Journal XXXV

STRONG AND SOFT

All too often our so-called strength comes from fear, not love. Instead of having a strong back, many of us have a defended front, shielding a weak spine. In other words, we walk around brittle and defensive, trying to conceal our lack of confidence. If we strengthen our backs, metaphorically speaking, and develop a spine that’s flexible but sturdy, then we can risk having a front that’s soft and open.

How can we give and accept care with strong back, soft front, compassion, moving past fear to a place of genuine tenderness? I believe it comes when we can be truly transparent, seeing the world clearly and letting the world see into us.

– Joan Halifax

EARLY SPRING

We began as mineral.
We emerged into plant life and
into the animal state,
then to being human.

And always we have
forgotten our former states,
except in early spring,
when we dimly recall
being green again.

– Rumi

I emphasise the teaching that the Dhamma is opanayiko – to be brought inside oneself – so that the mind knows, understands and experiences the results of the training within itself. If people say you are meditating correctly, don’t be too quick to believe them, and similarly, if they say you’re doing it wrong, don’t just accept what they say until you’ve really practised and found out for yourself. Even if they instruct you in the correct way that leads to enlightenment, this is still just other people’s words; you have to take their teachings and apply them until you experience results for yourself right here in the present. That means you must become your own witness, able to confirm the results from within your own mind.

It’s like the example of the sour fruit. Imagine I told you that a certain fruit tasted sour and invited you to try some of it. You would have to take a bite from it to taste the sourness. Some people would willingly take my word for it if I told them the fruit was sour, but if they simply believed that it was sour without ever tasting it, that belief would be useless (mogha), it wouldn’t have any real value or meaning. If you described the fruit as sour, it would be merely going by my perception of it. Only that. The Buddha didn’t praise such belief. But then you shouldn’t just dismiss it either: investigate it. You must try tasting the fruit for yourself, and by actually experiencing the sour taste, you become your own internal witness. Somebody says it’s sour, so you take it away and, by eating it, find out that it really is sour. It’s like you’re making double sure – relying on your own experience as well as what other people say. This way you can really have confidence in the authenticity of its sour taste; you have a witness who attests to the truth.

– Ajahn Chah

Your Blinded Hand

Suppose that
everything that greens and grows
should blacken in one moment, flower and branch.
I think that I would find your blinded hand.
Suppose that your hand and mine were lost among numberless cries
in a city of fire when the earth is afire,
I must still believe that I would find your blinded hand.
Through flames everywhere
consuming earth and air
I must believe that somehow, if only one moment were offered,
I would find your hand.
I know as, of course, you know
the immeasurable wilderness that would exist
in the moment of fire.
But I would hear your cry and you’d hear mine
and each of us
would find
the other’s hand.
We know
that it might not be so.
But for this quiet moment, if only for this
moment
and against all reason
let us believe, and believe in our hearts,
that somehow it would be so.
I’d hear your cry, you mine –
And each of us would find a blinded hand.

– Tennessee Williams

Everything has a hidden face. Hidden, not in the sense that it is intentionally concealed, but in that it can only be seen with different eyes than the physical. A different mode of perception must be used. The hidden face of Nature can only be seen with the heart. …

Everything we encounter in the wildness of the world gives off its own electromagnetic pulse of communication. These waveforms are filled with meanings, living communications that touch us and that we experience as feelings.

– Stephen Harrod Buhner

We cannot control our life. If we are set upon doing so, we have abdicated from peace, which must balance what is desired with what is possible. As Hokusai shows so memorably, the great wave is in waiting for any boat. It is unpredictable, as uncontrollable now as it was at the dawn of time. Will the slender boats survive or will they be overwhelmed? The risk is a human constant; it has to be accepted — and laid aside. What we can do, we do. Beyond that, we endure, our endurance framed by a sense of what matters and what does not. The worst is not that we may be overwhelmed by disaster, but to fail to live by principle. Yet we are fallible, and so the real worst, the antithesis of peace, is to refuse to recognize failure and humbly begin again.

– Sister Wendy Beckett

Sometimes I realize that if writing isn’t, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing.
– Marguerite Duras

What I know at sixty, I knew just as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous labor of verification…
– Emil Cioran

Oblivion is not to be hired: The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the Register of God, not in the record of man.
– Sir Thomas Browne

Like any bad woman,
I only like the beginning of things.
– Eloise Amezcua

…on Christianity and the Judaic… [Nietzsche] was very original. He saw the truth. But he was hostile to it… If you read Nietzsche, you cannot deny that he preached violence. … Nietzsche is both very great and very dreadful.
– René Girard

All individuals seeking Reality go toward the heart, and from the heart, toward the stars.
– Manly P. Hall

I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
– J.D. Salinger

You are reborn
With the roses, in every spring.
– Juan Ramón Jiménez

I have survived, but I have not been spared.
– Catherynne M. Valente

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
– Kahlil Gibran

That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul.
– Wassily Kandinsky

Nothing will beautify your life and the life of others like establishing kindness as a habit.
– Leo Tolstoy

Inside, we are ageless and when we talk to ourselves, it’s the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little. It’s the body that is changing around that ageless center.
– David Lynch

Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.
– Jules Verne

To end something completely —
a belief, attachment, image
without residue, is to
discover extraordinary freedom.

– Jiddu Krishnamurti

The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one’s intellect to know it better.
– Emile Zola

Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

It is regrettable that people think about our monetary system, and of our economic structure, only in times of depression.
– Henry Ford

How many men crowd toward the light not to see better, but to shine better.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

In my childhood home in Iowa, there was a strong belief that the core of Judaism lay in empathy with the suffering of the oppressed and the enslaved. For me that also meant solidarity with Palestinians living under occupation.
– David Shulman

Silence is the conversation of people who love each other. What matters is not what is said, but what doesn’t need to be said.
– Albert Camus

The same people who stir up popular hatred for Job used to elbow their way to the front of the flatterers. We think they have changed, but the change is part of their mimetic nature. It is the opposite of freedom. They are merely particles of the crowd.

Job says: ‘My brothers have been fickle as a torrent’ (6:15). … Today it is raining, and the friends are some many drops of water among countless others. If tomorrow the sun is shining, they will be the grains of sand in the burning desert.”

– René Girard

There is nothing more difficult than detecting the structuring mechanism at work in a text. It is like looking for depth on a two-dimensional surface, the written text.
– René Girard

As one of the masters has said: ‘The heart cannot live while the ego is alive.’
– Muhammad al-Darqawi

I never pay attention to anything by “experts”. I calculate everything myself.
– Richard Feynman

The flight path of the poem
It should be sensitive to each one.

– René Char

There’s a point in everybody’s life where they need a major transformation. And when that time comes you have to grab it by the tail. Grab it hard, and never let go.
– Haruki Murakami

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
– Anthony Burgess

If one’s mind has peace, the whole world will appear peaceful.
– Bulleh Shah

When we analyze our thoughts or ideas, however compounded or sublime, we always find that they resolve themselves into such simple ideas as were copied from a precedent feeling or sentiment.
– David Hume

Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.
– A. J. P. Taylor

The Yang power, the creative masculine, moves ahead with steadfast perseverance toward a goal until it becomes too strong, begins to break—and then the Yin, the receptive feminine, enters from below and gradually moves toward the top. Life is a continual attempt to balance these two forces.
– Marion Woodman

The prime purpose of eloquence is to keep other people from speaking.
– Louis Vermeil

It’s really important to be willing to expose your ideas to the possibility that you are wrong.
– Vernon Smith

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
– Carl Sagan

Do not think that life is a kind of theatrical show.
– Marcus Aurelius

A holy person is someone who is whole; who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.
– Alan Watts

I feel ugly, like I’m a bad person, and yet I’d like to be loved.
– Elena Ferrante

We are in a time of universal orphanage – of nature, of each other, of our own hearts. Take refuge in the fact that we all share this core wound and dilemma. What are you starving for?
– Kim Krans

Look at the present: the harmony, the ease.
– Marcus Aurelius

The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad, because you never know what will be the consequence of misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
– Alan Watts, Chinese Farmer Story

Words are harbingers, messengers of our time. They come into the world one way, and as the world turns, they evolve.
– Carol Edgarian

Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
– Eugene V. Debs

I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.
– Emma Goldman

Some suffering in this life cannot be healed in this life. There are wounds – spiritual, physical, emotional – that only eternity can restore.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Any writer who knows what he’s doing isn’t doing very much.
– Nelson Algren

Bring me a wave separate from the ocean and I will show you a person separate from the Universe.
– Alan Watts

They say that the system devours everything, that it assimilates everything. That is not true. There are things the system cannot assimilate, cannot digest. One of them, for example, is precisely poetry. In my view, it is unconsumable.
– Pier Paolo Pasolini

I reached heaven and it was syrupy.

It was oppressively sweet.

Croaking substances stuck to my knees.

Of all substances St. Michael was stickiest.

I grabbed him and pasted him on my head.

I found God a gigantic fly paper.

I stayed out of his way.

– Gregory Corso

Writing touches the unconscious in a way that talking does not. It gets beyond the old, to the truth of the real stories within.
– Pete Walker

Trust is the soul’s greatest lesson.
It’s easy to trust when life moves in harmony…
but the deeper initiation begins when the path feels uncertain,
when clarity fades,
and yet your spirit still whispers, “Keep going.”

– Bill Philipps

In the old days, the earth used to be round. Houses had doors. Bodies led out to gardens that were mostly sunny. When we raised curtains, scenes used to appear. Space was full of spaces and sights. There was some future. People used to write to each other.
– Cixous; tr. Lewis

Know that in your struggle, you are with all beings, because our true struggle is the same—to find our way to oneness, to nonseparation, in this fragile human form.
– Sallie Jiko Tisdale

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.
– Voltaire

If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn’t be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Two people can live in the same reality…
and experience two completely different worlds.

