beliefs which depend solely upon the place and time of your education, and upon what your parents and schoolmasters told you… every approach towards it is a step towards a scientific habit of mind.
– Bertrand Russell
Anyone who enjoys inner peace is no more broken by failure than he is inflated by success.
– Matthieu Ricard
Silence is ever-speaking; it is the perennial flow of ‘language’. It is interrupted by speaking; for words obstruct this mute ‘language’. Lectures may entertain individuals for hours without improving them. Silence is permanent and benefits the whole of humanity.
– Ramana Maharshi
Genius lives only one story above madness.
– Schopenhauer
A half-man (or, rather, half-person) is not someone who does not have an opinion, just someone who does not take risks for it.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.
– Saint Augustine of Hippo
Few are made for independence, it is the privilege of the strong.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The soul, you see, is a shy and retiring thing. It lurks in dark places and dislikes sunlight. And so, if you do not keep the skylight open at all times, the soul will rot…
– Yukio Mishima
The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.
– Christopher Hitchens
Ask for help. Not because you are weak. But because you want to remain strong.
– Les Brown
Even the slightest thought
immerses a man in sorrow;
when devoid of all thoughts
he enjoys imperishable bliss.
– Yoga Vasishta
I’m a bit like a sponge. When I’m not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little – and out comes, not water but ink.
– Georges Simenon
When you find it hard to find a friend to talk to, speak to your Guardian Angel. He is the most faithful of companions.
– St. Francis de Sales
Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.
– Baruch Spinoza
you meant
to bloom truthfully
in your own wild season
– @BashoSociety
You appeared to me like a last lifebuoy thrown into the middle of a life that was empty. I clung to it with all my strength and willingly closed my eyes to everything that could put this last hope in danger.
– María Casares to Albert Camus
Everybody loves his body, but few love their real being. Your real being is love itself, and your many loves are its reflections according to the situation at the moment. Love yourself wisely, and you will reach the summit of perfection.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Wise sayings often fall on barren ground; but a kind word is never thrown away.
– Arthur Helps
There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. The world is far more complex than the human mind, and there are far more patterns in Nature than we can ever hope to decipher.
– Carl Sagan
AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.
– Cory Doctorow
even in your bare seasons
something within you is
preparing to bloom again
– @BashoSociety
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
– Douglas Adams
It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.
– Voltaire
Reality is simply the loss of ego. Destroy the ego by seeking its identity. Because the ego is no entity, it will automatically vanish, and reality will shine forth by itself.
– Ramana Maharshi
To create, centuries and giants are needed; To destroy, a dwarf and a second.
– St. Augustine
LOST
my lost lamb lovelier than all the wool.
– Michael Longley
It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path.
– Søren Kierkegaard
You expect all kinds of things, but what real life throws up is always more bizarre.
– Georges Simenon
If you would only rid yourselves of the concepts of ordinary and Enlightened, you would find that there is no other Buddha than the Buddha in your own mind.
– Huang Po
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.
– Henry Ford
We don’t hate anybody. We love our people so much they think we hate the ones who are inflicting injustice against them.
– Malcolm X
I think I always just wanted to live the art life. And for me the art life was drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
– David Lynch
The city is a pit. The bottom is dark, but the top is light. One struggles to reach the top, but the mud pulls one back.
– Victor Hugo
STRANGE WAY
by Martyn Joseph
[Verse 1]
Strange way to start a revolution
That’s a strange way to get a better tan
Strange way to hold a power breakfast
And a strange way to show your business plan
Yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah
[Verse 2]
Strange way to see if wood would splinter
Strange way to do performance art
Strange way to say “I’ll see you later”
And a strange way to leave behind your heart
[Chorus]
Strange dissident of meekness
And nurse of tangled souls
And so unlike the holy
To end up full of holes
Strange way
[Verse 3]
Strange way to hang around for hours
It’s a strange way to imitate a kite
Strange way to get a view of Auschwitz
That’s a strange way to represent the light
[Verse 4]
Strange way to watch for stormy weather
And a strange way to disprove gravity
Strange way to go around fund-raising
What a strange way to sing I’m liberty
[Chorus]
Strange dissident of meekness
And nurse of tangled souls
And so unlike the holy
To end up full of holes
What a strange way
[Verse 5]
Strange way to test for hemophilia
Strange way to spend a happy hour
Strange way to down a bitter cocktail
Strange way to merchandise your power
[Verse 6]
Strange way to reassure your mother
That’s a strange way to finish your world tour
And a strange way to pose for all those paintings
What a strange way to gather in the poor
[Chorus]
Strange dissident of meekness
And nurse of tangled souls
And so unlike the holy
To end up full of holes
This world is too much with us
Could we not now just elope?
Strange way to hold us closer
Strange way to give us hope
Strange way
[Outro]
Strange way
Strange way
Strange way
People Crazy As Me
by Martyn Joseph
[Verse 1]
I always thought a man should have a dream
To dig himself out when he hit the floor
A fundamental right to some equality
Case some old bigot comes knocking on his door
[Verse 2]
I always thought a woman she should have the same
With equal rights attached to her name
Maybe they could raise a little family
And pass the message onto somebody
[Chorus]
I look around, sometimes I see
People crazy as me
[Verse 3]
Always thought the needy should come first
Lighten their burden, lift the curse
And give the old there something new
Like our grateful hearts for all they went through
[Verse 4]
I never thought that we should see them sick
As they take away the hospitals brick by brick
And build our stadiums up so high
I got a little contradiction here in my eye
[Chorus]
I look around, sometimes I see
The people crazy as me
People crazy as me
[Verse 5]
I always thought a child should have the chance
To be embraced by love and with her dance
To make mistakes but know the touch of grace
And if you beat on them, you’re a disgrace
[Verse 6]
And always give the time of day to anyone
Don’t be ignorant and don’t you poke fun
Don’t just deal with those who can give you gain
You should treat everybody just the same
[Verse 7]
I don’t think we’re supposed to understand
Every card placed in our hand
But I think that we are meant to know
We’re not alone wherever we go
[Verse 8]
And I always thought that we should live with hope
But never trample on those who just can’t cope
And righteousness not far away
Little bit of redemption is gonna save this day
[Chorus]
I look around, sometimes I see
People crazy as me
I look around, sometimes I see
People crazy as me
I see people crazy as me
Crazy as me
The artificial intelligentsia is dragging us into an archaic future where intelligence is quantified, fixed, and ranked, and smartness is fetishized. We would do well to remember that IQ is, above all, a eugenic concept.
– Ruha Benjamin
The role which the artist plays in society is to revive the primitive, anarchic instincts which have been sacrificed for the illusion of living in comfort… It is not the most comfortable life in the world but I know that it is life, and I am not going to trade it for an anonymous life in the brotherhood of man-which is either sure death, or quasi-death, or at the very best cruel
deception.
– Henry Miller
Much of our wounding occurs
before language.
We cannot think our way
out of trauma.
A more tactile, sensitive
alchemy is required.
– Matt Licata
THE LOVERS
I was always afraid
of the next card
the psychic would turn
over for us—
Forgive me
for not knowing
how we were
every card in the deck.
– Timothy Liu
Justified rage is what clears the path for the new to be built. It is what burns old systems to the ground so that we can RISE from the ashes.
– Jaclyn Cherie
The blue sea above,
the green sea below,
and your heart:
the third shore.
– JL Soler
Starting anything new requires an internal sense of its rightness for us or it won’t have enough energy to be taken up and manifested. And then tedious moments come along when we just “don’t feel like doing whatever it is”. Those are key moments when the self-talk needs to be a combination of tough love and compassion. They are the right approach for many things.
– Gunilla Norris
The tangible reality of our everyday lives is really a kind of illusion, like a holographic image. Underlying it is a deeper order of existence, a vast and more primary level of reality that gives birth to all the objects and appearances of our physical world in much the same way that a piece of holographic film gives birth to a hologram.
If the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality, and what is “out there” is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only processes some of the frequencies out of this blur, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist.
Although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this is an illusion. We are really “receivers” floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency.
– David Bohm
Being a ‘good person’ is something you do, not something you are.
– Luvvie Ajayi
The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains.
– Ray Bradbury, The Long Rain
The Rising Times
These are the rising times,
the rising of the sweet potency
within your soul.
The rising of humanity
to meet its greatest potential.
You know it.
You feel it.
Deep within your root,
there is a quivering.
It’s true.
It’s that uncertainty.
It’s that chaos.
It’s that which you fear
will shake you to your core.
Bless you,
I hope it will.
These are the rising times.
Let your authentic power rise.
Let your voice fly on
impassioned thermals,
high,
like a hawk kettling amidst the gods.
These are the rising times.
Stand up for what you believe in.
Stand up for those who have
been beaten down,
whatever their creed or form.
Stand up because humans are
not designed to crawl indefinitely,
And now is the time.
These are the rising times.
These are the rising times.
Raise your arms high above your head.
Look up.
You’re a vast being in a vast universe.
How lucky you are to be here now.
Be here now.
These are the rising times.
Glory to the phoenix for
teaching us that ashes are not
an end point,
but a bed for consummating that
which is destined to be reborn.
Believe in the heat and glow.
These are the rising times –
and I’ll stand beside you
as we see these times through.
Standing together –
that’s all She has ever wanted for us.
Stand up and stand together.
It’s really that simple for us
to become fully human.
The sun has been showing us how
every morning,
and the moon, every night –
Rising…
Did you realize?
These are the rising times.
– Jamie K. Reaser
Love Minus Zero/ No Limit
by Bob Dylan
My love she speaks like silence,
Without ideals or violence,
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful,
Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire.
People carry roses,
Make promises by the hours,
My love she laughs like the flowers,
Valentines can’t buy her.
In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all.
The cloak and dagger dangles,
Madams light the candles.
In ceremonies of the horsemen,
Even the pawn must hold a grudge.
Statues made of match sticks,
Crumble into one another,
My love winks, she does not bother,
She knows too much to argue or to judge.
The bridge at midnight trembles,
The country doctor rambles,
Bankers’ nieces seek perfection,
Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring.
The wind howls like a hammer,
The night blows cold and rainy,
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing.
Valentine’s Day
by Theodora Goss
This is the coldest day of the year so far —
the kind of cold that hurts you to the bone,
that says to impatient bulbs, stay underground:
the world is dead, there’s nothing for you here.
And yet this is the day we’ve chosen to be
our Valentine, instead of some day in June
when birdsong would wake us, not this bitter cold —
when roses would actually be blooming. Crazy, isn’t it?
