A notorious beginner of enterprises and non-finisher, partly through lack of time, partly through lack of single-minded concentration, I still wonder how and why I managed to peg away at this thing year after year, often under real difficulties…
– J.R.R. Tolkien
If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.
– Kenneth Goldsmith
Open
Open to the world
Open to spirit
Open to the changing wind
Open to touch
Open to nature
Open to the world within
Open to change
Open to adventure
Open to the new
Open to love
Open to miracles
Open Beloved to You
Open to learn
Open to laughter
Open to being blessed
Open to joy
Open to service
Open to saying “Yes !”
Open to risk
Open to passion
To peace and silence too
Open to love
Open to beauty
Open Beloved to You
– Mike Scott
YELLOW LADDER
by Elaine Equi
A yellow ladder
leans against
a redbrick wall
under a blue sky.
Beautiful.
But it doesn’t lead
to a window,
and it’s not tall enough
so someone could climb
over the wall.
Maybe a construction
worker left it there
temporarily.
But I don’t think
a builder put it there.
It must have been an artist.
Nevertheless,
don’t walk under it.
I tell my students, who believe passionately in explaining the work they’re sharing, You know, when you’re dead, you can’t go around explaining this thing—it has to be right there on the page.
– Louise Glück
BEAUTY OF THE BLUE SKY
Do we need to make a special effort to enjoy the beauty of the blue sky?
Do we have to practice to be able to enjoy it? No, we just enjoy it.
Each second, each minute of our lives can be like this.
Wherever we are, any time, we have the capacity to enjoy
the sunshine, the presence of each other, even the sensation of our breathing.
We don’t need to go to China to enjoy the blue sky.
We don’t have to travel into the future to enjoy our breathing.
We can be in touch with these things right now.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
What is being suggested is the initiation for enormous changes. In a man, or a woman, there is this potential energy that can just look, but can’t do more. We don’t know what will be the result of starting that process. Each time you start that process, it seems you forget, and forget again. But each time I start, I don’t know where I’ll forget or whether I’ll forget or not. I don’t know where it will lead. When I don’t know where it will lead, maybe then it will last longer. Maybe then I will be interested when I start. If it starts from some ego that wants to change something, it won’t last long. But if it starts from an energy that has awareness, that has the property which light has when it is transforming energy: do you understand what I mean by that? – if it has that property, maybe it will continue. I don’t know at the time I initiate this who is looking, whether I am using the right energy. There is a doing this and a self-observation. Maybe I’m cheating and trying to do something.
Or maybe I’m drawing on a possibility that exists, something universal, a chink of awareness. Maybe that awareness can ferment in me. I don’t know what is the process of that fermentation?
– Lord Pentland
It is only once in a while that you see someone whose electricity and presence matches yours at that moment.
– Charles Bukowski
The ancient world was settled so sparsely that nature was not yet eclipsed by man. Nature hit you in the eye so plainly and grabbed you so fiercely and so tangibly by the scruff of the neck that perhaps it really was still full of gods.
– Boris Pasternak
Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection …of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.
– David Whyte
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate…
– Anne Carson
It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.
– Anne Carson
To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.
– Michel Houellebecq
The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.
– Rollo May
Yet again, isn’t there something terrible in randomness—the idea that at the very bottom of its calculations, real depravity has no master plan of any kind, it’s just a dreamy whim that slides out of people when they are trapped or bored or too lazy to analyze their own mania.
– Aeschylus
Experiencing the radical present doesn’t mean detaching from what comes next.
– Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat Roshi
I am trying to write / a poem in which 1 am neither a monster nor a
martyr.
– Meghan O’Hern
You’re painfully alive in a drugged
and dying culture.
– Richard Yates
Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.
– Leo Tolstoy
After all those years of listening,
I thought you’d know
what a story was.
All you could do was weep.
You wanted everything told to you
and nothing thought through yourselves.
– Louise Glück
All the hardships of training teach you not only that nature can heal but also the importance of humility and surrender and recognizing that we’re part of something much larger. Surrender actually nourishes our sense of belonging.
– Hiroko Yoda
Not the blue the orthodoxy of the day
But a blue like intuition
The soft of the night into morning
Felt here. remembered
Under the hoofs of the cart
– Kamau Brathwaite
To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy.
– Robert Doisneau
Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.
– Dana Gioia
Happiness is to be outside, to walk, to look, to amalgamate with things. Sitting down, you fall victim to the worst of yourself. Man was not created to be nailed to a chair. But perhaps he doesn’t deserve any better.