Not because life is different…
but because their perception is.

Your inner state shapes your outer experience.

– LaRoy Dobbins

Never cease loving a person, and never give up hope for him, for even the prodigal son who had fallen most low, could still be saved; the bitterest enemy and also he who was your friend could again be your friend; love that has grown cold can kindle.
– Søren Kierkegaard

Christians still haven’t understood that God is further from people than people from him. I imagine a God bored beyond the edges of these people who only know how to ask, a God who are exasperated by the triviality of his creation, a disgust of earth and heaven.
– Emil Cioran

Recognizing that we are not separate from the rest of the biosphere brings a deep sense that the whole earth is our body and an aspiration to live out the implications of such realization.
– David Loy

I can’t start anything until I have a first sentence. That doesn’t mean I’ll keep it, but until I have a sentence that I think is the right one, I can’t write another word.
– Percival Everett

Mountains breed learned men and shepherds’ huts house philosophers.
– Miguel de Cervantes

Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.
– Eckhart Tolle

For many survivors, authority figures are the ultimate triggers. I have known several survivors, who have never gotten so much as a parking ticket, who cringe in anxiety whenever they come across a policeman or a police car.
– Pete Walker

Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive.
– Tennessee Williams

Emotionally regulated people move different. They don’t rage in the comment section of the internet. They’re not offended by reality. They’re not a ticking time bomb of unfelt emotions. They know themself and have cleared the pathway within.
– Nika Solé

Suff’ring is not always loss;
Often underneath the cross—
Heavy, crushing, wearing, slow,
Causing us in dread to go—
All unsuspected lieth gain,
Like sunshine in vernal rain.
– Richard Crashaw

Great deeds, without a noble people to heed them, are no more than a hefty blow to a numb skull, and lofty words that find no lofty hearts in which to echo are like a dying leaf rustling down into the dung.
– Friedrich Hölderlin

Revolution is an article of consumption. … Indeed nothing seems more conformist or more servile to me than the hackneyed mythology of ‘revolt.’
– René Girard

In my opinion, the new can only emerge within a tradition. You can’t subvert tradition except from within. Once you are exterior to everything, you’re in the void and there you stay. That’s where I think we are today. The more we condemn imitation, the more we surrender to it.
– René Girard

Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.
– Annie Ernaux

Writing is difficult; it is like jumping into the void.
– Nathalie Sarraute

I do not ask to walk smooth paths
nor bear an easy load.
I pray for strength and fortitude
to climb the rock strewn road.

Give me such courage and I can scale
the headiest peaks alone,
and transform every stumbling block
into a stepping stone.

– Gail Brook Burket

This mundus tenebrosus, this shadowy world of mankind, is sunk into night; there is not a field without its spirits, nor a city without its daemons …
– Peter Ackroyd

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

The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.
– Victor Hugo

A poem often asks us to dwell there, and it’s unbearable, especially if you have no practice, if you don’t read or if you don’t go off by yourself and sit alone for a while. Even those of us who write, we’re often rushing around. So this dwelling, not fully comprehending something instantly, is very difficult. Anything that pushes us into the depths of our being is very hard to bear. I find it hard to bear. Sometimes I open a book that’s so beautiful I have to shut it because it hurts me. I can’t stand it. It’s like, Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! This is going to drive me into my own heart. A day or two days later I’m saying, All right, and I just surrender to it: Do it to me. Go ahead. I want it. I don’t want it. I want it. I don’t want it.
– Marie Howe

In my best moments I think “Life has passed me by” and I am content.
– Agnes Martin

There are my sanctuaries: music that stirs, nature that heals, poetry that whispers, and solitude that understand.
– Marina Tsvetaeva

While expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it’s a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness…Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That’s good medicine for land and people alike.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

Our natural responses to media, and to technology, are irrelevant. We cannot trust our instincts or our natural physical responses to our new things. They will destroy us.
– Marshall McLuhan

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

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with, we cease to see.
– Anias Nin

I want to feel that I am thoroughly and completely understood so that now and then I can take my guard down and look out around me and not feel that I will be destroyed with my defenses down.

I want to feel completely vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed and absolutely secure.

This is what you look for in your children when you have them. This is what you look for in your [mate] if you get one.

That I can run the risk of radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my vulnerability will not step on me. That I can fell secure in my awareness of the active presence of my own idiom in me.

So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill. It doesn’t matter whether I become a doctor, lawyer, housewife . . .

I’m secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself, and having learned to listen to that, I can become quiet enough, still enough to hear the sound of the genuine in you.

– Howard Thurman

I was falling. Falling through time and space and stars and sky and everything in between. I fell for days and weeks and what felt like lifetime across lifetimes. I fell until I forgot I was falling.
– Jess Rothenberg

So of course, this isn’t just about jukeboxes or dancing, this is about longing for a place that both no longer exists and never did. This is an ode to an imaginary place, torn down. I am from a part of a city that might as well be an imaginary place. I cannot show people all of the things that made me. The basketball courts I played on are cracked now, and no one hangs nets on the rims. The hill I rode my bike down has been leveled and the church that sat at the bottom is gone. The Dairy Queen that I’d pop into at the end of those bike rides was a chicken shack for a while, then a check-cashing place for a while, and now it’s just another empty building.

A sign with nothing on it. Even the streetlights have been taken from the blocks I once ran down, attempting to get home before the beams of streetlights flickered and coughed some fractured brightness along the pavement.

The streetlight people were another marker of that pop song I’d push into the juke at South Detroit in Windsor, where everyone knew all of the words. I am finding the distance between memory and belief to grow shorter by the year. I am constantly using memory to convince myself that I’ve lived and experienced something. That my belief in the world has been shaped by some magic I’ve been a part of, even if I can’t go back to all of the places that magic sprung from. If the old bar is a new bar, or nothing at all. If the pool hall is an organic juice shop. A singer names an imaginary place in a song, and I can’t help but think of all of the places I once touched that are no longer real.

– Hanif Abdurraqib, On Believing

At certain periods a nation may be oppressed by such insupportable evils as to conceive the design of effecting a total change in its political constitution; at other times the mischief lies still deeper, and the existence of society itself is endangered. Such are the times of great revolutions […]. But between these epochs of misery and of confusion there are periods during which human society seems to rest, and mankind to make a pause. This pause is, indeed, only apparent, for time does not stop its course for nations any more than for men; they are all advancing towards a goal with which they are unacquainted.

– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places—retreated to most often when we are most remote from them—are among the most important landscapes we possess. Adam Nicolson has written of the ‘powerful absence[s]’ that remembered landscapes exert upon us, but they exist as powerful presences too, with which we maintain deep and abiding attachments. [These] landscapes, to borrow George Eliot’s phrase, can ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’.
– Robert Macfarlane

On the whole, it was not the crudest, the simplest, the most animalistic and primitive aspects of the human species that were reflected in the natural phenomena. It was, rather, the more complex, the aesthetic, the intricate, and the elegant aspects of people that reflected nature. It was not my greed, my purposiveness, my so-called ‘animal,’ so-called ‘instincts,’ and so forth that I was recognizing on the other side of that mirror, over there in ‘nature.’ Rather, I was seeing there the roots of human symmetry, beauty and ugliness, aesthetics, the human being’s very aliveness and little bit of wisdom. His wisdom, his bodily grace, and even his habit of making beautiful objects are just as ‘animal’ as his cruelty.
– Gregory Bateson

Turn anything that seems problematic over to your higher self, trusting that the “problem” is not what it seems to be. Rewrite your agreement about who you are and what you’re capable of achieving.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer

“It’s one big club and you ain’t in it.”

Thank God.

– Nika Solé

Finding time is the main problem. That’s why I want to retire—so I can really get to work.
– Samuel R. Delany

It is hard to let go of things, harder to let go of ideas, and even harder to let go of spiritual pretensions.
– Judy Lief

Words are the small change of thought.
– Jules Renard

Your sense of inner peace depends on spending some of your life energy in silence to recharge your battery, remove tension and anxiety, and feel closer to all of humanity. Going into the quiet and listening will heal and inspire you.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer

Once you have tasted meditation it is impossible for you to be in any misery. Bliss becomes inevitable, a natural showering, and it goes on showering like flowers showering from the sky.
– Osho

The chrysanthemum is of a deep happiness. It speaks through its color and its unruly shock of hair
– Clarice Lispector

It’s not external enemies that ruin societies; it’s the unlimited ambitions, the unbridled competitions, that divide human beings rather than unite them.
– René Girard

The Truth about Art

Every poem or novel you write
Every painting you paint
Every song you compose
is a stray dog looking for a home.

– john zbigniew guzlowski

The sole advantage in possessing great works of literature lies in what they can help us to become. In themselves, as feats performed by their authors, they would have forfeited none of their truth or greatness if they had perished before our day. We can neither take away nor add to their past value or inherent dignity. It is only they, in so far as they are appropriate food and not poison for us, that can add to the present value and dignity of our minds. Foreign classics have to be retranslated and reinterpreted for each generation, to render their old naturalness in a natural way, and keep their perennial humanity living and capable of assimilation. Even native classics have to be reapprehended by every reader. It is this continual digestion of the substance supplied by the past that alone renders the insights of the past still potent in the present and for the future. Living criticism, genuine appreciation, is the interest we draw from year to year on the unrecoverable capital of human genius.
– George Santayana

tea
is a quiet agreement
to begin again

– @BashoSociety

If we fail to look after others when they need help, who will look after us?
– Buddha

So far from it being self-evident to the modern that men are created equal, it is not self-evident that men are created, or even that men are men.
– G. K. Chesterton

In order to make people equal, you have to treat them differently. If you treat people alike, the result is necessarily inequality.
– Friedrich Hayek

The lights will blaze before they dim.
– Wendy Videlock

In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.
– George Orwell

As soon as you believe that a label you’ve put on yourself is true, you’ve limited something that is literally limitless, you’ve limited who you are into nothing but a thought.
– Adyashanti

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.
– Marcel Proust

The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
– Frank Herbert

A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.
– Kahlil Gibran

The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.
– Giordano Bruno

All Buddhas and ordinary people are just one mind. This mind is beyond all measurements, names, oppositions.
– Huang Po

Something’s off-key in my mind.
Whatever it is, it bothers me all the time.