The thing is, we like to believe in what we can’t see,
we crazy humans. That bulbs will be daffodils
and crocuses, that those sticks poking out of the ground,
half-covered in burlap, are actually rose bushes,
that the warblers and wrens who are having a grand old time
in Mexico will decide to return again.
We believe in spring, we believe in promises,
we talk about love, that insubstantial notion,
convinced that it will sprout from the cold ground.
We are, all of us, incurable romantics.
And yet, before the snow fell, I could see,
poking out of the ground, a few green shoots.
I know they’re there, just waiting for a finger
of warmth to touch them. And when that delicate girl,
the spring, with sunlit hair, returns again
from wherever she’s been vacationing, they’ll grow,
filling our world with colors and fragrances.
We’ll forget our frostbitten cheeks, the icy sidewalks.
For now? We wrap ourselves in scarves and curse
the wind, and slip on ice, and talk about love,
convinced that it exists although we can’t see it —
hopeful or delusional, which may be
much the same thing. Meanwhile the world around us
lies (at least we hope) not dead but sleeping . . .
I love a lot of people, understand none of them.
– Flannery O’Connor
Checkout
by Caroline Bird
I think “so, this is death” and wonder why
I can still see through my eyes. An angel
approaches with a feedback form asking
how I’d rate my life (very good, good,
average, bad, very bad) and I intend to tick
“average” followed by a rant then I recall
your face like a cartoon treasure chest
glowing with gold light, tick “very good,”
and in the comment box below I write
“nice job.” The angel asks if I enjoyed
my stay and I say “Oh yes, I’d definitely
come again” and he gives me a soft look
meaning “that won’t be possible but thanks
all the same,” clicks his pen and vanishes.
I can’t think of any other time in all of history except the Civil War that the United States government has fought against itself every day. This is absolutely absurd.
– David Salter
Isolated people whom are with few options, and raised in such environments, will begin to believe their immense limitations are infinite possibilities.
– Nolan Elenya
The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you will see that they are all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.
– Robert Anton Wilson
I do love nothing in the world so well as you—is not that strange?
– William Shakespeare
Our society has taught us how to fill up the mind, how to jam it full of ideas, prejudices, regrets, anticipations and expectations.
– Ajahn Sumedho
Your mouth is snow now on my lips, cool, intimate, first kiss, a vow. Time falls and falls through endless space, to when we are.
– Carol Ann Duffy
In order to create, the need to express has to be bigger than the fear.
– Juliette Binoche
If you cannot hear the cry then you have cultivated a life of indifference.
– Rob Bell
Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting—break it through winning their hearts before engaging their minds.
– Sun Tzu
To replace the patriarchy with a matriarchy will only be neurotic in another direction. Valuing the “feminine” and the “masculine” equally is the only path toward greater wholeness and fuller humanity.
– James Hollis
Nobody is purely good or purely evil. Most of us are in-between. There are moths that explore the day and butterflies that play at night. Polarity is an integral part of nature — human or not human.
– Suzy Kassem
All around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural.
– Margaret Fuller
Art is the conceptual solution of complicated forms, the perpetual fusion of personality, not humble ornamentation of surface pyrotechnics. Beauty never comes from decorative effects but from structural coherence. Art never grows out of the persuasion of published eclecticism or the inviting momentum of the bandwagon.
– Robert Gwathmey, Painters on Painting
The United States is a powerful country… but it doesn’t run the world, and it should not aspire to run the world. That’s a kind of madness.
– Jeffrey Sachs
The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.
– John Dewey, How We Think
…it may be that kindness is our best audition for a worthier world.
– Michael Blumenthal
Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen.
– John Bertram Phillips
Black holes are the seductive dragons of the universe, outwardly quiescent yet violent at the heart, uncanny, hostile, primeval, emitting a negative radiance that draws all toward them, gobbling up all who come too close. Once having entered the tumultuous orbit of a black hole, nothing can break away from its passionate but fatal embrace.
– Robert Coover, A Child Again
Human relationships were strange. I mean, you were with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stopped.
– Charles Bukowski, Women
Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.
– Oscar Wilde
People love other people’s stories. Theories divide people, but stories unite people.
– James H. Billington, 13th Librarian of Congress
Loving practice is not aimed at simply giving an individual greater life satisfaction; it is extolled as the primary way we end domination and oppression.
– bell hooks
Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.
– George Jean Nathan
When a society has no mythological anchor, no soul-affirming rites-of-passage, a society doesn’t know which story it’s in. And as for evil—surely we are too sophisticated for that? When you lose the metaphor, a hand moves briskly to a rusty blade. We are adrift in an epidemic of the literal.
– Martin Shaw
It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.
– Albert Camus
Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.
– Philip José Farmer
Before the year 313, it’s unthinkable that a Christian would be in the army. By the year 400, we ARE the army… and we’re killing the pagans.
– Richard Rohr
Some are made modest by great praise, others insolent.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn
Love Is Always a Radical
It does not speak as the preachers speak;
it comes into the cities like a madman
overturning the money-tables;
it breaks all laws on earth.
Say it:
the mark of a sick age
is the hatred of all that is simple.
In a world of steel and legions
all they will ever do with love
one
another
is nail it in the air among the birds.
– Joseph Fasano
At last, she makes her choice. She turns around, drops her head, and walks toward a horizon she cannot see. After that, she does not look back anymore. She knows that if she does, she will weaken.
– Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
Grace is a short interlude where there is forgiveness, where kindness reigns, where there is bestowing of mercy.
– Carol Edgarian
Nothing is more unfair than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present. Whatever may be said of morality, political wisdom is certainly ambulatory.
– Denys Winstanley
In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes.
– Seneca
Matter is light, crystallized into the complex idea of this universe, exactly as literature is typeset assembled into the complex ideas of a library.
– Walter Russell
We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.
– Tennessee Williams
The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.
– Ferdinand Foch
Act only according to that maxim that you would will as a universal law.
– Immanuel Kant
Show that you have the spirit of a free man.
– Epictetus, Discourses
Poets can express much more than novelists, this connected sense of something which is simple and lucid and true and non-bogus and at the same time oddly accidental.
– Iris Murdoch
Uniqueness is anomalous; in our oddness is our integrity, our individuality.
– James Hillman, From Types to Images
Amidst radical changes in climate and in culture, creation wishes to continue, yet can only work through the souls of those alive at a given time. There may be no better time than these troubled times to learn the pattern set within the soul and claim the mythic thread that brought each of us to life.
– Michael Meade
Initially the truth might be a specific insight, some connection we make between various elements in our experience. But as the soul gives herself more to the truth, the truth becomes essential truth, and ultimately the absolute truth—the ultimate nature of everything in all its beauty, magnificence, and splendor. When we finally behold the absolute truth and see its beauty and magnificence, we understand. We recognize it as the source of love. We love it because it’s lovable. We love it because we are loving our true self. We love it because it’s natural to love the truth. Not because it’s correct, ethical conduct, but because in some very deep place in us, the truth is the Beloved.
– A. H. Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry
For Nature has no knowledge of the past —
Our phantom years do not concern or touch her;
And faced with her we dimly see at last
Ourselves as a mere fantasy of Nature.
– Fyodor Tyutchev (tr. John Dewey)
It is urgently necessary to close my mouth with kisses.
– Franz Kafka, 1912.
I take a piece, a piece of my heart, wrap it carefully in a few written pages, and give it to you.
– Franz Kafka, 1903.
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
– Pablo Neruda, (tr. Mark Eisner)
The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their downfall: in the labyrinth, in hardness towards oneself and others, in experiment; their delight lies in self-mastery: asceticism is with them nature, need, instinct.
– Nietzsche
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing, red-hot iron; it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever. You have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question—whether you can love yourself. And that will be the test.
– Carl Jung
Aloneness is a state of being, whereas loneliness is a state of feeling. It’s like the difference between being broke and being poor.
– Townes Van Zandt
You shouldn’t ask me whether I like him or not. The way you mean it, I don’t suppose I like anybody.
– Dorothy Baker
I consider life as an inn where I must stay until the coach of the abyss arrives. I do not know where it will take me, for I know nothing. And I sing slowly, to myself alone, vague songs I compose while I wait.
– Fernando Pessoa
Many people are caught in a knot of self-destructive behavior and are unable to see it or appreciate how they themselves have tied it. Each believes the problems lie somewhere “out there,” surrounding them but beyond them, rooted in external circumstances.
– James F. Masterson
Nobody will ever induce me to absolve human nature because I know myself.
– Nicolás Gómez Davila
If I can speak in all the languages of men or of angels, but if I do not have love, then I am only a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
– 1st Corinthians 13
Anyone can build a house of wood and bricks, but the Buddha taught that that is not our real home. Our real home is inner peace.
– Ajahn Chah
Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick
with bloody blows on its head.
– Frank O’Hara
The victim mindset dilutes the human potential. By not accepting personal responsibility for our circumstances, we greatly reduce our power to change them.
– Steve Maraboli
I am not a snob; it is simply that I am not interested with what most people have to say, or what they want to do mostly with my time.
– Charles Bukowski
My ambition is handicapped by laziness.
– Charles Bukowski
People are always looking for the secret to the universe. The secret is there is no secret; it’s all just a fascinating, complicated mess.
– Prof. Feynman
When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety. If I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without pain. From this, I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me.
– Rumi
In all institutions from which the cold wind of open criticism is excluded, an innocent corruption begins to grow like a mushroom – for example, in senates and learned societies.
– Nietzsche
If I could only have the experience of meeting a passionate thinker, that is, someone who honestly and honorably expressed in his life what he has understood!
– Søren Kierkegaard
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
– Edward Lear
What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?
– Søren Kierkegaard
The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.
– Eckhart Tolle
I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go,
and the days
go by. I drop in.
– Frank O’Hara
Reality is a great storyteller. It tells stories more surprisingly and violently than all poets.
– Alexander Kluge
Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.
– Carl Sagan
winter seclusion
listening, that evening
to the sound of rain
– Buson
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
– Ernest Becker
You can successfully force people to follow a certain course, but you cannot force them to understand it.
– Confucius
I sat facing you for hours but you didn’t speak. Then I finally understood the unspoken meaning. Removed from their covers, books lay scattered about; outside the bamboo screen, rain beats against the plum tree.
– Ryokan
All through life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, no one would tell me what it was.
No, said the old man, that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.
– Douglas Adams
With each session of silence the fog lifts a bit more, until one day the ego “I,” with its insistent look-at-me voice, drops away, revealing the true self afloat in a vast blue sky.
– Joan Duncan Oliver
Instead of searching for what you do not have, find out what it is that you have never lost.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
There is no hierarchy of suffering. There’s nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours.