– Emil Cioran
I was wedded to all the stars of the sky: There was not a single star left;
and I married every one of them with great spiritual pleasure…
Then I married the moon.
– Ibn Arabi
Fancy demanding feeling from poetry! That’s not the main thing at all. Radiant words, words of light, full of rhythm and music, that’s poetry.
– Théophile Gautier
The forces that are worked against you can only get through to you where your aura is weakened. Through your vices, your limiting beliefs, and what you’ve not made right within yourself.
– Nika Solé
There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever; everything useful is ugly.
– Théophile Gautier
There is a kind of dream we call kawaru yume. The Dream That Changes. There is the yochi yume, the dream in which you see what will happen. This is useful, to prepare for events that are otherwise unseen. The kawaru yume is more important. It’s seeing which world we are in, and whether we need to stay there. You not only see the future, you can lean in to make it change.
– Robert Moss
Mister Rogers once talked about how if you asked a room full of people to draw a tree, every single one would look different.
Even though we all know what a tree is.
And I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.
When we’re little, we create so freely.
Purple trees.
Crooked trees.
Trees with giant swirls and strange colors and wild ideas.
Children don’t begin by asking,
“Is this cool?”
They begin by asking,
“What if?”
But somewhere along the way, many of us slowly learn to stop drawing our own tree.
We start noticing what gets approval.
What gets likes.
What helps us fit in.
And little by little, some people begin hiding the parts of themselves that made them unique in the first place.
I know I did.
I spent a lot of years trying to fit in somewhere.
Trying to figure out who I was supposed to be.
And honestly, it wasn’t until I became a father—and really, maybe not even until my 30s—that I started circling back to something I knew naturally as a child:
There is only one me.
Only one person with my ideas, my imagination, my voice, my perspective, my way of seeing the world.
And the same is true for you.
Sometimes growing up is actually the process of finding the courage to become yourself again.
To stop apologizing for your creativity.
To stop shrinking your ideas.
To stop believing you have to draw the same tree as everybody else.
The world doesn’t need another copy.
It needs the tree only you would draw.
– Lauren Loveless
‘Jesus’ life didn’t go well. He didn’t reach his earning potential. He didn’t have the respect of his colleagues. His friends weren’t loyal. His life wasn’t long. He didn’t meet his soul mate. And he wasn’t understood by his mother.
…Yet I think I deserve all those things because I’m so spiritual.
– Hugh Prather
Cynics are only in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves.
– George Meredith
We must never be afraid to be a sign of contradiction for the world.
– Mother Teresa
Developing compassion is the most fruitful way of “getting even” with people who make you angry.
– Chögyam Trungpa
That outering or uttering of sense which is language and speech is a tool which ‘made it possible for man to accumulate experience and knowledge in a form that made easy transmission and maximum use possible.ʼ
– Marshall McLuhan
Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
– Charles Mingus
As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has-or ever will have-something inside that is unique to all time.
– Fred Rogers
Empaths did not come into this world to be victims, we came to be warriors. Be brave. Stay strong. We need all hands on deck.
– Anthon St. Maarten
A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a shortcut to meet it.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Of course everybody knows without telling that the king is naked: that the metaphysicians not only are unable to explain anything, but that hitherto they have not been able to present even a single hypothesis free from contradiction.
– Lev Shestov
There is no small act of kindness.
Every compassionate act makes large the world.
– Mary Anne Radmacher
In short, the medium is the message signifies not only the end of the message, but also the end of the medium. There are no longer media in the literal sense of the term … that is to say, a power mediating between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another — neither in content nor in form.
– Jean Baudrillard
My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.
– Jodi Picoult
People of uncommon abilities generally fall into eccentricities when their sphere of life is not adequate to their abilities.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When a society has no mythological anchor, no soul-affirming rites-of-passage, a society doesn’t know which story it’s in. When you lose the metaphor, a hand moves briskly to a rusty blade. We are adrift in an epidemic of the literal.
– Dr. Martin Shaw
You don’t really exist in the way that you think you do, so you are constantly trying to secure your existence.
– Chögyam Trungpa
A personal library is a quiet anchor.
– Rachel Carson
It’s interesting watching people underestimate you until they realize you were being humble, not incapable.
– J.