– Charles Wright

Your beliefs are clouds
That obscure
The radiance
Of your sky nature.

– @KavijiPoet

Solitude Tanka
by Chen-ou Liu

English Original:

I close
the valves of my heart
to this red-dust world:
solitude and I
of the same race now

Japanese Translation by Hidenori Hiruta

塵の世に心臓弁を我閉じる孤独と我は今同種なり

(Note: Red dust is a Buddhist set-phrase for the world and its passions)

When the mind becomes quiet, if you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light and love you have never known, and yet you recognize it at once as your own nature.

– Nisargadatta Maharaj

The aesthetics of modernism, with its denial of the past, its vandalization of the landscape and townscape, and its attempt to purge the world of history, was also a denial of community, home, and settlement.
– Sir Roger Scruton

It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

O Man, help thyself!

– Ludwig van Beethoven

The psalms are not used in a vacuum, but in a history where we are dying and rising, and in a history where God is at work, ending our lives and making gracious new beginnings for us.
– Walter Bruegggemann

The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.
– Søren Kierkegaard

It’s amazing what one ray of the sun can do with the soul of a man!
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

at the height
of the argument
the old couple
pour each other tea

– George Swede

happy or not
just to be as I am …
patches of fog

– Chen-ou Liu

In my picture of the world there is a vast outer realm and an equally vast inner realm; between these two stands man.
– Carl Jung

Lock yourself in a room and study until you collapse. True brilliance comes from obsession.
– Isaac Newton

What assistance can we find in the fight against habit? Try the opposite!
– Epictetus

A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.
– Larry McMurtry

The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

All of my work is authentically generated with a squishy brain and a creaky left hand.
– Jon Carling

The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action secretly, and to have it found out by accident.
– Charles Lamb

They want you and your kids to be dumber, less competent, less able to think on your own. They want citizens who don’t question them or the power structures they create which benefit only themselves. They don’t believe in democracy. They think democracy has run its course.
– Maureen Langloss

If you look for holes
Then it’s holes you’ll find
Look for gold.

– O. C. Haynes

Confusion is chaotic only when it can give rise to a new world.
– Friedrich Schlegel

To suffer and to know what it is that you suffer: how can that be measured against its much-prized opposite, the ability to be happy without knowing why?
– Rachel Cusk

Whether or not you can change the world with a song, you’ve still got to write the song. You still have to try.
– Anaïs Mitchell

Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don’t know why people shouldn’t write poetry. That’s brave.
– Robert Frost

But only poets, since they must excavate and recreate history, have ever learned anything from it.
– James Baldwin

A good many will admit that self-knowledge and reflection are needed, but very few indeed will consider such necessities binding upon themselves.
– CG Jung

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.
– Michael Chabon

Everything was so beautiful that I wanted to find a way to make it stay that way forever.
– Ryū Murakami

It is the utter simplicity of life which defeats man. He has turned the earth inside out in a frantic effort to attain security, to arrive at wisdom. But he has never really attached himself to the earth, never sufficiently venerated it. He has tried to subjugate when he has had only to observe and enjoy.
– Henry Miller

I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic.
– Raymond Chandler

God moves in sympathy with those seeking the spirit, destroying the darkness of their ignorance with the bright lamp of wisdom.
– Bhagavad Gita 10:11

Don’t wait for old age to seek the Truth. The fire can start at any time.
– Kabir

Scientists today announced they have discovered a cure for apathy. Unfortunately, no one cares.
– George Carlin

Break a pact. Accept forgiveness. Make a bet.
– Paulo Coelho

You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.
– Susan Orlean

Death steals everything except our stories.
– Jim Harrison

A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
– Alexander Pope

Don’t confuse the fall of the colonial empire for the end of the world.
– @dr.rosalesmeza

Every relationship is like its own country with its own set of rules, and you don’t know it unless you live there.
– Amy Poehler

For you, a thousand times over
– Khaled Hosseini

My existence is realized only as permanent contact with the border of the unpredictable.
– Leszek Kolakowski

I have a remarkable restlessness…
do you have a remarkable restlessness…
– Albert Hoffman

the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
get away
from
them

– Charles Bukowski

Reading poetry is a technique of meditation; we must keep reading and rereading the same poem for quite a while before its real intensity will emerge.
– Northrop Frye

The soul is not upgraded by books or by thinking or by wanting to be better, the soul is upgraded by pressure that kills everything fake in you. the way fire does. gold is not purified by being admired, it is thrown into heat until everything that is not gold burns away. and what is left is not beautiful because someone made it beautiful, it is beautiful because there is nothing left to lie. war produces poets, peace produces advertisers. collapse produces saints, comfort produces consumers. this is not an opinion, this is history. read it, and the pattern is so blatant it is stupid how anyone misses it. the best human beings you have ever met were made in the worst times, and the emptiest human beings you have ever met were made in the times that should have been the best.
– @lichthauch

Each alone on the heart of the earth,
impaled upon a ray of sun:
and suddenly it’s evening.

– Salvatore Quasimodo (tr. Allen Mandelbaum)

Wood’s Edge
by Brenda Hillman

Infinity lifted:
a gasp of emeralds.


I thought I felt
the tall night trees
between them,

no exactitude,
a wait not even
known yet.

I held my violet up;
no smell.
It made a signal squeak
inside, bats,

lisps of pride;

ah, their little things,
their breath: lungs of a painting,

they swept me
in four ways, their square
plans, as I have made
a good square saying,

you I
you not-I
not-you I
not-you not-I,

ritual of hope
whose weight
has not been measured—

Our core is wisdom and compassion, and discipline is the way—through skill and carefulness—that we align our actions with our fundamental dignity.
– Phakchok Rinpoche

All of nature is bound together in a highly complex whole through an ongoing process of spontaneous self-organization.
– R. Aziz

What can be shown, cannot be said.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Isn’t that what life is, after all? Missing something that’s right there before you?
– William Gaddis

If your idea of success is just about being ahead of others, you will definitely not explore the full potential of who you are.
– Sadhguru

Every time I can take something that’s hurting, something that’s toxic, something that’s out of balance, and actively participate in its transformation, that act will help me to grow.
– Julia Butterfly Hill

The voice of conscience is not the voice of divinity; it is the voice of the individual’s own integrity.
– Manly P. Hall

What truly exists is consciousness. That’s the only thing I am directly acquainted with. I don’t know about atoms, galaxies, and neurons; all of that is inferred. The only thing I know is seeing, hearing, feeling.
– Christof Koch

A nation must ravage itself before foreigners can ravage it, a man must despise himself before others can despise him.
– Yukio Mishima

Higher than actuality stands possibility.
– Martin Heidegger

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
– Eudora Welty

There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.
– Haruki Murakami

“Listen!” said the White Spirit. “Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become that child again: even now.”
– C.S. Lewis

I do not need oppose, or deny, because it is clear to me that I cannot be the opposite or denial of anything. I am just beyond, in a different dimension altogether.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

…men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
– G.K. Chesterton

The prize is just the joy of writing, hearing the sounds, hearing those voices.
– Suzan-Lori Parks

A writer writes both consciously and subconsciously.
– Naguib Mahfouz

The noble man is chiefly concerned with wisdom and friendship; of these, the former is a mortal good, the latter and immortal one.
– Epicurus

At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
– James 4:7

Space is a form abstracted from matter and exists only in consciousness.
– Arabic physicist Ikhwan al-Sufa, 900 AD

In non-visual space both man and animal are hunters.
– Marshall McLuhan

Consider your origin. You were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.
– Dante Alighieri

When a sage engages in activity, his mind remains fixed in the Self and his activity does not distract him.
– Ramana Maharshi

In naturally occurring timeless awareness, the ultimate heart essence,
there is no causality, so the abyss of samsara is crossed.
There is no better or worse, so samsara and nirvana are an integrated mandala.
– Longchenpa

tea holds space
for feelings
without names

– @BashoSociety

Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they? That’s life, basically. It’s just more and more things to go through.
– Sally Rooney

It was the word beyond speech.
– Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil

This is no more than the ecstasy of chaos:
Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love
Which alone, as we know certainly, restores
Fragmentation into true being.

– Robert Graves, Ecstasy of Chaos

When we try to run from our suffering, to bury it beneath our business or brush it beneath the rug of trying to feel good—we lose out on the opportunity to feel, let go, transmute, and heal.
– Jack Kornfield

When we realize suffering is not a mistake, we finally begin to take our next steps on the road home to freedom.
– Jack Kornfield

As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.
– Eckhart Tolle

Great minds do not, for the most part, change … . The different works produced by great philosophers over a lifetime are usually variations on a theme, or themes.
– Glenn Alexander Magee

I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes.
– Gaston Bachelard

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
– Joan Didion

Recognize that your struggle and your suffering is the same as everyone else’s, I think that’s the beginning of a responsible life. Otherwise, we are in a continual savage battle with each other with no possible solution, political, social, or spiritual.
– Leonard Cohen

Irrationalism has effortlessly prevailed, but reason never triumphs on its own – it must be fought for.
– Heinrich Mann

Given my scientific training, no one thought it possible that I might dedicate myself seriously to literature … How was I to defend myself when my best antecedents were in the future?
– Ernesto Sabato

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

In March I’ll be rested,
caught up, and human.