– Edith Eger
All is a play in consciousness. All divisions are illusory. You can know the false only. The true you must yourself be.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Fixity in the Self is your real nature. Remain as you are. That is the aim.
– Ramana Maharshi
deep in the hedge
a small brown bird
building hope
– @RainyDayRibbons
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
– Plato
I shall show you a love
potion without a drug, without
a herb; without the incantation
of any sorceress: if you wish
to be loved, love.
– Seneca
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.
– Alan Watts
Emptiness, silence, stillness. This is not a void to be feared, but a sanctuary to be sought.
– Wu Hsin
Life, Love, Libraries, have no future.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
– J. D. Salinger
Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
– Sun Tzu
True merit is like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
I have faith in the unlimited, loving power of the Universe.
– Louise Hay
Become who you are by learning who you are.
– Greek poet Pindar
The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of the common man.
– William Beveridge
You are not imagining it.
This world has failed you, radically.
– Bernard T. Joy
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
Is the scale of an artwork intrinsic to the logic?
Or is scale compensating for lightness?
Is immersion generating the awe?
And does awe generated by immersion endure?
Are we witnessing the emergence of a new cathedral-scale logic?
– Laura Kerr, Scale Integrity Test
You have seen my descent. Now watch my rising.
– Rumi
Corporations take the humanity out of trade – they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.
– Nassim Taleb
I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.
– Jane Austen
There have always been ignorant people, but they haven’t always had college degrees to make them unaware of their ignorance. Some people imagine that they are well informed because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes.
– Thomas Sowell
falling branch
only after the sound
the sky opens wider
– @BashoSociety
You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
– Terence McKenna
Anything can happen in life, and above all, nothing
– Michel Houellebecq
in this world of dew
we walk together
brief lovers
– Issa
If you seek the secret of Unity,
Read your own being.
– Niyazi Misri
If a person does not become what he understands, then he does not understand it either.
– Søren Kierkegaard
There is one thing that you can trust everybody to do, and that is to put his interest above yours.
– Milton Friedman
Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
– Douglas Adams
If we cannot go back, it hardly seems worth while to go forward. There is nothing in front but a flat wilderness of standardization either by Bolshevism or Big Business…
– G.K. Chesterton
The word of God spoken in the desert is deprived of roots in the sand, but becomes instead a book of ‘inconsumable fire,’ like the burning bush of Moses’ theophany. God’s word, spoken in the desert, is itself a wanderer and a nomad, like any other desert dweller, and finds its echo only in the word of a wandering people.
– Edmond Jabes
I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism.
– Nelson Mandela
If many variables exist, many variables must be studied.
– B.F. Skinner
They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?
– Fidel Castro
Democracy? I want nothing to do with a system which operates on the premise that my rights don’t exist simply because I am outnumbered.
– R. Lee Wrights
I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, ‘The Beatles did.’
– Kurt Vonnegut
Right down there, in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.
– Pema Chödrön
A woman is a school.
– Céline Semaan
Life is too hard for us to be divided
– Katt Williams
There are no guarantees – except the guarantee that holding back from life instead is a recipe for anguish.
– Oliver Burkeman
Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire.
– Greta Thunberg
The girl replies that she was dreaming about her mother, who died not long ago. The dead are at peace, thinks B stretching out in the bed. As if she had read his mind, the girl says that no one who has passed through this world is at peace. Not anymore, not ever, she says with total conviction.
– Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth
If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.
– Julian Assange
My only advice is to stay aware, listen carefully, and yell for help if you need it.
– Judy Blume
They said that if I questioned a 6,000-year-old earth, I would question whether other parts of Scripture should be read scientifically and historically. They were right. I did. They said that if I entertained the hope that those without access to the gospel might still be loved and saved by God, I would fall prey to the dangerous idea that God loves everyone, that there is nothing God won’t do to reconcile all things to Himself. They were right. I have. They said that if I looked for Jesus beyond the party line, I could end up voting for liberals. They were right. I do (sometimes). They said that if I listened to my gay and lesbian neighbors, if I made room for them in my church and in my life, I could let grace get out of hand. They were right. It has. They told me that this slippery slope would lead me away from God, that it would bring a swift end to my faith journey, that I’d be lost forever. But with that one, they were wrong. Yes, the slippery slope brought doubts. Yes, the slippery slope brought change. Yes, the slippery slope brought danger and risk and unknowns. I am indeed more exposed to the elements out here, and at times it is hard to find my footing. But when I decided I wanted to follow Jesus as myself, with both my head and heart intact, the slippery slope was the only place I could find him, the only place I could engage my faith honestly. So down I went. It was easier before when the path was wide and straight. But truth be told, I was faking it. I was pretending that things that didn’t make sense made sense, that things that didn’t feel right felt right. To others, I appeared confident and in control, but faith felt as far away as friend who has grown distant and cold. Now, every day is a risk. Now, I have no choice but to cling to faith and hope and love for dear life. Now, I have to keep a very close eye on Jesus, as he leads me through deep valleys and precarious peaks. But the view is better, and, for the first time in a long time, I am fully engaged in my faith. I am alive. I am dependent. I am following Jesus as me—heart and head intact. And they were right. All it took was a question or two to bring me here.
– Rachel Held Evans
The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.
– Corrie Ten Boom
Our wounds and our gifts are next-door neighbors.
– Dr. Alexandra Solomon
You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.
– Agatha Christie
The unceasing propaganda in our time for ‘the individual’ seems to me deeply suspect, as ‘individuality’ itself becomes more and more a synonym for selfishness. A capitalist society comes to have a vested interest in praising ‘individuality’ and ‘freedom’ — which may mean little more than the right to the perpetual aggrandizement of the self, and the freedom to shop, to acquire, to use up, to consume, to render obsolete.
I don’t believe there is any inherent value in the cultivation of the self. And I think there is no culture (using the term normatively) without a standard of altruism, of regard for others. I do believe there is an inherent value in extending our sense of what a human life can be. If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader and then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other words, other territories of concern.
– Susan Sontag
When we listen to people, our own language softens. Listening may be the cardinal act of giving.
– Paul Hawken
Letting go is not the same as pushing someone else away.
– Damien Rice
If God is compassionate, then certainly those who love God should be compassionate as well.
– Henri J.M. Nouwen
We are rarely proud when we are alone.
– Voltaire
If a normally kind, agreeable person makes an enemy of you, you ought to ask yourself why.
– Joyce Rachelle
We learn to live in mystery, to be supported by ultimate insecurity, and to love the flavor of nonbeing.
– A. H. Almaas, The Inner Journey Home
All we really want is Love’s confusing joy.
– Rumi
Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
Some say water is the mightiest force on earth. But the yearning for freedom is even stronger.
– Carole Weatherford
We are both the authors and the readers of our own lives.
– Lex Fridman
You cannot employ non-hostile, non-destructive technical skill unless you realize basically that you yourself are this whole domain of nature. That’s the real you. You are not in a fight against nature. You’re not here to conquer nature—because there’s nothing to conquer! It’s all you.
– Alan Watts
Integration is not on one or two levels of our existence; it is the coming together of the whole.
– Krishnamurti
What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.
– Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov
WRESTLERS
In the sky of men, the star’s bread seemed to me shadowy and hardened, but in their narrow hands I read the joust of these stars calling others: emigrants from below deck still dreaming; I gathered their golden sweat, and through me the earth ceased to die.
REMANENCE
From what do you suffer? As if in the noiseless house there were to awake the ascendancy of a face that an acrid mirror seemed to have fixed. As if, the high lamp and its radiance inclined over a blind plate, you were to lift toward your anguished throat the old table with its fruits. As if you were reliving your escapades in the morning haze toward the beloved revolt, which better than all tenderness, could succor you and raise you. As if condemning, while your love sleeps, the sovereign portal and the path leading toward it. From what do you suffer?
From the unreal intact in reality laid waste. From their venturesome deviations circled with cries and blood. From that which was chosen and left untouched, from the shore of the leap to the coast attained, from the unreflecting present that disappears. From a star which, foolish, came close and will die before me.
– Rene Char, (tr. Mary Ann Caws)
Bright Bindings
by Countee Cullen
Your love to me was like an unread book,
Bright-backed, with smooth white pages yet unslit;
Fondly as a lover, foolishly, I took
It from its shelf one day and opened it.
Here shall I read, I thought, beauty and grace,
The soul’s most high and awful poetry;—
Alas for lovers and the faith they place
In love, alas for you, alas for me.
I have but read a page or two at most,
The most my horror-blinded eyes may read.
I find here but a windy tapering ghost
Where I sought flesh gifted to ache and bleed.
Yet back you go, though counterfeit you be.
I love bright books even when they fail me.
Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything’s possible when it comes to love.
– Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
when our every inhale is considered greed
and our every exhale considered pollution
our laughter becomes our liberation
our sighs become our salvation
our hollers become a kind of holy
a praise song to our survival
that brings empires to their knees
– FreeQuency
The telephone runs on electricity and human emotions and samsaric problems run on the mind.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Once, when he and I were discussing his theories of nuclear deterrence, he asked me if I knew what had remained inside Pandora’s box after she had opened it and let out all the evils and ills into the world. “Right there,” he said, “at the bottom of the jar—because it was a large urn or a jar, you know, not a box at all—right there, waiting quietly and obediently was Elpis, which most people like to regard as the daimona of hope and counterpart to Moros, the spirit of doom, but to me, a better and more precise translation of her name and of her nature would be our concept of expectation.
Because we don’t know what comes after evil, do we? And sometimes the deadliest things, those that hold enough power to destroy us, can become, given time, the instruments of our salvation.” I asked him why the gods would let out all the hurts, pains, illnesses, and iniquities to roam free while keeping hope trapped behind the lid of the jar. He winked and said that it was because they know things that we can never know.
– Benjamín Labatut
But not to worry. Those of you who have no need to be worried should not in the least be worried. As for those of you who should be worried, it’s a little late to start worrying now, you should have started months ago, when it could’ve done you some good, because at this point, what’s decided is decided, or would have been decided, if those false rumors we are denying, the rumors about the firings which would be starting this week if they were slated to begin, were true, which we have just told you, they aren’t.
– George Saunders
What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
When you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience.
– Kelly McGonigal
Posthumanism, in my account, can be understood as a thoroughgoing critical naturalism, an approach that understands humans as part of nature and practices of knowing as natural processes of engagement with and as part of the world. In particular, the acknowledgment that humans are part of nature entails the simultaneous recognition that our understanding of nature as that which is disclosed through scientific practices entails an appreciation of the fact that scientific practices are natural processes rather than external impositions on the natural world.
– Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway
… it suddenly felt as if life in its thousand details, twists, and turns had become perfectly clear and transparent. Just like a crystal-clear sea.
– Etty Hillesum
We as humanity are now the disappointment of the hopes of the ages. . . What a catastrophe in heaven and on earth! In the face of such a picture we may well grow humble again. It is true that modern man is a culmination, but tomorrow he will be surpassed. He is indeed the end-product of age-old development, but he is at the same time the worst conceivable disappointment of the hopes of mankind. The modern man is conscious of this. He has seen how beneficent are science, technology and organization, but also how catastrophic . . .
– C. G. Jung
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
– Alfred North Whitehead
All appearances are verily one’s own concepts, self-conceived in the mind, like a reflection seen in a mirror. The Dharma being nowhere save in the mind, there is no other place of meditation than the mind. Quite impossible is it to find the Buddha… elsewhere than the mind.
– Padmasambhava
I know what the river is like at night. I know how it tongues the dark and swallows the rain and how it never ever sleeps. I know how it sings in its chains, how steadily it backstrokes into eternity, how if you stand beside it in the deeps of its throat it seems to be saying, saying, saying, only what you cannot tell.
– Niall Williams, History of the Rain
What if our religion was each other? If our practice was our life. If prayer, our words. What if the temple was the Earth? If forests were our church. If holy water–the rivers, lakes, and ocean. What if meditation was our relationships? If the teacher was life. If wisdom was self-knowledge. If love was the center of our being.
– Ganga White
As we become sensitive to our soul’s experience, we find the smallest moments, the slightest breezes, can move so much inside us in the stillness. Life’s brief encounters with intimacy have more importance. With the subtle qualities we find in our inner life, the silence leads us. The pure presence always begins inside. From our soul’s quiet recesses we are taken to caverns and gardens and skies above mansions of silence.
Our interior life is full of the ways of the soul. Our dreams, feelings, intuition, and thoughts are just the beginnings of the vast language of our soul in the silence. In our meditations and prayers we hear the small whispers, the perfect presence speak to us, seeking our awareness and appreciation. To value our inner life is to open the doors for the galaxies of stars in the silence to be discovered. These stars turn out to be not so far away but right next to our soul and in the midst of the hearts of those around us.
– Bruce Davis
An anxious brain isn’t overreacting, it’s stuck in survival mode. When the amygdala (your brain’s alarm system) fires too often, it sends constant danger signals, while the anterior cingulate cortex can accidentally turn the volume up even more. At the same time, the prefrontal cortex, the part needed for logic, calm thinking, and good decisions, starts to go offline. That’s why anxious children (and adults) can’t just think their way out of it. Their brain has shifted from reasoning to protecting. The good news is with the right sensory, movement, and regulation, we can help the brain feel safe again, and when safety returns, thinking, learning, and connection come back online too.
– Anthony Goldsmith
Try this Exercise. Lie on your back and slowly hug one knee into the chest while the opposite arm reaches across the body to gently press into that knee, hold for 5 slow breaths, then switch sides. The cross-body pressure plus deep joint compression tells the brain and nervous system “I’m safe.” This movement lights up both sides of the brain, organizes the midline, and helps calm an overfiring amygdala while bringing the prefrontal cortex back online. It’s simple, grounding, and incredibly regulating, especially before work or school, after a meltdown, or anytime the brain feels too busy.
– Anthony Goldsmith
One who, while himself seeking happiness,
oppresses with violence other beings who
also desire happiness, will not attain happiness
hereafter.
– Buddha
As my prayer become more attentive and inward
I had less and less to say.
I finally became completely silent.
I started to listen
– which is even further removed from speaking.
I first thought that praying entailed speaking.
I then learnt that praying is hearing,
not merely being silent.
This is how it is.
To pray does not mean to listen to oneself speaking,
Prayer involves becoming silent,
And being silent,
And waiting until God is heard.
– Søren Kierkegaard
The birdcalls start their praise.
And rightly so. We listen long.
(We behind masks, in costumes!)
What do we hear? a little willfulness,
a little sadness, and tremendous promise,
sawing away at the half-locked future.
And in between, healing in our listening:
the beautiful silence they break.
– Rilke
Teilhard de Chardin once wrote that “my matter,” my body, is not a bit of the universe that I possess totally. It is the whole of the universe possessed by me partially. This strange thought is the modern equivalent of the ancient doctrine of the human person as microcosm, the world in miniature. Love for matter, for the cosmos of God’s mak-ing, like charity, begins at home. How can I love God’s creation if I fail to love that world as it exists summed up in my own body?
When an acquaintance loves someone we do not find attractive we sometimes express puzzlement in the form of the question: “What does she see in him?” If we asked God, “What do you see in me, in my body?” the answers might amaze us indeed.
– Martin Smith
And meanwhile, outside the door, waits my faithful, my lonely night…
– Vladimir Nabokov
It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters your mind. It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid internalizing every feeling that enters your heart.
– Adam M. Grant
Only in our doing can we grasp you.
Only with our hands can we illumine you.
The mind is but a visitor:
it thinks us out of our world.
Each mind fabricates itself.
We sense its limits, for we have made them.
And just when we would flee them, you come
and make of yourself an offering.
I don’t want to think a place for you.
Speak to me from everywhere.
Your Gospel can be comprehended
without looking for its source.
When I go toward you
it is with my whole life.
– Rilke
When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to other. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.
– Joy Harjo
Reverence is the process of awakening to being alive. It’s the realization that life is amazing, and every living being is our sibling.
– Paul Hawken
Lord, give me victory,
help me defeat my enemies,
the skin on my body, the verge,
the hours, the years.
– Nichita Stanescu
To be God, naked, solar, in the rainy night, on a field: red, divinely, manuring with the majesty of a tempest, the face grimacing, torn apart, being impossible in tears: who knew, before me, what majesty is?
– georges bataille, story of the eye
Here’s the deal. The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through. Aye, there’s the rub. Many of us “helper” types are as much or more concerned with being seen as good helpers as we are with serving the soul-deep needs of the person who needs help. Witnessing and companioning take time and patience, which we often lack — especially when we’re in the presence of suffering so painful we can barely stand to be there, as if we were in danger of catching a contagious disease. We want to apply our “fix,” then cut and run, figuring we’ve done the best we can to “save” the other person.
– Parker J. Palmer
Now we have to get back the cosmos, and it can’t be done by a trick. The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again. It has taken two thousand years to kill them. Who knows how long it will take to bring them to life. When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos. — It is nothing human and personal that we are short of. What we lack is cosmic life, the sun in us and the moon in us.
– D.H. Lawrence
While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality… true art lies in a reality that is felt.
– Odilon Redon
And as soon as you have renounced that aim of “surviving at any price” and gone where the calm and simple people go—then imprisonment begins to transform your former character in an astonishing way. To transform it in a direction most unexpected to you.
And it would seem that in this situation feelings of malice, the disturbance of being oppressed, aimless hate, irritability, and nervousness ought to multiply. But you yourself do not notice how, with the impalpable flow of time, slavery nurtures in you the shoots of contradictory feelings.
Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant. You were constantly in a rush. And you were constantly short of time. And now you have time with interest. You are surfeited with it, with its months and its years, behind you and ahead of you—and a beneficial calming fluid pours through your blood vessels—patience.
You are ascending…
Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgements. You have come to realize your own weakness—and you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another’s strength. And wish to possess it yourself.
The stones rustle beneath our feet. We are ascending…
With the year, armor-plated restraint covers your heart and all your skin. You do not hasten to question and you do not hasten to answer. Your tongue has lost its flexible capability for easy oscillation. Your eyes do not flash over with gladness over good tidings, nor do they darken with grief.
For you still have to verify whether that’s how it is going to be. And you also have to work out—what is gladness and what is grief.
And now the rule of your life is this: Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost.
Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens with suffering. And even if you haven’t come to love your neighbors in the Christian sense, you are at least learning to love those close to you.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
As we age and plasticity declines, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to change in response to the world, even if we want to. We find familiar types of stimulation pleasurable; we seek out like-minded individuals to associate with, and research shows we tend to ignore or forget, or attempt to discredit, information that does not match our beliefs, or perception of the world, because it is very distressing and difficult to think and perceive in unfamiliar ways.
One reason we can change our brains simply by imagining is that, from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound. When people close their eyes and visualize a simple object, such as the letter a, the primary visual cortex lights up, just as it would if the subjects were actually looking at the letter a. Brain scans show that in action and imagination many of the same parts of the brain are activated. That is why visualizing can improve performance.
– Norman Doidge, M.D.
A candle of the Lord is the soul of man, but the soul can become a holocaust, a fury, a rage. The only cure is to discover that, over and above the anonymous stillness in the world, there is a Name and a waiting. Many people suffer from a fear of the self. They do not feel at home in their own selves. The inner life is a place of dereliction, a no-man’s-land, inconsolate, weird. The self has become a place from which to flee.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should—so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.
– Charlotte Brontë
Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.
– David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
But if you cannot find
a good companion
of integrity and wisdom,
then, like a king departing
a conquered land,
or an elephant wandering
alone in the forest,
walk alone.
– Dhammapada 329, Ajahn Munindo
Red is holy. Nobody understands it. It goes on, on, without the world’s understanding. Blue is holy. Blue goes on without the world’s understanding. And the heart…the heart can’t wait. Revolts without understanding. Boom. Goes on. Without the world’s understanding.
– Tennessee Williams
Essentially, you say goodbye to something every day without even realizing it.
– Lev Feuchtwanger
We are not meant to stay wounded. We are supposed to move through our tragedies and challenges and to help each other move through the many painful episodes of our lives. By remaining stuck in the power of our wounds, we block our own transformation. We overlook the greater gifts inherent in our wounds — the strength to overcome them and the lessons that we are meant to receive through them. Wounds are the means through which we enter the hearts of other people. They are meant to teach us to become compassionate and wise.
– Caroline Myss
They will only deserve the name of ‘a human’ and can only count on something prepared for them from Above, who have managed to acquire the necessary data to preserve unscathed the wolf and the lamb that have been entrusted to their care.
– G. I. Gurdjieff
Naturally, if what I say has truth in it, this will already have been dealt with by the world’s poets, but the flashes of insight that come in poetry cannot absolve us from our painful task of getting step by step away from ignorance toward our goal.
– Winnicott
I think the world would be a far calmer and more respectful place if more people were seen reading in public.
– @Kulambq
I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed
– T. S. Eliot
Everything is changing constantly, but the awareness, the fact of being aware of sensations and change, does not change. There is always awareness.