All ‘scholars’ are apt to be quarrelsome…
– J.R.R. Tolkien
In early morning
I gaze at the sweep of the sky
cloud formations I’ve never seen before
then realize that this particular sky
with its clouds, colors, curves
is unique
Each person is their own sky
never before present on earth
which a breath created long ago
in a singular garden
– Mark Gordon
We do not know what the psyche is, this noun taken from a verb psychein, ‘to breathe’. But therein lies the clue that the psyche is a verb and not a noun, a process and not an entity. To think of the psyche, even the unconscious, as an entity leads to the fallacy of literalism wherein one is more easily seduced by the fantasy of measurement or manipulation, rather than the more respectful effort to track those energies as intentions and to possibly align oneself with them.
– James Hollis
The fun of this whole thing is to make patterns, to figure out games, to do something with it.
– Alan Watts
If we think that things are being repeated, it is generally because we don’t pay attention to all of the details. But if we pay attention we see that there is no such thing as repetition.
– John Cage
We wholly overlook the essential fact that the achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.
– CG Jung
You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.
– Haruki Murakami
With an ambiguity I want to clarify: I hide from language inside language. When something–including nothingness–has a name, it seems less hostile. Nevertheless, I suspect that the essential is unspeakable.
– Alejandra Pizarnik, (tr. Cole Heinowitz)
We can faithfully adhere to a precept, and yet end up doing irreparable harm. We can never trace the ultimate consequence of our choices, but it’s safe to conclude that whatever we decide to do will be fraught with certain error and fall short of the best intent.
– Lin Jensen
If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.
– Haruki Murakami
The antidote to wrongs done in the past is restitution. But the only antidote to feelings of guilt, whether individual or collective, is repentance.
– Owen Barfield
Hard truth: If you are looking for perfect consistency in a relationship you are not going to find it. A human being is not a machine.
– Yung Pueblo
It’s always interesting that people search so tirelessly outside of themselves, for who they are.
– Nika Solé
Even if we are not at a meditation center, we can still practice at home, because around us the dharma is present. Each pebble, each leaf, each flower is preaching the dharma.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
A life based on thought and its activities becomes mechanical; however smoothly it may run, it is still mechanical action.
– Krishnamurti
VICTIMS OF CAPTOLOGY
I don’t look outside
or talk to the night
sky. I fall asleep
with my hands
holding my phone
like it’s your face.
– Kyla Jamieson
The Madman knows that once God is dead, man must live like a god: man must go beyond the limits of his own being, leave his own nature behind and assume the burden, the risk, and the pleasure of divinity.
– Octavio Paz
The work of art lives and develops, like any other natural organism, through the conflict of opposing principles. Opposites reach over into each other within it, taking the idea out into infinity.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
The metaphors we use to describe the world (such as a machine, a jungle, a seamless whole, a mother, a living being) affect ways we live.
– Lisa M Christie, PhD
You don’t need to seek awakening. Just notice where you’re resisting life, and soften there. Freedom is already here.
– Amoda Maa
Besides, I’m not in the mood for all this today. I have no desire to demonstrate, surprise, amuse, or persuade. My goal is absolute rest. To know nothing, to teach nothing, to want nothing, to sense nothing, to sleep, and then to sleep more.
– Charles Baudelaire
Clear-seeing comes not from mind-based beliefs or knowledge, but from the absence of the overlay of beliefs on what we see.
– Amoda Maa
I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way, we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
– Hermann Hesse
It’s also a basic misunderstanding about the nature of translation–cherry-picking a single word isn’t very useful or productive.
– Alicia E. Stallings
As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around.
– Haruki Murakami
Identification with our mind causes thought to become compulsive.
– Eckart Tolle
When the spiritual war on the planet heats up, those with the purest hearts and most active divine connection are chosen to lead humanity through it.
– Nika Solé
I think it’s okay if writers don’t have the answers to what happened in a story, as long as an emotional truth was discovered.
– Melissa Lozada-Oliva
Floating Sweet Dumpling
by Ho Xuan Huong
Translated by Marilyn Chin
My body is powdery white and round
I sink and bob like a mountain in a pond
The hand that kneads me is hard and rough
You can’t destroy my true red heart
The older I get, the more I understand people who move to the countryside, grow their own vegetables, get a dog, and only talk to about three people. That life gets more appealing every year.
– Introvert Problems
The universe has an odd habit of making the strongest souls wait the longest for the things meant for them.
– Nithya Shri
We are defined and controlled by all that we have not transcended.
– Adi Da
The legitimate function of the mind is to tell you what is not.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
We cannot let the oil companies, the gas companies, and petro states tell us what is permissible.