– Sylvia Plath

The world is what it is
and not what a son-of-a-bitch named Einstein
says it is.

– Nicanor Parra

Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.
– Sally Rooney

Be the one who nurtures and builds. Be the one who has an understanding and a forgiving heart one who looks for the best in people. Leave people better than you found them.
– Marvin J. Ashton

But for me, the most awful thing would be to feel that I’d agree with the things I’ve already said and written — that is what would make me most uncomfortable because that would mean that I had stopped thinking.
– Susan Sontag

They were always at work revising the secret map.
– Robert Aickman

People talk a lot about the pleasures of the creative life. They’ve never tried it!
– W. D. Snodgrass

I respect people the most when they’re real. Not because they fit into any particular box. Not because they conform to what society says. But because they are themselves. That’s rare.
– Nika Solé

Our language did not evolve for scientific or metaphysical purposes, but just to help us make do and get along in the real world.
– Alexander Stern, Wittgenstein’s Apocalypse

Always let love guide
your every thought,
your every word
and your every action.

– Lynn Dailey

I’m scared
I’m scared of myself…
at daybreak
piece by piece I try
to put myself together

– Chen-ou Liu

Once we know how to have compassion, there may be times when we not only let go of ill-will but also let go into a sense of empathy. Letting go of fear, may then also be resting back into a sense of calm.
– Gil Fronsdal

But not all men seek rest and peace; some are born with the spirit of the storm in their blood.
– Robert E. Howard

If someone is a fake, but you can’t see it, there is nothing I would or could do to convince you. You’ll just have to keep learning like everyone else until you can tell the difference.
– Kenneth Folk

Memories are made of wondrous stuff—deceptive and yet compelling, powerful and shadowy. There is no relying on memory, and yet there is no reality outside of the one we carry in our recollection.
– Golo Mann

Art is only able to say what it says by not saying it.
– Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

As soon as we’re born, we’re sentenced to death — just that we don’t know when our turn will come. So you can’t be complacent. Start right in and develop all your good qualities to the full while you still have the chance.
– Ajahn Fuang

Avoid popularity; it has many snares, and no real benefit.
– William Penn

Theatre is a humble materialist enterprise which seeks to produce riches of the imagination, not the other way around.
– Charles Ludlam

Just let go. Let go of how you thought your life should be, and embrace the life that is trying to work its way into your consciousness.
– Caroline Myss

Like love, mourning affects the world – and the worldly – with unreality, with importunity. I suffer from what it demands of me. (…) The world depresses me.
– Roland Barthe

Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked.
– John Cheever

We who hear the gentle murmuring of the primal spring; should we fear the coming earthquake? Truly not! For we know that it will merely tear apart the rubble and carve out the riverbed for the stream, so that we may one day see its living waves flowing freely.

– Richard Wagner

wordless
in my borrowed tongue
plum blossoms
– Chen-ou Liu

The degree to which a person can grow is directly proportional to the amount of truth he can accept about himself without running away.
– Leland Val Van De Wall

this urge
(to know her name) …
blooming wildflowers
– Chen-ou Liu

Logic is a crutch for the weak; the strong walk on their own intuition.
– Osho

They say you proclaim the word of God, yet I hear only of good and evil — nothing of love or truth.
– Rumi

Are we right to hope that theorizing and debating will help us to act well? What if all this thinking distracts us from acting at all?

– Clare Carlisle, On Solvej Balle’s Philosophy of Time

Wishes can be your best avenue of getting what you want when you turn wishes into action. Action moves your wish to the forefront from thought to reality.
– Byron Pulsifer

There is something that is featureless yet complete,
Silent and void.
It stands alone and does not change,
Goes round and does not weary.

– Lao Tzu

My only relief is to sleep. When I’m sleeping, I’m not sad, I’m not angry, I’m not lonely, I’m nothing.
– Jillian Medoff

Best writing advice I ever heard was “a sentence isn’t a truck to carry data”
– Morow Jävis Kærdenax

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
– Søren Kierkegaard

A student was meditating in Ajaan Fuang’s presence when—in a spasm of mindlessness—she slapped a mosquito that was biting her arm.

Ajaan Fuang commented: “You charge a high price for your blood, don’t you? The mosquito asks for a drop, and you take its life in exchange.”

The unconscious can move in every possible direction, even in time it can go forward and backward, because it knows no space.
– Carl Jung

Deep feelings always mean more than they are capable of saying.
– Albert Camus

Man is free at the instant he wants to be.
– Voltaire

People aren’t jealous of material things anymore. they’re jealous of your aura, your personality, the way people love and support you.
– Nithya Shri

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Read everything… but remember: a book is only a book. You must learn to think for yourself.
– Maxim Gorky

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable.
– Walt Whitman

Mingle the starlight with your lives and you won’t be fretted by trifles.
– Maria Mitchell

We cannot be the ones to distribute good and evil: we do not know the proportions.
– Eduardo de Filippo

The old chivalry is dead. Wars from now on will be waged by technologists.
– Ernst Jünger

These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.
– Vernon Cooper

When someone is conquered by thoughts it is a sign that pride preceded them, and therefore, he must humble himself more.
– St. Macarius of Optina

Dreaming is the poetry of Life, and we must be forgiven if we indulge in it a little.
– John Galsworthy

The veil that clouds your eyes
shall be lifted
by the hands that wove it.

And the clay that fills your ears
shall be pierced
by those fingers that kneaded it.

And you shall see,
and you shall hear.

Yet you shall not regret
having known blindness,
nor sorrow
that you were once deaf.

For in that day
you shall know the hidden
purposes in all things—

and you shall bless the darkness
as you would bless the light.

– Kahlil Gibran

Stepping away from routine helps you see parts of yourself you might not notice in everyday life.
– Lama Elizabeth Monson

Don’t just look at the world
Through your mind
Look also through your heart
It will give you a more complete picture.
– @KavijiPoet

Be great in act, as you have been in thought.
– William Shakespeare

I spent years trying to improve myself before I noticed something odd.

The “me” I was trying to fix only existed when I thought about it.

Between thoughts?

Just open, quiet awareness.

No broken person in sight.

– @everyday_awaken

The star that bids the shepherd fold, now the top of heaven doth hold.
– John Milton

Time just seems to fly away for a boy. That, I s’pose, is why one day you wake up suddenly and you ain’t a boy any longer.
– Robert Ruark

It all boils down to the last person you think of at night—that’s where your heart is.
– Charles Bukowski

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
– Fredrick Douglass, 1852.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
– John Locke

Of all wit’s uses, the main one
Is to live well with who has none.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

​I have been the dupe of my heart, but I will no longer be the dupe of my eyes. I have seen the world, and I have seen it as it is. I have been a slave, but I will be a King.
– Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

If you would escape moral and physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing—court obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie.
– Elbert Hubbard

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
– William Somerset Maugham

The human heart is a perpetual idol factory.
– John Calvin

God is the source. God is the refuge of all beings, their beginning, middle and end.
– Bhagavad Gita 10:20

Because that is when you love somebody – when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.
– Philip Roth

Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.
– Brian Keene

Prevent the things you have been doing and you are half way home.
– Frederick M. Alexander

There are so many great books in the world ,
all of them islands in the infinity of man’s ignorance.

– George Whitman, owner of Shakespeare and
Company in Paris, 1938

History is a prophet who looks back; because of what was, and against what was, it announces what will be.
– Eduardo Galeano

The words of The Poet ring true for centuries to come, soothing the wounds of despair and violence that captivate our world.
– Kim Krans, The Wild Unknown Archetypes

When we compare ourselves with others, we always lose, because we either feel superior or inferior, and both are forms of being lost.
– Henri Nouwen

Only their efforts to make him talk failed. He would say one word at a time, if pressed, but seemed happier not to and could not be made to repeat a whole line.
– Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day

The Greek word for sin, hamartia, means “to miss the mark.” It is quite a different understanding than the conventional modern notion of sin as a violation of a written law or, more simply, “bad behavior”—however that behavior may be defined in any given cultural context.
– Heather Hamilton and Jim Palmer

The whiskey had its own mind. Or spirit, he said. A cunning spirit. Sometimes it fooled him. Sometimes it set him free.
– Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

With Jung, I am convinced that the “catastrophe of the modern” stems from one-sidedness, that is, from the dominance of particularity over wholeness and of rationality over intuition.
– Ursula Wirtz

If one attempted to look into the future one would see nothing; it was like peeping into a person’s earhole.
– Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen

To You

What is more beautiful than night
and someone in your arms
that’s what we love about art
it seems to prefer us and stays

if the moon or a gasping candle
sheds a little light or even dark
you become a landscape in a landscape
with rocks and craggy mountains

and valleys full of sweaty ferns
breathing and lifting into the clouds
which have actually come low
as a blanket of aspirations’ blue

for once not a melancholy color
because it is looking back at us
there’s no need for vistas we are one
in the complicated foreground of space

the architects are most courageous
because it stands for all to see
and for a long long time just as
the words “I’ll always love you”

impulsively appear in the dark sky
and we are happy and stick by them
like a couple of painters in neon allowing
the light to glow there over the river

– Frank O’Hara

The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn’t lessen but augments this love of life.
– Pier Paolo Pasolini

It is their relationship to time that divides the mythically oriented and the historically minded man … He who only measures and calculates finds no access to that which cannot be grasped by the space-time concept.
– Emma Brunner-Traut

The patient knows exactly what is going on in the analyst’s mind, and he feels the disharmony between the analyst’s words and his real feelings.
– Sándor Ferenczi

Our remedy, our safety, our protection, our dearest interests and the social well-being of our families, present and future–all depend on our unity and our regard for each other.
– Daniel Weaver