– Douglas Penick
We prefer our personal tragedies, because we’re all cowards and bastards.
– William T. Vollmann, Europe Central
Not only higher forms of life but also many of the smallest insects are social beings who, without any religion, law or education, survive by mutual cooperation based on an innate recognition of their interconnectedness.
– Dalai Lama XIV
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The sage puts himself last and becomes the first, Neglects himself, and is preserved. Is it not because he is unselfish that he fulfills himself?
– Tao Te Ching
Crying as a mode of composition will visit anyone who lives long enough to miss you.
– Laynie Browne
Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it.
– Stephen Levine
Remember: the enemy is the literal, and the literal is not the concrete flesh but negligence of the vision that concrete flesh is a magnificent citadel of metaphors.
– James Hillman
Grand ideas kill first efforts. Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret.
– Louise Erdrich
In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.
– Socrates
Happiness is permanent. It is always there. What comes and goes is unhappiness.
If you identify with what comes and goes, you will be unhappy. If you identify with what is permanent and always there, you are happiness itself.
– Papaji
The lamentable problem that you can’t believe everything you’re told is not solved by merely believing the polar opposite.
– David Mitchell
Who wants to live to be a hundred? What’s the point of it? A short life and a merry one is far better than a long life sustained by fear, caution and perpetual medical surveillance.
– Henry Miller
The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long lived.
– Jacques Derrida
The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days.
– Lao Tzu
I cannot solve your problem by mere words. You have to act on what I told you and persevere. It is not the right advice that liberates, but the action based on it.
– Nisargadatta
Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. Quit evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now.
– Epictetus
Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Eat like you love
yourself. Move like you love
yourself. Speak like you love
yourself. Act like you love
yourself.
– Tara Stiles
The poet always remains true. He endures in the cycle of nature. The philosopher changes within the eternally enduring. The eternally enduring can only be represented in what is changeable. The eternally changeable only in the lasting, whole, present moment. The images of nature are before and after. It alone is reality.
– Novalis, Last Fragments
Faith is, above all, open-ness — an act of trust in the unknown.
– Alan Watts
Know that which has form to be false; that which is formless is eternal.
– Avadhuta Gita
Most people are far too occupied with themselves to be malicious.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
As Jung once put it, we all walk in shoes too small for us. Living within a constricted view of our journey, and identifying with old defensive strategies, we unwittingly become the enemies of our own growth, our own largeness of soul, through our repetitive, history-bound choices.
– James Hollis
So often we are afraid of missing out; but if you allow the World of Honey-Covered Hooks to siphon off your attention, what you will have missed out on is you.
– Frank Inzan Owen
Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.
– Sarah J. Jackson
We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species. The list of its undeniable abominations is long and hardly bearable. And these abominations are not balanced or compensated or atoned for by the list, endlessly reiterated, of our scientific achievements. Some people are moved, now and again, to deplore one abomination or another. Others… deplore the whole list and its causes. Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come.
Protesters who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal.
If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance.
History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use.
Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
– Wendell Berry
Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean ‘ecological’ in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.
– Neil Postman
I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
– James Michener
The fact of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is knowing what to read.
– Jacques Ellul
HOPE ALWAYS COMES EASIER
when it’s morning,
when the birds are already
weaving music through the trees.
Easier when the dew
still shines on the leaves
and the world is warming.
In these ripening moments,
it’s hard to remember,
was it only hours ago,
how darkness poured over you
like oil in the ocean.
How nothing seems possible then.
But here, here is the bright red neck
of morning, humming through the shadows
on emerald wings, and here you are,
rising to meet it, not even
because you want to, but
because something in you rises
and carries you with it into the day.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Sometimes the year looks back, lets out a scream,
Looks back, then passes out appalled.
– Miklós Radnóti
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space…
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
if you’re going to say ‘I lived’…
– Nazim Hikmet
“Get going,” says my conscience.
“But there is a huge river ahead.”
“Don’t worry—there will be a boat when you get there.”
“Get going,” says my conscience.
“But there is a thick wilderness ahead.”
“Just get going—the Divine will make a way.”
“Get going,” says my conscience.
“But there is pitch darkness out there.”
“Not to worry—take a leap in the darkness and the light will shine.”
– Abiodun Fijabi
Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.
– Neil Gaiman
Again, we are daily forced to choose between depression and anxiety. Depression results from the wounding of the individuation imperative; anxiety results from moving forward into the unknown. That path of anxiety is necessary because therein lies the hope of the person to more nearly become an individual. My analyst once said to me, “You must make your fears your agenda.” When we do take on that agenda, for all the anxiety engendered, we feel better because we know we are living in ‘bonne foi’ [good faith] with ourselves. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the perception that some things are more important to us than what we fear.
– James Hollis
Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.
– Cormac McCarthy
I work at a bookstore. Teenager came in daily. Read for hours. Never bought anything. Finally asked. “Looking for anything specific?” “Just reading. Can’t afford books. Library’s far. This is closer.” Let him stay. Read whatever.
Whenever. Brought him snacks. Hot chocolate. Safe space. Learned his story. Foster kid. Seventh home. Books were his escape. His education. His hope.
Started giving him books. “Damaged copies. Can’t sell them. You want?” He knew better. Took them anyway. Read everything. Three years of this. He aged out of foster care. Eighteen. Scared. Nowhere to go. Helped him apply to college. Scholarships. Got in. Full ride. English major. Graduated. He’s a teacher now. High school English. Brings his whole class to
the bookstore. Shows them where he spent his teenage years. “Bookstore worker gave me sanctuary. Knowledge. Hope. Taught me one person caring changes trajectories.” He buys books for students. Who can’t afford them. Pays it forward. Every kid in his class reads. Because someone let a foster kid read for free.
– Paula Simmons, bookstore clerk, Rhode Island
I hope you get old.
I hope time is heavy on your bones, draped over you like an embrace from God.
I hope the backs of your hands become deep maps—
Of all the places you have been.
Dark stains where your fingers dipped into clay and dirt and mud.
I hope you get old. I hope time fills your heart with joy and triumph. I hope you have enough obstacles to teach you character and empathy and enough challenges to bestow you with uniqueness.
I hope pain shows you how strong you are and the value of a true friend.
I hope you’ve been alone enough to know yourself.
I hope you find quiet more than you find chaos.
I hope you get old.
That time wraps around your legs like a desperate lover.
I hope you can look into the faces of people you have loved and cherished
and that you leave behind echos of grief,
Because you were loved in turn.
I hope you give thanks for every waking moment,
For what you have and for what you have not.
I hope you get old.
I hope you make things that last.
I hope you’ve inspired people.
I hope you’ve helped someone.
I hope grace rests at your feet.
I hope.
You forgive everything,
You did.
Not
Get
Quite.
Right.
– Jann Arden
The Sweetest Little Song
by Leonard Cohen
You go your way
I’ll go your way too
Don’t strain after more light than you’ve got yet; just wait quietly. God holds you when you cannot hold Him, and when the time comes to jump, He will see to it that you do jump—and you will find you are not frightened then… So just be supple in His hands and let Him mould you (as He is doing) for His own purposes, responding with very simple acts of trust and love.
– Evelyn Underhill
Go
by Kathleen Ossip
It is a cube, it is red, it is mountainous,
it is a bird of fire, it is the bones of the pelvis, it is a walnut,
it is treasured. It is yellow Saturn wobbling in its orbit.
It is danger, squawking.
It is the desire to sit down with strangers in cafes
and then it is the strangers in cafés,
it is the man with the black T-shirt
labeled UNARMED CIVILIAN and it is the blind man with
him
and his painful trembling.
Always it is oxygen and more oxygen. It is the fight in you
and the fight in you dying. It is the need for water
and the water that falls from the sky.
It is desperate for a theory and it is the acts you call evil
when you know there is no evil only desperation.
It is that bravery, that arrogance, that blindness.
It is the pink morning and your smile in the pink morning.
It is a phantom and the thin neck of a tree it
is a little project called loving the world.
It is howling in the dirt it is an extravaganza.
It’s the abandoned sports bra, in the dirt beside howling you.
It’s the windchimes in the thin-necked tree and
it is tonguetied. It is asleep.
It is waking up now. It is a small cat on the bed.
It is the threads of a leaf and it is the Three Graces:
Splendor, Mirth and Good Cheer.
It is their heartfelt advice:
You can’t let it hurt you.
You must let it hurt you.
It is a careless error and the hotel pool blue with chemistry.
It’s a kiss of course it is a kiss.
It’s an old strange book newly acquired
but not yet catalogued, it is crazy.
It is you, crazy with honesty and crazy with ambition.
It’s the sun that stuns over and over again.
It’s your tablet, which is every tablet everywhere.
It’s an explosion it is every explosion everywhere.
It is pavement, mineral and hot and wet with droplets.
It’s the stars that pitch white needles into the pond.
It is provable, it is a lotion, it is a lie.
It is a baby because everyone is a baby.
It talks to you, always to you, it moves
swiftly, it is stuck, it moves swiftly, it is stuck, it moves
swiftly. It’s the impenetrable truth, now clear as ice.
It is serious, it is irreversible, it is going, going.
It is flying now laughing strong enough to know anything.
Forget about your bodymind phenomena. Just observe your body, but never react to it. Observe the world, but never react to it. Observe your thoughts, but never react to them. Allow whatever happens to happen.
– Robert Adams
Observe the arrow on the Parker ballpoint pen. One must write poems that enter easily but are difficult to pull out, like arrows.
– Lee Seong-bok
Our virtues are, most often, only vices disguised.
– La Rochefoucauld
When you encounter a difficulty in your life, an impasse, solve it. If you can solve it, it’s good. If you can’t solve it, it’s still good, as it’s no longer your problem if you can’t solve it.
– Guo Gu
chasing novelty
is drinking from a river
that never quenches
– @BashoSociety
Addiction to novelty as a source of dopamine is a dangerous game.
– Karen Neverland
Wisdom, like genius, is rooted not in the abstract and discursive, but in the intuitive and perceptive faculty. It does not consist in sentences and thoughts one carries ready-made in his head; rather, it is the whole way the world represents itself to him.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
People do not see that the main question is not: “Am I loved?” which is to a large extent the question: “Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired?” The main question is: “Can I love?”
– Erich Fromm
When I see hunger, cold, and degradation, I understand that this is a crime, not committed once but constantly.
– Leo Tolstoy
When you know you’ve hit the right notes, you just sit there and read the same paragraphs over and over and over again.
– Edward P. Jones
Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth.
– Deleuze and Guattari
Giving up spontaneity and individuality results in a thwarting of life. Psychologically the automaton, while being alive biologically, is dead emotionally and mentally. … Behind a front of satisfaction and optimism modern man is deeply unhappy; as a matter of fact, he is on the verge of desperation.
– Erich Fromm
What a joy it is that life has no point! That means I can grant it one…
– Constantin Noica
If any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone. For God hath made all men to enjoy felicity and constancy of good.
– Epictetus
we don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.
– Charles Bukowski
You want immediate results! We do not dispense magic here. Everybody makes the same mistake: refusing the means, but wanting the ends. You want peace and harmony in the world, but refuse to have them in yourself.
– Nisargadatta
We’re so captive to the moment, we lose sight of what extends beyond all moments. Which means losing touch of what matters, what lasts and what will sustain us in the long run.
– Pico Iyer
I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.
– Michel Foucault
Because school is not important. Work is not important. Nothing is more important than stopping fascism. Because fascism will stop us all.
– Fred Hampton
I’m not sure we have had a truly transgressive piece of art in several decades. We have had art that transgresses the mores of several decades ago, for sure. But when it comes to the sacred cows of the here and now, I think artists are timid, afraid, and divert their energies.
– Bernard T. Joy
I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.
– Franz Fanon
Flicker
What a small flicker is given
To each of us to know.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
You go around all day guarding the flicker
you found again that morning. Cupping a hand
to protect it from wind, holding it close
to the chest, so no wayward breath blows it out.
This flame, shaky and uncertain, is how you
light the rooms behind your eyes that no one
has ever seen. The wick may be frayed,
and the wax will last for just an hour or two
at best, but it is enough. It will always be
enough to look into the eyes of another
and pass the flicker on to them.
– James Crews
Literature is expansive. Reading it opens you to moral and intellectual spaces you could not easily have imagined. It ripples the clearest water.
If the ideologies by which you see the world are brittle or narrow you cannot say you’ve read literature until it shatters them.
– Bernard T. Joy
Why must the gate be narrow? Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened. To come in among these trees you must leave behind the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
– Wendell Berry
Commonsense, it may be said with some certainty, is always transcendental. It depends upon a certain large grasp of the actual state of the facts, strong enough to resist all of the thousand wiles and sophistries of argument and verbal misrepresentation.
– G. K. Chesterton
All that needs doing can be done in peace and silence. There is no need to get upset.
– Nisargadatta
If you can smuggle all your 3 A.M. self into your 3 P.M.’S you’re an artist.
– Darby Hudson
One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.
– C. S. Lewis
Cry if you have to, you might be harboring a silent storm.
– Goitsemang Mvula
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
– William Blake
When one setteth about righting a wrong, one driveth not full head against it, for in so doing one getteth naught but hard knocks. Nay, go deftly about it, and then, when the time is ripe, strike the blow.
– Sir James (Howard Pyle, Men of Iron)
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water.
When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown.
Instead you relax, and float.
– Alan Watts
The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, ‘Create silence’.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.
– Giacomo Leopardi
To accuse others for one’s own misfortune is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.
– Epictetus
Gratitude is seeing how someone changed your heart and quality of life, helped you become the good parts of the person you are.
– Anne Lamott
There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We’ll dream of being blind.
– Paul Virilio
The fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Serenity can only be attained by a desperate mind, and to be desperate one must have lived a lot and still love the world.
– Blaise Cendrars
Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize.
– Haruki Murakami
Buster
can you turn the sound down,
she says, just before the
silent movie begins
– Alec Finlay
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true
– Dylan Thomas
What the Goddess dismantles
is certainty.
What she protects is truth.
– Matt Licata
So long as the mind is split, life is perpetual conflict, tension, frustration, and disillusion. Suffering is piled on suffering, fear on fear, and boredom on boredom… But the undivided mind is free from this tension of trying always to stand outside oneself and to be elsewhere than here and now. Each moment is lived completely, and there is thus a sense of fulfillment and completeness.
– Alan Watts
Don’t tell me what you believe. Show me how you treat other people, and I’ll tell you what you believe.
– James Talarico
In between is where humans always are—that’s what we have to welcome, a story with an uncertain ending. And this condition is interesting if you inhabit it; it’s alive.
If I’m facing something that I don’t know how to do, the not knowing is what is true and the resources I have, deeply ignorant as I am, will have to be enough.
– John Tarrant
Then, all at once, I felt how great and how small I was; then did those two mighty forces, pride and humility, happily unite …
– Søren Kierkegaard
Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air–moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh–felt as if it were being exhaled into one’s face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze. It was aphrodisiac and repressive, soft and violent at the same time. In New Orleans, in the French Quarter, miles from the barking lungs of alligators, the air maintained this quality of breath, although here it acquired a tinge of metallic halitosis, due to fumes expelled by tourist buses, trucks delivering Dixie beer, and, on Decatur Street, a mass-transit motor coach named Desire.
– Tom Robbins
In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home.
It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard.
I walked the streets, savoring that long lost perfume.
– Anne Rice
The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha thought, not edifying. One must immerse oneself into the river of life and let the question drift away.
– Irvin Yalom
I don’t think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don’t take the toys out of their hands, we’re fools.
– Ray Bradbury
The paradox of our practice is that the most effective way of transformation is to leave ourselves alone. The more we let everything be just what it is, the more we relax into an open, attentive awareness of one moment after another.
– Barry Magid
He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old Chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.
– Cormac McCarthy
This is not kind of like what the Nazis did.
This is precisely what the Nazis did.
– Fran Lebowitz, 2026
I heard a courageous man
A poet and a man of vision
who spoke of change
and its frustrations
in a voice of reason
of keeping hope alive
and of a rainbow coalition
on our way back home…
– Aztec Two-Step
Pancake Poem
I wrote a pancake poem.
Instead of eggs, I used some nouns.
Poured in verbs in place of milk.
Added adjectives for flour.
I whisked the words together,
and cooked them golden brown.
I tossed my poem in the air;
it landed upside down.
– Brian Bilston
WORDS FOR THE ROAD
Know, now, there is no one
who can guide you.
Know there will be nothing
to return to.
Know, now, that the trial
will be long.
Come, then. You were called to this,
this wild life.
Go in
and lie down in the darkness.
Hear them now, the wild flocks
in the starlight,
thrashing in the vastness of their passing?
If you cannot have a home, become a song.
– Joseph Fasano
We need poetry to keep expanding so that it can account for the actual lives that people are living.
– Edward Hirsch
Don’t bother with churches, government buildings or city squares; if you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars.
– Ernest Hemingway
Poetry necessitates that we slow down, deepen our attention, practice care with language and with each other; poetry is an essential language…and it affirms our shared humanity.
– Arthur Sze
The World Is Too Much With Us
by William Wordsworth
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
In the smokiest city the poet will transport us, as if by enchantment, to the fresh air and bright sun, to the murmur of woods and leaves and water, to the ripple of waves upon sand, and enable us, as in some delightful dream, to cast off the cares and troubles of life.
– John Lubbock
Only those who never think are happy, those who limit themselves to what is strictly necessary to survive. True thought resembles a demon that disturbs the origins of life, a disease that attacks its very roots and leaves man face to face with the vertigo of his own lucidity.
– Emil Cioran
Consciousness is the screen on which all the pictures come and go.
The screen is real, but the pictures are mere shadows on it.
– Ramana Maharshi
I like the weight I like the lilt, I like the scene. I don’t like the s here but don’t mind it there. I like the noun to situate hue. A gourd is gourd-colored. It’s extra if its sound value complements its substance, say, for example, hock.
– C. D. Wright
the ego cannot be a vessel for the influx of grace until it has been emptied of its own inflated fullness; and this emptying occurs only through the experience of alienation.
– Edward Edinger
The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt.
– Carl Jung
Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
– Nassim Taleb
It is tragic to see how often a man shamelessly entangles his own life, and the lives of others, while remaining completely incapable of seeing how much of the whole tragedy originates from himself, and how he himself constantly nourishes and maintains it.
– C.G. Jung
Sensual pleasure passes and vanishes, but the friendship between us, the mutual confidence, the delight of the heart, the enchantment of the soul, these things do not perish and can never be destroyed.
– Voltaire
The mania for health and optimization is a reflexive response to the lack of being. We try to compensate for the absence of being by extending bare life, and in doing so we become desensitized to life’s intensity. We confuse it with increased production, performance and consumption, but these are merely forms of survival.
– Byung-Chul Han
We know perfectly well that neither love nor peace of mind can be bought with any currency.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
The psychic energy required and used in writing a poem is also a secret. Where did it come from? How did it get here and where is it going?
– Mary Ruefle
The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.
– Deleuze
Also, it was one of those days when you do something, it works out, and then you wish that you’d known in advance that it was going to work, so you could have enjoyed it while it was happening.
– Julian Cope
Every time a man gives way to vanity, every time he thinks and lives in order to show off, this is a betrayal. We do not need to reveal ourselves to others, but only to those we love. For then we are no longer revealing ourselves in order to seem but in order to give.
– Albert Camus
The wind is rising! … We must try to live!
– Paul Valéry
The Buddha says, ideally, you want to make your mind like a broken gong. People can hit it, but there’s no reverberation.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Virtues lose themselves in self-interest, as rivers lose themselves in the sea.
– La Rochefoucauld
Through this hole
at the bottom of the cavern
of death, the imagination
escapes intact.
– William Carlos Williams
What are we and what could we be? What forms of new subjectivity can we create that will not originate in subjection?
– Foucault
We take that which is unreal to be real and that which is real to be unreal.
– Rupert Spira
Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run best contribution we can do to our fellow man.
– Rollo May
What is meaning? I don’t know, but I may know what its opposite is: thinking that nothingness is easy to bear.
– Mahmoud Darwish
‘Lead us not into temptation’ often means, among other things, ‘Deny me those gratifying invitations, those highly interesting contacts, that participation in the brilliant movements of our age, which I so often, at such risk, desire.’
– C.S. Lewis
Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.
– C. D. Wright
Translation is the circulatory system of the world’s literatures.
– Susan Sontag
[Our public discourse] is very impoverished […]. We don’t expect [politicians] have contact with literature, with history, with the richness of descriptive language that the humanities have always stood for. I think that’s a great loss.
– Martha Nussbaum
Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home…To be a member of one’s community is to share in its myths….
– Rollo May
The first effect of not believing in God, is that you lose your common sense.
– G. K. Chesterton
What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.
– Dostoevsky
Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target, as far as which others cannot even see.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The wheel of time
Turns everything to dust
Root yourself
In the eternal and unchanging.