Considering that this body is frail like a jar, make your mind strong like a fortress.
– Dhammapada

riding on a wave of understanding
and like sunlight
arriving without a sound

– Joanne Kyger

A powerful way to help language pathways is through cross modal activation, which gently links movement, sound, and meaning. Begin with slow cross body movements, such as marching on the spot while tapping the opposite knee, to engage both sides of the brain. While moving, softly hum or repeat a single vowel sound to activate auditory and speech networks without pressure. Then pause, look at a nearby everyday object, and communicate its purpose using gestures rather than words, allowing meaning to form without forcing language. Finally, say the word aloud once or twice with a calm breath in between. This approach works because language is built through movement, sound, vision, and connection, helping the brain access communication pathways more safely and effectively, without correction or demand.
– Anthony Goldsmith

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data, which is often fragmentary and fleeting.
– V.S. Ramachandran

He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
– Gabriel García Márquez

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible.
– Thomas Merton

Co-regulation is where it all starts. Before a child can regulate themselves, they need to feel it through you first. Your nervous system becomes the anchor, your breathing, your tone, your presence is what their brain is reading in every moment. When a child is overwhelmed or dysregulated, it’s not a behaviour problem, it’s a nervous system asking for support. This is where you step in, not to fix or control, but to bring calm into the space, maybe that’s sitting close, slowing your breath, humming, using a steady voice or just being there without saying much. Over time, their nervous system begins to mirror yours, and that feeling of safety gets wired in. That’s how self-regulation is built. Connection first, always.
– Anthony Goldsmith

All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. Then the archetypes begin to function, as happens also in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways.
– CG Jung

One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter.
– Francoise Sagan

Jung, for instance, always liked to send people with the same blind spots to each other because, he said, if two idiots sit together and neither can think they will get into such trouble that at least one of them will begin to think!
– Marie-Louise von Franz

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
– Thoreau

Who betrays you once, will betray you a thousand times. There is no need to drink the whole sea to realize it’s salty.
– Brands of Billions

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty. Competing with each other and ungenerous about each other. Hemingway was ungenerous about other writers. Most writers are. Writers can be the stinkers of all time, can’t they?
– Lillian Hellman

Accept being unimportant.
– Tao Te Ching

Every man who is truly a man must learn to be alone in the midst of all others, and if need be against all others.
– Romain Rolland

There is enough poetry and enough cosmos and enough infinite in another human being or a rock and a waterfall or a half-smile.
– Leonardo daVinci

Love makes you want to be a better man—right, right. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.
– Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

Any ideological system which places a hierarchy on human life is a threat to all of us
– Simone Zimmerman

The older I grow; the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgement of others.
– Benjamin Franklin

Democratic power is the only voice most citizens have.
– José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation.
– James Madison

I am not sorrowful, but I am tired Of everything that I ever desired.
– Ernest Dowson

Never discuss a situation until you understand how it came to be.
– John Henry Clarke

Of course, writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future. But it does encourage me to use our past and present behaviors as guides to the kind of world we seem to be creating. The past, for example, is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes.
– Octavia Butler

The journey of life is not about being perfect; it’s about getting lost and finding your way again.
– Paulo Coelho

a genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone around him is losing his mind.
– Napoleon

In nature’s infinite book of secrecy, a little I can read.
– William Shakespeare

For it would seem—her case proved it—that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
– Virginia Woolf

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
– Thomas H. Huxley

One must speak for a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality
– Antonio Gramsci

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.
– Nelson Algren

The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

There’s a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.
– Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase filled with perfumes, with sounds, with projects, with climates.
– Marcel Proust

In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

We do things with language, produce effects with language, and we do things to language, but language is also the thing that we do. Language is a name for our doing: both “what” we do (the name for the action that we characteristically perform) and that which we effect, the act and its consequences.
– Judith Butler, Excitable Speech

There is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.
– Barbara Kingsolver

The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
– Daniel Boorstin

The relationship between information and the mechanisms for its control is fairly simple to describe: Technology increases the available supply of information… control mechanisms are strained… When additional control mechanisms are themselves technical, they in turn further increase the supply of information. When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquillity and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.
– Neil Postman

No difference without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now.
– Jacques Derrida

The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.
– Jacques Derrida

It is much easier to imagine ourselves
in the place of God the Creator than in
the place of Christ crucified.
– Simone Weil

When the world gives you power,
be humble; when it takes it away,
be patient.
– Saadi

Don’t be blinded by the theorists
and the lying press.

– Ezra Pound

Because of craving, suffering arises;
with the ending of craving, suffering
ceases.

– Buddha

A Lesser Triumph

Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est.
– Ludwig van Beethoven

Yesterday I remembered applause. Whole rooms
would erupt with it, the people holding all that energy
inside their liquid bodies like geysers ready to burst.
It would start with the smack of one hand against
another, the expulsion of air between the flatness
of palm and palm so sudden that the shock would
travel briefly faster than sound, the kinetic energy
of that singular impulse reaching the drum
of a neighbor’s ear and through the ossicles,
rippling around the little hairs of the cochlea
and all the canals vibrating the vestibular nerve,
sparking electrochemical waves over axon and synapse
and down to the hands, which too would clap
in confirmation, relieved at the release, each
neighbor’s two neighbors of neighboring hands
expanding the blast like the neutron burst
in a fission reactor until the whole body of bodies
would explode, lifting their backs by their limbs
and out of their seats, the lungs pushed through
the lips and the teeth into whistles and hoots,
their caps sometimes blown clear to the ceiling
as humanity shook, and then settled down finally
like the smoke that settles in the valley late at night,
lingering among the silent trunks of the trees.

– Timothy Green

Is war a more important
human endeavor than love?
And if not, then why does
the history that is told focus
on war?

– Carol P. Christ

Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear … You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.
– Harold Bloom

That which endures is not one or another association of living forms, but the process of which the cosmos is the product, and of which these are among the transitory expressions.
– T. H. Huxley

In all of your relationships, if you can love someone enough to allow them to be exactly what they chose to be—without any expectations or attachments from you—you’ll know true peace in your lifetime.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer

Villainy wears many masks; none so dangerous as the mask of virtue.
– Washington Irving

In the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time…You pour yourself into it, care so much, & see up close so much birth & growth & beauty & danger & triumph—& then everything dies anyway, right? But u just keep doing it. What a great metaphor!
– Anne Lamott

Effortless mindfulness empowers us with the natural capability to be with our thoughts and emotions, without obsessive monitoring.
– Loch Kelly

One of Jung’s basic beliefs . . . is that the purpose of human life is to become conscious. Part and parcel of this is achieving a balance between spirit and instinct. Go too far one way or the other and we get into trouble.
– Daryl Sharp

When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
– Rollo May

The difficulty of translation from a language that doesn’t yet exist is considerable, but there is no need to exaggerate it. The past, after all, can be quite as obscure as the future.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

Nothing can save us—not all our money, nor all our bombs, nor all our guns—if we cannot achieve that long, long, long-delayed maturity.
– James Baldwin

a quiet cup of tea
reveals more truth
than loud advice
– @BashoSociety

But if we do revive and pursue the pagan ideal of a simple and rational self-completion we shall end – where Paganism ended. I do not mean that we shall end in destruction. I mean that we shall end in Christianity.
– G.K. Chesterton

Everyone has unique gifts and talents. What you love is what you’re gifted at. To be completely happy, to live a completely fulfilled life, you have to do what you love.
– Barbara Sher

You practice forgiveness for two reasons: to let others know that you no longer wish to be in a state of hostility with them and to free yourself from the self-defeating energy of resentment.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer

Doubt is the beacon that lights the way to discovery; it is the courage to question that frees us from the prison of unexamined beliefs.
– Karl Popper

For me, the ideas come when I’m in the bathtub or when I’m swimming. Water, it does something.
– Ishmael Reed

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

The genius of the Buddha—the Indian prince Siddhartha—and many who followed him was the realization that the mind is not static. It is living, breathing, evolving.
– Lawrence Levy

Sometimes a man must fight so hard for life that he has no time to enjoy it.
– Charles Bukowski

What we analysts have well and truly advanced about love, is that it is the source of all evil.
– Lacan

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There’s a corpse in the middle of every great poem.
– Sandra Simonds

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and, above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.
– Marie Curie

Next time you have to make a decision, be sure to breathe in and out first.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

Good people strengthen themselves ceaselessly.
– Confucius

I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn’t. But I don’t sit back waiting for it. I work every day.
– Alberto Moravia

Romantic pride willingly denounces the presence of the mediator in Others in order to found its own autonomy on the ruins of rival pretensions.
– René Girard

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor. In order to uncover his true shape, he must shatter his own substance with heavy blows of the hammer.
– Alexis Carrel

I call you ‘comrades’ rather than ‘brothers and sisters’ because if we are brothers and sisters it’s not from choice, it’s no commitment; but if you are my comrade, I am your comrade too, and that’s a commitment and a responsibility.
– Amilcar Cabral

It is good to love the unknown.
– Charles Lamb

The refusal of the real is the number one dogma of our time. … The famous linguistic methods are much appreciated nowadays because they replace the search for truth with structuralist word games.
– René Girard

Practice the pause. Pause before judging. Pause before assuming. Pause before accusing. Pause whenever you’re about to react harshly and you’ll avoid doing and saying things you’ll later regret.
– Lori Deschene

Nourish your soul, and the universe responds in bloom.

When you take time to care for your inner world, everything in your outer world begins to shift.
Self-care isn’t selfish — it’s sacred.

– Bill Philipps

I am not alone. I am surrounded by perplexities.