– @KavijiPoet
I became a psychotherapist because that’s where people will unburden themselves, where they will show what is in their hearts.
– Rollo May
The train whistle makes us see the train, the footstep in the hall reminds us of the family relative. The oranges bring back the breakfast room.
– Delmore Schwartz
Meditation must be continuous. The current of meditation must be present in all your activities.
– Annamalai Swami
Experiment, meditate, and be constantly in touch with things which disturb you. One day nothing will be disturbing, and that will be the day of great rejoicing.
– Osho
Love a river girl. Spend your truth. The grass which hides your love’s gold will never know frost.
– René Char (tr. Nancy Kline)
Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.
– Roger Scruton
When you understand the inside, the outside will be just fine. Get inside the music and listen…
– Thelonious Monk
When an illness is part of your spiritual journey, no medical intervention can heal you until your spirit has begun to make the changes that the illness was designed to inspire.
– Caroline Myss
You are enjoined to pay attention to what’s coming into your mind and to say it out loud.
– Benjamin Y. Fong interview with Jonathan Lear
Change is not merely necessary to life – it is life.
– Alvin Toffler
Explaining poetry is like trying to explain a perfume.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
I entered Paris, which I found worse than ugly, a real insult to my suffering, with a single idea in my head: not to be found out.
– Stendhal
I have read many books but forgot most of them. What remains is a kind of mood, a vague memory of the feeling rather than the facts.
– George Orwell
Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
– Albert Camus
Can I realize that if I were not loved, and if love were not the gift I had to bring, I wouldn’t be here on earth? It is love that brings me here, not karma, not past patterns to work out, but love and the fact that I have love to give.
– David Spangler
This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.
– Anais Nin
Are you a reader? If you aren’t a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
– Wallace Stegner
Remarkable acts of art-making — bold, perverse, unbeholden, free — have had the side effect of changing the weather in a country, in a people, at a certain historical moment, and finally in me, conferring freedoms for which I am now very grateful.
– Zadie Smith, The I Who Is Not Me
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
– Horace Mann
I don’t think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
– J. M. Coetzee
Today when I wake up I stay put. I don’t go to the bathroom to weigh myself or to the kitchen to drink a glass of tepid water before preparing the coffeepot. The city doesn’t beckon or lend me a shoulder today. Maybe it knows I’m about to leave.
– Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts
I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one; One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.
– Rumi
Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.
– Blaise Pascal
The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites—day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other…Life is a battlefield. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.
– CG Jung
Pseudoscience differs from erroneous science. Science thrives on errors, cutting them away one by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypothesis is disproved, but such disproof are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise.
Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced.
– Carl Sagan
Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.
– Confucius
In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.
– Louis Pasteur
There are a thousand ways to tell a story, and how you tell it can be just as important as what you tell.
– Jane Warren
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
– Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I am working on counterpoisons… I create a space in which people can breathe, restore their faith and strength to live.
– Anais Nin
The most important part of education — to teach the meaning of to know.
– Simone Weil
It was one of those days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.
– Charles Dickens
Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward from the Highland hills.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
MUM IS THE WORD
The League of Quiet Persons meets
monthly. Its quarters are a cavernous
warehouse away from traffic. Its
business is not to discuss business.
Minutes are read silently and tacitly approved.
Members listen to rain argue with corrugated
iron, a furnace with itself. Glances
are learned. It is not so much refuge
from noise the members seek in such company
as implicit permission not to speak,
not to answer or to answer for,
not to pose, chat, persuade, or expound.
Podium and gavel have been banned,
indeed are viewed as weaponry.
A microphone? The horror.
Several Quiet Persons interviewed
had no comment. A recorded voice
at the main office murmured only, “You
have reached the League of Quiet
Persons. After the tone, listen.”
– Hans Ostrom
Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.
– Toni Morrison
Meaning
When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add Up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.
– And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
– Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.
– Czeslaw Milosz
You have a $75,000 degree you never used. You’re not the only one.
Approximately 52% of recent four-year college graduates are underemployed. 61% of individuals with master’s degrees are underemployed two years after graduation.
She has a degree in anthropology, four years of coursework and fieldwork and late nights in the library, $72,000 in loans, and a story she stopped telling. Graduated with honors in 2021, walked across the stage in a polyester gown, believed the promises they made about what came next.
She cleans teeth now, $24 an hour, and she is good at it. Her patients like her.
A patient asks what she studied. The pause lasts two seconds, long enough to decide. “General studies,” she says, arranging instruments on the tray. The patient nods, satisfied. She scrapes plaque from a molar. She has this conversation once a month, and the lie comes easier each time.
She applied to 180 positions, museum curator and research assistant and grant writer and cultural consultant, kept a spreadsheet, color-coded the rejections.
The rejection emails stopped feeling personal around number sixty. By one hundred she stopped reading them. By one-forty she stopped applying.
That was three years ago. She closed the laptop, the spreadsheet still open with its 180 rows and color-coded rejections and formulas calculating her odds. She hasn’t opened it since.
The degree sits in a box in her closet now, cardboard warping in the damp. She took it down last year, couldn’t stand seeing it.
Physics majors working restaurant lines. Film school graduates driving Uber. Music masters who gave up and do accounting now. Teachers at Target, screenwriters who stopped trying, people told they are overqualified and underqualified at the same time.
They all did what they were told. They all have the degrees. They all applied.
They all tried.
If your degree is worthless, then who sold it to you?
In 1958 a British sociologist named Michael Young published a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy, a satire, a dystopian warning.
Young wrote it as if it were a thesis from the year 2034, looking back at how society had sorted people by merit, by test scores and credentials and achievement. In his imagined future the smart ones had risen and the rest had stayed down, and because the system looked fair, inequality had become permanent. No one could complain. After all, you had been given your shot. You just were not good enough.
The elites controlled everything and justified it by denying they controlled anything at all. Merit, not power, had chosen them.
Young set his satire in 2034. We are living it eight years early.
He meant it as warning. They read it as blueprint. By 1980 they were calling it progress.
By the 1960s American policymakers were using “meritocracy” unironically. By the 1980s it was doctrine. The joke became the ideology, the satire became the blueprint.
Now imagine yourself in that future Young warned about. You are eighteen, told to go to college or be left behind, get educated or stay poor, work hard and get qualified and the system will reward you.
So you go. You borrow. You study. You graduate. You did everything right.
And then you cannot find work, because there are more qualified people than jobs requiring qualifications. They produced too many of you.
But when you cannot find work, who gets blamed?
You do.
Should have picked STEM, should have networked better, should have been smarter.
The shame does the work force used to do.
Seventeen percent of Americans held bachelor’s degrees in 1980.
Then came 2008 and President Barack Obama’s explicit goal: by 2020, America would claim the highest proportion of college graduates worldwide. “We used to have the highest proportion of college graduates,” he said. “We now rank ninth. That’s not acceptable.”
What the policy did not mention, what Obama’s education secretary never addressed in those soaring speeches about opportunity, was that we were simultaneously offshoring white-collar jobs, automating knowledge work, consolidating industries. Fewer companies meant fewer positions. And states were cutting funding for public universities by thirty percent per student while enrollment grew.
The message was clear, more degrees, though the infrastructure made them expensive and the job market did not expand to match.
Degree attainment more than doubled, rising from seventeen percent in 1980 to thirty-eight percent today.
Did the number of jobs requiring degrees double?
No.
Did wages for college graduates double?
No. Adjusted for inflation, wages for college graduates have been flat since 2000.
Did the politicians who pushed enrollment explain what happens when supply exceeds demand?
No.
Did the universities who charged $72,000 warn their students?
No.
What did happen?
Credential inflation.
In 2014 a company called Burning Glass Technologies analyzed twenty-five million job postings. What they found was remarkable.
Sixty-seven percent of Production Supervisor postings required a college degree, though only sixteen percent of current Production Supervisors actually had one.
Sixty-five percent of Executive Secretary postings required a bachelor’s degree, though only nineteen percent of current Executive Secretaries had one.
The jobs had not changed. The requirements had.
A hiring manager opens the applicant tracking system. Two hundred seventeen applications for one Production Supervisor position, all of them qualified, all of them desperate. She adds a filter, Bachelor’s degree required, and the number drops to seventy-three. Still too many but manageable now. She doesn’t call it credential inflation. She calls it having options. The degree requirement has nothing to do with the work and everything to do with leverage. Two hundred seventeen people competing makes them grateful for $24 an hour.
When everyone has a degree, when the credential that once signaled exceptional becomes the baseline that signals nothing, employers can demand degrees for work that never needed them. The work did not become more complex. Employers demand it because they can.
Flood the market with qualified workers. Wages fall, power shifts, people accept worse conditions because they are competing against each other.
The same logic as agricultural overproduction keeping food prices low. Except it is human capital.
Nobody needed to conspire. The incentives were already aligned. Politicians wanted to say “more Americans than ever have degrees.” Universities wanted enrollment growth. Banks wanted loan customers. Employers wanted overqualified workers at entry-level wages.
Eight percent of all Americans are working jobs that do not require the degrees they paid for, and that number is rising. One point eight million Americans have been job searching for more than six months.
They did not create the oversupply by accident. They created it by policy.
They produced her perfectly, educated enough to be useful, desperate enough to comply, ashamed enough to blame herself.
She still checks LinkedIn, three times a day, four on weekends. She still believes that if she just tries harder, finds the right connection, proves herself one more time, the promise will finally work.
That belief keeps her applying. She blames herself, keeps trying, never stops.
When you flood the market with qualified workers, wages fall, requirements inflate, power shifts. The worker blames herself.
Why pay more when a hundred qualified applicants are competing for the same job?
Why not demand a bachelor’s for work a high school graduate used to do? You can.
Workers take what they can get, grateful just to be hired. They do not negotiate. They do not organize. They are too busy competing.
And when they cannot find work they blame themselves. Should have picked a better major, should have networked, should have been smarter.
They created the oversupply. The worker absorbed the shame.
This is how you build a compliant workforce without force. You convince people their desperation is their fault, tell them the system is fair, let their failure prove they were not good enough.
You make the meritocracy look real.
Maybe you read this and think anthropology, of course she cannot find work, should have picked something practical.
That voice, the one that says her failure proves her choices were bad, is what keeps this running.
Because if her failure is not her fault, then whose is it?
Who pushed college enrollment while offshoring jobs? Who charged $72,000 while cutting education funding by thirty percent? Who demands degrees for work that does not need them? Who told an entire generation the path to security required debt, then produced more degrees than jobs?
If she did not fail, then they lied.
And the system you believe in does not exist.
The receipts are public. The mechanism is documented.
Degree attainment more than doubled. Jobs did not double. Wages did not double. What doubled was the number of people convinced their inability to find work was personal failure instead of structural design.
The shame. That’s what keeps this running.
Opportunity survives as a word. It still appears in speeches and campaign ads.
Belief is what breaks, belief that working hard matters, that credentials mean something, that the system rewards merit instead of extracting it.
Michael Young tried to warn us in 1958. He wrote a satire about a society that sorted people by credentials and called it fair, a society where inequality became moral verdict, where your failure proved you deserved to fail.
The elites read his warning and adopted it as policy. And now millions of people with degrees work jobs that do not require them, convinced the problem is their choices, not the machine that produced them.
She keeps the box on the top shelf of her closet, behind the winter coats she rarely wears. Sometimes she forgets it’s there. Most days she remembers.
The degree sits inside, cardboard warping in the damp, the seal softening where moisture has worked through. Seventy-two thousand dollars to learn what a British sociologist tried to warn about seventy years ago. The system would create the appearance of fairness while engineering permanent desperation. Credentials would become traps instead of tickets. Meritocracy would be the lie that made inequality feel earned.
Tonight she will clean teeth. Tomorrow she will check LinkedIn out of habit, close it without looking.
She stopped applying three months ago.
The box stays on the shelf. The system already got what it needed from her.
– Jermaine Fowler
Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.
– Mary Oliver
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
– T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
The wilderness will lead you to your heart where I will speak. Integrity and justice with tenderness you shall know.
– Ash Wednesday reflection from Hosea
Remember that Lent and Ash Wednesday are not just about putting away the bad things. It is more about creating good things and helping the poor and the needy, being kind to people, and much more.
– Jacob Winters
Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.
– Alexander Calder
Many ‘primitive’ peoples … believe that almost every normal adult has the ability to go into a trance state and be possessed by a god; the adult who cannot do this is a psychological cripple.
– Robert O. Becker and Gary Selden
Feldenkrais called attention to the fact that all negative emotional expressions are accompanied by a shortening of flexor muscles. Therefore, about the time that someone gets overly interested in negative emotion, he begins to get chronic shortening of he flexor muscles. The energy in a chronically flexed body has to work just to hold it up; the man continuously has to add energy to that body to keep it going. Such chronic flexion gives a feeling of tiredness, of “depression.”
– Ida Rolf
Silence, the contemplative knows, is that place just before the voice of God. It is the void in which God and I meet in the center of my soul. It is the cave through which the soul must travel, clearing out the dissonance of life as we go, so that the God who is waiting there for us to notice, can fill us. A day without silence is a day without the presence of the self.
The pressure and pull of a noisy day denies us the comfort of God. It is a day in which we are buffeted by the world around us and left at the mercy of the clatter and jangle of our own hearts. To be a contemplative we must put down the cacophony of the world around us and go inside ourselves to wait for the God who is a whisper not a storm.
Silence not only gives us the God who is stillness but, just as importantly, it teaches the public self of us what to speak. Then we finally understand what Abba Isidore meant when he said: “Living without speaking, is better than speaking without living…if, however, words and life go hand in hand, ah, that is the perfection of life.
– Joan Chittister
THE WORLD HAS NEED OF YOU
everything here
seems to need us
– Rainer Maria Rilke
I can hardly imagine it
as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient
prayer of my arms swinging
in counterpoint to my feet.
Here I am, suspended
between the sidewalk and twilight,
the sky dimming so fast it seems alive.
What if you felt the invisible
tug between you and everything?
A boy on a bicycle rides by,
his white shirt open, flaring
behind him like wings.
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little. Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple as well.
– Ellen Bass
The history of the universe…is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a Demon.
– Jorge Luis Borges
The day was returning, and with it the sense of life and light which had been so long absent from the world.
– Elizabeth Gaskell
Paul on the Road to Damascus
for Ash Wednesday
Say you get a second chance.
Say your life had crumbled
into rubble, the cold hands of ghosts
upon your shoulders.
Say, at last, you’d let the dark
be dark.
I tell you
you will fall down, once, in wonder.
It’s your choice
what you do with all that ruin.
I broke. I broke. I opened.
And you there, you there
in this coldness, be still, be still
and give in
Listen. I tell you
you can do this:
In the darkness, in the tatters
of your madness,
you can still go out through the moonlight
and be with it, just be
with all that falling
when the dark departs
and the stars lift up their fires
and they tell you, with the blazing
of their changes, that you will, that you will survive
your childhood, and that someone near
is on their way
to find you—a luck, a love, a wonder-
you there with your hands, your
fast, your ashes,
and what will you do, in those ruins,
what will you do when the moment comes
with the miraculous afterlife you are?
– Joseph Fasano
If this country was truly “pro-life,” we would have Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, gun reform, universal child care, paid sick leave, and a living wage.
– Robert Reich
Jung was not concerned with repairing broken lives to fit into an insane social order, but had to reverse the directions of psychiatry and argue that society was mad and, as such, individual madness is to be expected as a product of a more general madness.
– David Tacey
Still
by A. R. Ammons
I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I’ll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:
but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is
magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:
I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up
and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:
I whirled through transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:
at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!
Democracy depends upon being able to think clearly. Thinking depends almost entirely on memory. And if you have not read and remembered the very best that has been said, thought, written, you will never be able to think. And democracy becomes impossible.
– Harold Bloom
Humankind is bound to suffering—
for from suffering, every treasure emerges.
– Saadi Shirazi
The doubt, like the mosquito, buzzes round my faith. We are all human, Mary, until we are divine, and to some of us, that is far off, and to some as near as the lady ringing at the door…
– Emily Dickinson
The point is to think with your subject’s mind. It’s espionage in a way.
– Stacy Schiff
Every being is more than itself… All things are related to a reality above & beyond themselves; from this reference alone can they be perfected and carried to fulfillment. Failing this reference to the other, all things, all orders of reality become empty shells.
– Roman Guardini
Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.
– Rollo May
Abundance of knowledge does not teach men to be wise.
– Heraclitus
There is a divine source, a powerful force, a perfect order that controls everything. When you recognize it, acknowledge it and surrender to it, you won’t have to struggle to solve problems.
– Iyanla Vanzant
Imagination is not fantasy… Imagination is a quasi-divine faculty that perceives… the intimate and secret relationships of things, their correspondences and analogies.
– Charles Baudelaire
There is but one way to tranquility of mind and happiness, and that is to account no external things thine own, but to commit all to God.
– Epictetus
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.
– Kurt Vonnegut
You may go where you like; you will never taste supreme peace except through perfect quiescence. Hence abandon all hopes and sense-desires.
– Yoga Vasishta
To be psychologically free is to be confident in our own inner world, responsible for our own strengths and weaknesses, consciously loving ourselves and, therefore, able to love others. Dreams guide us in that direction, however crooked the path may be.
– Marion Woodman
…nurturing an Eden from which I was already exiling myself. After I had left for good, all I really needed to do was to describe the place exactly as it had been. That I could not do, for that was impossible. And that is where poetry might begin.
– Larry Levis, On Hometowns
Is it possible for the mind to be totally free from the vast tradition of centuries?
– Krishnamurti
I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It’s all a question of how I view my life.
– Paulo Coelho
You’re only making a mess by trying to put things straight.
You’re trying to straighten out a wiggly world and no wonder you’re in trouble.
– Alan Watts
If we never work with uncomfort, we can never transform.
– Scott Tusa
Modern man’s restless inner division, the tormenting chaos he has built up between his desires and capabilities, driving him into self-destruction, arose from a distortion of his inherent nature, caused by a fundamental misunderstanding of what society truly is.
– Richard Wagner
I live in a kind of tension between the will to say yes to my suffering, and my inability to utter this yes with complete sincerity.
– Karl Jaspers
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
– Rollo May
Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.
– Paulo Coelho
Only useless things are indispensable.
– Francis Picabia
According to Shantideva, the more we appreciate the complexity of a situation, the less extreme our views and emotions will be.
– Allison Aitken
It’s good to leave each day behind, like flowing water, free of sadness. Yesterday is gone and its tale told. Today new seeds are growing.
– Rumi
It didn’t make much sense for me to start writing. My financial circumstances weren’t such that I could afford to be a writer. I didn’t even have a pen.
– Imre Kertész
The easiest and noblest way is not to be crushing others, but to be improving yourselves.
– Socrates
The bubbles of water and the flames of fire are nothing but the mind. The flowers of the spring and the moon of the autumn are nothing but the mind. Confusions and dangers are nothing but the mind.
– Dogen
You come here to be enlightened. Life is a process of enlightenment. If you live it truly, Buddhahood is bound to happen. It is not some accident; you carry the seed within you. Just give the right soil and the seed will sprout, and a Buddha will flower in you.
– Osho
It is time for us to turn to each other, not on each other.
– Jesse Jackson
In memorizing the poems I loved, I “ate” them in a way. I breathed as the poet breathed to recite the words: someone else’s suffering and passion enters your body to transform you, partly by joining you to others in a saving circle.
– Mary Karr
Your mind is never totally contaminated by your neurosis. Goodness is always there.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I don’t need a friend who changes
when I change and who nods
when I nod; my shadow does that
much better.
– Plutarch
Approach it like a wild deer you would do anything not to startle. If all else fails, approach writing by not approaching it at all,
– Polly Atkin
Those who see worldly life as an obstacle to Dharma see no Dharma in everyday actions… They have not yet discovered that there are no everyday actions outside of Dharma.
– Dogen Zenji
I get angry about things,
then go on and work.
– Toni Morrison
You change the world by being yourself.
– Yoko Ono
Much of life is discovering who you are.
– P.S. Baber
My greatest asset is that I am constantly evolving.
– Jane Fonda
Sometimes I envy the dead poets,
they no longer have “bad days,” they don’t know
“ennui,” they’ve parted ways with “vacancy,”
“rhetoric,” rain, low pressure zones,
they’ve stopped following the “astute reviews,”
yet still keep speaking to us.
Their doubts vanished with them,
their rapture lives.
– Adam Zagajewski
The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.
– Adam Smith
When asked, Who is the rich man? Epictetus replied, ‘He who is content.’
A city is not adorned by external things, but by the virtue of those who dwell in it.
– Epictetus
None of us knows what might happen even the next minute, yet still we go forward. Because we trust. Because we have faith.
– Paulo Coelho
There are many people who arrive at conclusions in life much the way schoolboys do; they cheat their teachers by copying the answer book without having worked the problem themselves.
– Søren Kierkegaard