– King Arthur (John Steinbeck, The Acts of
King Arthur and His Noble Knights)

Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering.
– Epicurus

The trap that catches the mouse is baited with what the mouse likes best.
– African Proverb

But man doesn’t exist.
He has never existed, never.
But man doesn’t live, as the day doesn’t live.
But the moon invents his furious metals.

– Vicente Aleixandre (tr. Lewis Hyde)

Blake was … so conscious of the shape of his central myth that” he created “a dialectic, an anatomy of poetry, a rigorously unified vision of the essential forms of the creative mind, piercing through its features to its articulate bones.
– Northrop Frye

Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune.

– Charles Lamb

To walk alone along a lonely street is part of the philosopher’s nature. His gift is the rarest gift of all, the most unnatural one in a certain sense, exclusive and hostile even toward others with similar gifts.
– Nietzsche

True listening
Is not a practice of the ears
But an openness
Of the being.

– @KavijiPoet

The king who saves us is not a ruler with power, but a servant with love.
– Henri Nouwen

It is much more necessary for man to discover himself than to find out if other worlds are inhabited.
– Manly P. Hall

We gazed at each other, and looked at the green meadow o’er which the cool evening was just passing, and we wept. Right then, Life was dearer to me than all my wisdom had ever been.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

A Call
by Seamus Heaney

“Hold on,” she said, “I’ll just run out and get him.
The weather here’s so good, he took the chance
To do a bit of weeding.”

So I saw him
Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig,
Touching, inspecting, separating one
Stalk from the other, gently pulling up
Everything not tapered, frail and leafless,
Pleased to feel each little weed-root break,
But rueful also…

Then found myself listening to
The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks
Where the phone lay unattended in a calm
Of mirror glass and sun struck pendulums…

And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays,
This is how Death would summon Everyman.

Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him.

Virginia Woolf on how to read The Faerie Queene:

The first essential is, of course, not to read The Faery Queen. Put it off as long as possible. Grind out politics; absorb science; wallow in fiction; walk about London; observe the crowds; calculate the loss of life and limb; rub shoulders with the poor in markets; buy and sell; fix the mind firmly on the financial columns of the newspapers, weather; on the crops; on the fashions. At the mere mention of chivalry shiver and snigger; detest allegory; revel in direct speech; adore all the virtues of the robust, the plain spoken; and then, when the whole being is red and brittle as sandstone in the sun, make a dash for The Faery Queen and give yourself up to it.

Nothing, not a cracker, not a crumb. Still
a vague intimation shadows the memory of this place, and others,
that somewhere down the pike these landscapes are waiting again,
or are, perhaps, the only things we take with us—
our psychic terrain—
as though through memory we create our own afterlives—
which can’t be the entire breadth of it all,
… but in some way a homeland,
a landscape out of which we might ramble into the afterlives, yes,
the memories, of one another…

– David Bottoms

Missing the Boat
by Naomi Shihab-Nye

It is not so much that the boat passed
and you failed to notice it.
It is more like the boat stopping
directly outside your bedroom window,
the captain blowing the signal-horn,
the band playing a rousing march.
The boat shouted, waving bright flags,
its silver hull blinding in the sunlight.
But you had this idea you were going by train.
You kept checking the time-table,
digging for tracks.
And the boat got tired of you,
so tired it pulled up the anchor
and raised the ramp.
The boat bobbed into the distance,
shrinking like a toy—
at which point you probably realized

you had always loved the sea.

America does not know how to exist in a world it does not control.
– Lydia Polgreen

Take the
selfishness out
of anger and
you’re left with
determination

– Bernie Glassman

…faith for is a way of situating yourself in front of reality, starting with your own self. It is a judgment, a position, a stand that you take, with respect to everything. If you fail to take that stand then, at best, you are superficial. You have no depth. Therefore you are at the mercy of whatever power comes along to move you. Because you do not have this firm stand, you are vulnerable to power.
– Lorenzo Albacete

There are then, in short, diverse tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life. Here we have one of the ruling ideas of this book-the idea, indeed, which served as the starting-point of our inquiry.

That which is usually held to be a greater complexity of the psychical state appears to us, from our point of view, to be a greater dilatation of the whole personality, which, normally narrowed down by action, expands with the unscrewing of the vice in which it has allowed itself to be squeezed, and, always whole and undivided, spreads itself over a wider and wider surface.

That which is commonly held to be a disturbance of the psychic life itself, an inward disorder, a disease of the personality, appears to us, from our point of view, to be an unloosing or a breaking of the tie which binds this psychic life to its motor accompaniment, a weakening or an impairing of our attention to outward life.

– H. Bergson

I had one trip that I really loved. I was convinced that I was a minor character in someone else’s dream. The feeling was intensely relaxing. I didn’t have to do anything, because everything I did was just a metaphor. And since it wasn’t my dream, I didn’t have to decode the signs. Nothing made sense but nothing had to. It was the greatest experience I’ve ever had; for an entire afternoon I didn’t have to exist. And I came back.
– Season Butler, Cygnet

Every moment is like a gift. And since it is, relax, get into the moment and do all you can to listen to it. I mean, really, really listen. Be present to the moment with everything you. It takes practice. After you’ve listened for a while, you start responding. You give back because you begin to see how everything is on loan — a gift from God… Try listening, looking. Looking and listening lead into everything else. Real listening means you don’t project yourself into the situation. You simply are receptive, seeing things as they are, not as you might wish them to be. Listen!
– S. T. Georgiou

Zuly
by John Gorka

And the good earth shook the day that Jesus was reborn
In Anchorage, March the 27th, 1964
When He came back this time though it was as a baby girl
Her parents said Her mission was the same, to save the world

God looked down and said, oh the times they are a changing
I will send My only daughter as soon as I complete the staging
All the land shook and rolled and split, there was no warning
Except Gabriel had told the mom She’d arrive Good Friday morning

And so it came to pass that Her parents named Her Zuly
A bright and happy child, also willful and unruly
The birds would come and visit Her, they wished they could take Her with them
When they left their roosts for winter, She would always miss them

Zuly won a scholarship though the classes mostly bored Her
She loved the other students though and the teachers all adored Her
We learned more from Her, they said than we could ever teach Her
But there were times when we just could not reach Her

She said we are here to love each other that is all
And organized religion that’s comparatively small
Not that I don’t love all those so-called holy ones
But why are there so few daughters among the leaders with My sons?

Now She runs a charter boat on Resurrection Bay
She takes tourists to see the wild creatures every summers day
In fall She teaches bush kids at the boarding school in Sitka
On those long December nights She is the light of winter

The thing about freedom, though, is that you can’t just want it for yourself only, or your own kind. Freedom means everybody… Freedom means justice.
– Mab Segrest

Difficulties seem to come in packs like feral dogs. Blessings gather like flocks of geese and spread their wings over us. Since neither is permanent, we simply find ourselves in life’s river doing the best swimming we can. I’m checking on my backstroke. How about you?
– Gunilla Norris

Once in a lifetime every person encounters a staircase which can take them to a special place; but only some of them grasp this and use the stairs!
– Mehmet Murat Ildan

I’m curious. Period. I find everything interesting. Real life. Fake life. Objects. Flowers. Cats. But mostly people. If you keep your eyes open, everything can be interesting. The secret is that there is no secret.
– Agnès Varda

Since love came over and knocked me down,
Then kicked me in the side and fled,
I have suffered from a prolonged perplexity.
God is the object of my wonder and the closest to me.
Especially near sleep. My sheets are like the wings of a guardian angel.
There is no other fabric so near to my feelings.
– Fanny Howe

Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at its melancholy rim, green in its envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in its greatest rages, black.
– Salman Rushdie

I don’t know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I’m some sort of Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.

I would like to recapture that freshness of vision which is characteristic of extreme youth when all the world is new to it.

I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have a light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.

– Henri Matisse

And what if there is nothing else? What if all life ends in the silent void of death? Then is it all in vain? I think not, for love, for the sake of love, will always be enough. And if our lives are but a single flash in the dark hollow of eternity, then if, but for the briefest of moments, we shine – then how brilliantly our light has burned. And as starlight knows no boundary of space or time, so too, our illumination will shine forth throughout all eternity, for darkness has no power to quell such light. And this is a lesson we must all learn and take to heart – that all light is eternal and all love is light. And it must forever be so.
– Richard Paul Evans

Crying was my most constant companion. One day, while walking on the beach, I saw the reflection of the sun on the water. Inexplicably, I felt a sense of a Presence larger than life itself after seeing a patch of light differently than ever before. The light image kept me alive … I was suffused with love. I had sensations of warmth from the light coming into my body and entering each cell, having awareness of my whole body in a startling way. It felt comforting, life-changing and dramatic, yet peaceful. I was able to function again. My most important focus became to deepen my experience of being suffused by the light.
– Virginia Swain

… is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines. It is not to lead our neighbor into a corner where there are no alternatives left, but to open wide a spectrum of options for choice and commitment. It is not an educated intimidation with good books, good stories and good works, but liberation of fearful hearts so that words can find roots and bear ample fruit …

The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves created free; free to sing their own songs, speak their own languages, dance their own dances; free also to leave and follow their own vocations. Hospitality is not a subtle invitation to adopt the lifestyle of the host, but the gift of a chance for the guest to find his own …

To convert hostility to hospitality requires the creation of the friendly empty space where we can reach out to our fellow human beings and invite them to a new relationship. This conversion is an inner event that cannot be manipulated but must develop from within. Just as we cannot force a plant to grow but can take away the weeds and stones which prevent its development, so we cannot force anyone to such a personal and intimate change of heart, but can offer a space where such a change can take place.

– Henri Nouwen

Every act of love is a new beginning, a new creation. To live compassionately is to believe in a love greater than ourselves yet intimately present to us, a love visible in the trees, the streams, the clouds, the poor, nonbelievers, and all who share the life that is our life—a love binding us together without constraints. We must believe that each person is capable of being transformed by love, that each tree, flower, animal, living creature, the stones, the sand, the sky—everything is capable of being transformed by love. And that when all is united by a luminous thread of love, Christ will be visible in the universe.
– Ilia Delio

FLEXIBLE MIND


In some sense, it’s all a question of
developing a flexible mind –
developing a flexible identity even –
that is capable of fluid transformation.

– Pema Chodron

In the minds of thinking men the present is always under attack from the past and future simultaneously.
– John Berger

I’m afraid to write. It’s so dangerous. Anyone who’s tried, knows. The danger of stirring up hidden things-and the world is not on the surface, it’s hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it’s a terribly dangerous void: it’s where I wring out blood. I’m a writer who fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others- Which? maybe I’ll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well.
– Clarice Lispector

“It wasn’t what you said”, he told her. “It was how I felt when you said it”.
– Anne Tyler

I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Between the universe that can be apprehended by pure intellectual perception (the universe of the Cherubic Intelligences) and the universe perceptible to the senses, there is an intermediate world, the world of Idea-Images, of archetypal figures, of subtile substances, of “immaterial matter.” This world is as real and objective, as consistent and subsistent as the intelligible and sensible worlds; it is an intermediate universe “where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual,” a world consisting of real matter and real extension, though by comparison to sensible, corruptible matter these are subtile and immaterial.

The organ of this universe is the active Imagination; it is the place of theophanic visions, the scene on which visionary events and symbolic histories appear in their true reality. Here we shall have a good deal to say of this universe, but the word imaginary will never be used, because with its present ambiguity this word, by prejudging the reality attained or to be attained, betrays an inability to deal with this at once intermediate and intermediary world.

– Henry Corbin

The grief of time passing, of life moving on half-finished, of empty spaces that were once bursting with the laughter and energy of people we loved.

As long as there is love there will be grief because grief is love’s natural continuation.

It shows up in the aisles of stores we once frequented, in the half-finished bottle of wine we pour out, in the whiff of cologne we get two years after they’ve been gone.

Grief is a giant neon sign, protruding through everything, pointing everywhere, broadcasting loudly, “Love was here.”

In the finer print, quietly, “Love still is.”

– Heidi Priebe

MAYBE VERY HAPPY

After she died he was seized
by a great curiosity about what
it was like for her. Not that he
doubted how much she loved him.
But he knew there must have been
some things she had not liked.
So he went to her closest friend
and asked what she complained of.
“It’s all right,” he had to keep
saying, “I really won’t mind.”
Until the friend finally gave in.
“She said sometimes you made a noise
drinking your tea if it was very hot.”

– Jack Gilbert

My advice is, don’t be a Buddhist.
In the end, it’s all about personal gain, fame, and business.
Just be a person with a good heart,
That’s the meaning of a true Dharma practitioner.
We live in the illusion and appearance of things.
There is reality. We are this reality.
When you understand this,
you will see that you are nothing,
and by being nothing, you are everything.
That’s all.

– Kalu Rinpoche

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

He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past.
– Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

Every word has a history. Every word has an image locked into its roots.
– John Ciardi

What are we doing, we psychotherapists? We are trying to heal the suffering of the human mind, of the human psyche or the human soul, and religions deal with the same problem.
– CG Jung

I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw some things back.
– Maya Angelou

If plan A isn’t working, you stop. That’s what I learned from mules and donkeys.
– Percival Everett

When students are searching for their voice, they are searching for poetry. When they find their voice, they will have found poetry. When they find poetry, they will live to regret it.
– Mary Ruefle

You should show encouragement whenever you can. People try harder when they know that someone cares about them.
– Stephanie Perkins

You write the beginning and then you go back and rewrite the beginning, and you never got off page one. It’s kind of a syndrome, and I have a rash piece of advice which is — Go on, page two, page three, and never look back. Get something finished, no matter how lousy it is. […] Perfectionists cannot get going unless they kind of do violence to their own instincts, and just blast ahead.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

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

A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.
– Andrei Tarkovsky

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
– George Bernard Shaw

If I tell these private thoughts of mine, it is because I know they are not mine alone, and that practically everyone is trying to say the same things and that the writer is only a man who says out loud what other people think or whisper.
– Eugène Ionesco

In order to act, an operational notion of the object is required; but a poetic notion is required in order to understand.
– Nicolás Gómez Davila

…you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon …
– Wallace Stevens

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
– James Joyce

Fails e’en thy faith, rooted in earth of stars!
Perchance the wind is writing the Lost Word.
– A. E. Waite

Empire functions best when crisis is ubiquitous. Crisis is Empire’s regular mode of existence, in the same way that an insurance company comes into being only when there’s an accident. The temporality of Empire is the temporality of emergency and catastrophe.
– Tiqqun

Often prisoners were sent to penalty compounds for refusal to become informers. The majority died there and naturally cannot speak about themselves. And the murderers from State Security are even less likely to speak of them.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

People are confused and unsure, they seek answers to guide them to joy, tranquillity, self-knowledge, salvation―but they also demand that it be easy to learn, that it require little or no effort, that results be quickly obtained.
– Erich Fromm

If only we can create a sufficient number of people in this world whose Experience of Life goes beyond the physical and the mental, this world will be a very different place.
– Sadhguru

Humanism is the only – I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.
– Edward W. Said

A map is just a piece of paper until someone bleeds for it.
– Mouin Bseiso

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.
– Albert Einstein

You don’t have to enter a monastery to be a mystic…
Living as a mystic means orienting the whole of yourself toward the sacred.
It’s a matter of purposely looking through the lens of love.
– Mirabai Starr

We think that we have to know who we are in order to bloom, but that is not true. It is our nature to bloom, but we don’t have to know who or what we are in order to do so. . . . We can only do the practice and let it shape us.
– Ken McLeod

Anybody can run away and survive, the trick was to stay and survive.
– Philip Roth

Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.
– Carlos Fuentes

There’s a part of me that wants to let problems go for a while, let a piece of writing simmer and percolate, in the hope that my unconscious will take care of it. That the solution will come. And I think that’s useful up to a point…
– Robert Hass

The characters are the main entrance into the work because they’re shaped like humans and they’re lit more brightly than their surroundings.
– Dennis Cooper

If you go to the thinking, take your heart with you. If you go to the love, take your head with you. Love is empty without the thinking, the thinking hollow without the love.
– C.G. Jung

A tragedy, when a mature mind and a romantic heart are in the same body.
– Nizar Qabbani

We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine.
– Philip K. Dick

Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Maybe all we can do is to make our remaining time here full of gentleness and good humor.
– Anne Lamott

They fear the poem because it travels without a passport.
– Mouin Bseiso

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy.
– Karl Marx

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.
– Paulo Coelho

He who has peace of mind disturbs neither himself nor another.
– Epicurus

You have to get dirty with your emotions. Meditation allows us to feel them, live them, and taste them completely.
– Pema Chödrön

Therapists need the courage to be creatively insane.
– Carl Whitaker

The world does not give us very much now; it often seems to consist of nothing but noise and fear, and yet grass and trees still grow.
– Hermann Hesse

Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

For most of its history and prehistory, the human race has lived in various states of ignorance and wonder. Even today most of us will accept the disenchantments of knowledge only with great reluctance.
– Robert Pogue Harrison

Understand this much:
whatever you love and look for, you are.
– Rumi

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
– James Baldwin

If anyone hurts you and you forgive him, you are leading yourself to the kingdom of God. If anyone is quarrelsome and you give understanding, you are taking yourself to the kingdom of God.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

If someone is suffering and you reach out with aid and compassion, you are moving into the presence of God.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

I write poetry to prove I can’t write poems.
– Percival Everett

The purpose of art actually is, in many cases, to make you feel quite uncomfortable. Or at least to go to that place that’s already of discomfort inside of you and tap into that.
– Michael Moore

Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself… and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.
– Donald Woods Winnicott

We always think in terms of share of mind versus share of market – because if the share of mind is there, the share of market will follow.
– Warren Buffett

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.
– Charlotte Brontë

Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
– Robertson Davies

Nothing new in my life, my dear old friend. I spend it uniformly amidst my books and in the company of my dog.
– Gustave Flaubert

The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.
– Paulo Coelho

A work survives its readers; after a hundred or two hundred years, it is read by new readers who impose on it new modes of reading and interpretation. The work survives because of these interpretations…
– Octavio Paz

The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
– Elena Ferrante

So manifold are our interests in life that it is not uncommon, on the self-same occasion, for the foundations of a happiness which does not yet exist to be laid down simultaneously with the aggravation of a grief from which we are still suffering.
– Proust

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.
– Joan Didion

When the world seems to be falling apart, stick to your own trajectory; hang onto your own ideals and find kindred spirits. That’s the rule of life.
– Joseph Campbell

I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.
– Ben Franklin

Thinking is the hardest work there is which is probably the reason so few engage in it.
– Henry Ford

Tell your own story, and you will be interesting.
– Louise Bourgeois

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.
– Frank Lloyd Wright

I am so hip even my errors are correct.
– Nikki Giovanni, Ego Tripping

I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn’t have loosened. A stitch come undone.
– Gillian Flynn

Better to be alone than in the company of a teacher who only wants your money.
– Kabir

I want to go everywhere, see everything, do everything. I want to find something. Yes, that’s it. I want to find something.
– Agatha Christie

The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.
– George Bernard Shaw

In the struggle for memory, the sharpest storyteller becomes the architect of truth.
– Kwahi izvoni

Evil cannot create anything new. It can only spoil and destroy what good forces have invented or created.
– J.R.R Tolkien

We are teaching the world the great truth, that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson: the Religion flourishes in greater purity without, than with the aid of Government.
– James Madison

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.
– John Coltrane

People love other people’s stories. Theories divide people, but stories unite people.
– James H. Billington

It is not daily increase but daily decrease; hack away at the unessential.
– Bruce Lee

Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.
– Anaïs Nin

In parallel with the development of my interests in technical gadgetry I began to acquire a profound love of and respect for the natural world which motivates my scientific thinking to this day.
– Robert B. Laughlin

Poetry is primarily about the sound; secondarily about the images; perhaps tertiarily about allusion, figures of speech, and all the deep resonances that literary people like to talk about; and at best quaternarily about meaning and substantive significance.
– Andy Harless

Be humble to the lowly, and gentle to weak. Be a dinosaur to the phony, and a stone wall to the critic.
– Abhijit Naskar

Forms of political resistance that champion forms of autonomy freed of all dependency perhaps make this mistake of understanding dependency as exploitation.
– Judith Butler

If the main pillar of a system is living a lie, then it is not surprising the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.
– Vaclav Havel

We lose the ability to be arrogant, once we reach a certain degree of intelligence.
– Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The Trinity answers the deepest needs of the human heart, offering a depth of spirituality unknown in any other religion.
– C. Colson

Love is the most vital and necessary tool we have for our future, for our bettering.
– Aja Monet

Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed their leaders and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient well the jails are full of petty thieves, and the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.
– Howard Zinn

Vulnerability is an expensive gift, not to be opened because people you’re familiar with are present.
– April Lashon

I was like a man in a bog.
The more he struggles, the more he sinks.
No good can result from efforts made apart from faith in Jesus.
– Charles Spurgeon

To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them.
– René Descartes

Art looks like a lottery from out there.
– Eileen Myles

When we realize who we are, we no longer have this endless confusion, this eternal battle with ourselves. Therefore we tend to not struggle with others or the world.
– Adyashanti

Every man is an abolitionist; every man is selfish enough to be an abolitionist for himself, but every man is not unselfish enough to be an abolitionist for others.
– Gerrit Smith

You’ll meet a hundred different people who will describe you in a hundred different ways, don’t dwell too much on the kind of impression you make. Remember, there are a thousand paintings of the sun, but only one that rises and sets each day.
– Ekta Somera

Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.
– Constantin Stanislavsky

His thoughts are high, his love is wise,
His wounds a cure intend;
And though he does not always smile,
He loves unto the end.

– C.H. Spurgeon

It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.
– Eckhart Tolle

People who intentionally or unintentionally hurt other people: I have come to the conclusion that they cannot help themselves, and they cannot be helped.
– Yiyun Li

Happiness isn’t something you experience; it’s something you remember.
– Oscar Levant

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy.
– Winston Churchill

There are essentially two things that will make us wiser: the books we read and the people we meet.
– Charles Jones

The first species to know that it can bring about its own extinction is also the first species aware that it can generate its own evolution toward more freedom, more complexity, and more consciousness and love.
– Barbara Marx Hubbard

I study myself more than any other subject.
That is my physics. That is my metaphysics
– Michel de Montaigne

Maybe we’ve been looking for the wrong thing. Maybe the visitors are not arriving as spaceships at all.
– Paul Davies

Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.
– Malcolm X

You’ve got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend

When I was down you just stood there grinnin’

You’ve got a lotta nerve to say you got a helping hand to lend

You just want to be on the side that’s winnin’

– Bobby Dylan

We are masters of the unsaid words but slaves of those, we let slip out!
– Winston Churchill

The majority of religions are complicated systems of preparation for death, so much so that life actually has no significance except as a preparation for the ultimate goal of death.

In both the greatest living religions, Christianity and Buddhism, the meaning of existence is consummated in its end.

– Carl Jung

The truth is, I have a great deal to do; and I have made up my mind not to die till it is done.
– Edgar Allan Poe

There is but one religion, and that is the progress of the soul toward God. The prophets are as different lamps, but the Light is the same.
– Basha’u’llah

A little stupid is like a little forest fire. If you happen upon some stupid, please stomp it out before it spreads.

– Quentin R. Bufogle

Ask yourself whether our language is complete – whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Eternal Life

Half a century.
The weight of that word used to send me straight to bed.
No more. I’m gathering wisdom.
Alchemists aren’t law-breakers –
sure, they’re naive sometimes, like the saints,
believing in stones, fish seen in dreams,
signs written on the sky.
Where is God?
April is reborn out in the cosmos,
in the most perfect silence.
Inside and outside of me.

– Adélia Prado

You say you see no hope
You say you see no reason we should dream
That the world would ever change
You say the love is foolish to believe
‘Cause they’ll always be some crazy
With an army or a knife
To wake you from your daydream
Put the fear back in your life

Look
If someone wrote a play
To just to glorify what’s stronger than hate
Would they not arrange the stage
To look as if the hero came too late?
He’s almost in defeat
It’s looking like the evil side will when
So on the edge of every seat
From the moment that the whole thing begins

It is love who mixed the mortar
And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love who made the stage here
Although it looks like we’re alone
In this scene, set in shadows,
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love can show the way

Now the stage is set
You can feel your own heart beating in your chest
This life’s not over yet
So we get up on our feet and do our best
We play against the fear
We play against the reasons not to try
We’re playing for the tears
Burning in the happy angel’s eyes

For it’s love who mixed the mortar
And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love who made the stage here
Though it looks like we’re alone
In this scene, set in shadows,
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love will show the way

– David Wilcox

I don’t want to read any more about narcissism and alienation and the futility of relationships between the sexes. I don’t want to read any more about human, in particular male, hideousness. Whatever happened to Faulkner’s idea that a writer’s job was to lift people up?
– Sigrid Nunez

While words take time to utter and hear, and require attention to parse their meaning, the impact of the image is instantaneous, its influence decadent. Before the primacy of the image, a salesman or an advertisement would have to describe the attributes of a product in a rational appeal to the intellect. Afterward, it was the mythology of the brand, usually concocted by psychologists, that would sway a consumer’s heart. Likewise, with the rise of the image in politics, the policy platform of a presidential candidate would come to matter less than the ability of his image to convey ineffable or irrelevant values.
– Daniel J. Boorstin

Some men never discover the divine presence within because they can’t bring themselves to face their demons. Don’t try to engineer this process or manufacture any angels. It will be done to you; just do not hate or fear the falling.
– Richard Rohr

We are born with a mind, open to everything, no fear, no known boundaries, but with each new rule, restriction the mind divides.
– Patti Smith

Lying still and thinking little is the cheapest medicine for all sicknesses of the soul and, if persisted with, grows more pleasant hour by hour.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims

If we have identified too closely with the light, have too idealized an image of ourselves, then our shadow will surely come up and hit us on the backside. The same is true if we have identified with our negative side. Either position is a denial of our wholeness.
– Marion Woodman

The shortest, surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to be.
– Marcus Aurelius

The friend in my adversity I shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity.
– Ulysses S. Grant

One must not talk to a man unless he is willing to listen.
– Seneca

All the world loves you
but you are nowhere to be found.
Hidden, and yet completely obvious.
– Rumi

It’s frightening to be free, to have to take responsibility for your decisions.
– Azar Nafisi

I didn’t aspire to be a member of the adult world, with its endless responsibilities.
– Patti Smith

It is really a thought that built this portentous war establishment, and a thought shall also melt it away.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Ode to the Hebrew Letter ‘Chet’

you come hot,
scratching at the throat,
marching between
one blazing Arab &
one crazy Jew.

– Maya Pindyck

That which men call virtue is usually no more than a phantom formed by our passions, to which one gives an honest name in order to do with impunity whatever one wishes.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

It is a great art to saunter.
– H.D. Thoreau

The spirit blows where it will; one sees it blow on fools, and it whispers to them what they are able to hear.
– Paul Valéry

The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man’s life; and until he has realized it, he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of all his powers.
– Evelyn Underhill

You don’t need to dream of heaven, if you haven’t been through hell.
– Britt Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality

Mother I never knew,
every time I see the ocean,
every time-

– Kobayashi Issa, (tr. Robert Hass)

The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
– Rebecca Solnit

Acceptance is the universal currency of real friendship. . . . It does not warp or shape or wrench a person to be anything other than what they are.
– Joan Chittister

The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without: to follow one’s own path, not that of the crowd.
– Nicholas Tharcher

War
by Edwin Starr

War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, uhh
War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it again, y’all
War, huh (good God)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, listen to me, oh

War, I despise
‘Cause it means destruction of innocent lives
War means tears to thousands of mother’s eyes
When their sons go off to fight
And lose their lives

I said, war, huh (good God, y’all)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, just say it again
War (whoa), huh (oh Lord)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, listen to me

It ain’t nothing but a heart-breaker
(War) Friend only to The Undertaker
Oh, war it’s an enemy to all mankind
The thought of war blows my mind
War has caused unrest
Within the younger generation
Induction then destruction
Who wants to die? Oh

War, huh (good God y’all)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it, say it, say it
War (uh-huh), huh (yeah, huh)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, listen to me

It ain’t nothing but a heart-breaker
(War) It’s got one friend that’s The Undertaker
Oh, war, has shattered many a young man’s dreams
Made him disabled, bitter and mean
Life is much too short and precious
To spend fighting wars each day
War can’t give life
It can only take it away, oh

War, huh (good God y’all)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, say it again

War (whoa), huh (oh Lord)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, listen to me

It ain’t nothing but a heart breaker
(War) Friend only to The Undertaker, woo
Peace, love and understanding, tell me
Is there no place for them today?
They say we must fight to keep our freedom
But Lord knows there’s got to be a better way, oh

War, huh (God y’all)
What is it good for? You tell me (nothing)
Say it, say it, say it, say it

War (good God), huh (now, huh)
What is it good for?
Stand up and shout it (nothing)