– Al Gore
Those who don’t want to change, let them sleep.
– Rumi
Wires
The widest prairies have electric fences,
For though old cattle know they must not stray
Young steers are always scenting purer water
Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires
Leads them to blunder up against the wires
Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter.
Young steers become old cattle from that day,
Electric limits to their widest senses.
– Philip Larkin
Human Mind
I dealed in love, baby
In good words, baby, from above
Ain’t always easy to supply
But I ain’t giving up, baby
Burning hillsides
Children dying by machines of war
And I know every tear that I’ve cried
Through the worst in my life
Was love in full supply
God bless the human mind
Who would dream the sweet design?
Even in these days I find
This far down the line
I find good in it sometimes
God bless the human mind
Find a reason, Lord, to keep on trying
With every tear you cry
You find good in it sometimes
I dealed in loss, daddy
I am the last, daddy, last of us
Ain’t always easy to believe
I miss my family, daddy
Spinning B-sides, singing “By and By”
Will mean once more and I
Know everyone can still fly
The best in my life is love in full supply
God bless the human mind
Who would dream the sweet design?
Even in these days I find
This far down the line
I find good in us sometimes
God bless the human mind
Find a reason, Lord, to keep on trying
With every tear you’ve cried
Find good in it sometimes
– Mavis Staples
I tell the rogues to read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the internet or watch too much television lose it… Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.
– Werner Herzog
I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.
– Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
There’s a dream I have in which I love the world.
– Cameron Awkward-Rich
One hour devoted to mourning and lamenting the stolen equality of the weak is nobler than a century filled with greed and usurpation.
– Kahlil Gibran
In a world in which we have a diagnostic term for every “abnormal” state of mind, we overlook the pathology of the “normal”: the unreflective participation in a destructive pursuit of status, wealth, and power.
We are so profoundly sick as a society that we do not see how spiritually ill that society asks us to be: it wants our souls lost in the doomscroll; it wants us addicted to flickering images, distracted by meaningless bickerings, all while the powerful do what they wish with our world.
In such a distorted world, those who are spiritually stationary appear “healthy.” Those who are spiritually searching, however, appear “ill”—and indeed they often are, as they are the rightly restless ones; they are the seekers; they are carrying the burden of something ancient, something new, something that has no place in a world that has abandoned the pursuit of Truth for the pursuit of winning the meaningless Game at all costs—even at the cost of lives, futures, souls.
Such a Truth needs solitude, patience, and deep communion in which to grow. If it does not become itself, it turns into bitterness, rage, destruction.
And that is just more currency for the Players of the Game.
But Truth has another chance to appear. If it does, it will come from the outcasts, from the thinkers, from the feelers; it will come from the artists who risk everything; it will come from the children who refuse to play the false game and choose the real one; it will come in some inconspicuous place, on some distant day, in the eyes of someone who has gone deep enough into the fear and the solitude and the mystery to be changed, to see the self and the other, to see the heart of the real.
And when that life speaks, when it comes with its clarity and mystery, we will be judged by whether we can hear it, by whether we have lost the capacity to do so, by whether we destroy it because we cannot bear the challenge of its simple and transformative truth.
We will be judged by whether we make a space for it at the table or crown it again in thorns.
Because that is what the lost do with Truth, with Beauty, with Love. They come face to face with the devastating clarity of its command—”love one another”—and they nail it in the air among the birds.
They build systems and wage wars to cover up that simple mystery. They slay that Truth and then wear its symbols in a mockery of what it came for.
They slay whatever wakens them too soon.
Our only hope is to not be so lost. Our only hope is in cultivating the ability to listen. Not just to speak, not just to opine, not just to consume mindlessly, but to listen.
Can we listen, really listen—to ourselves, to each other, to the voices that rise up in solitude, to the ancient things within us, trying to tell us what they have always known? Can we hear the great questions instead of the sham ones? Can we live? Do we even want to?
The command is simple but the way is hard. But it is a joyful difficulty. Because it is both rest and work. Both stillness and motion. Because all this listening and all this becoming and all this search for Truth is one thing: love.
What is the rain saying? What is your neighbor going through? What is that voice whispering in you, that hunger you’ve learned to ignore, that calling you’re told you’d be absolutely mad to follow through the dark of the door?
– Joseph Fasano
If we don’t have true perception of visual dharma, a lot of things can go wrong.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Empty, I echo to the least footfall.
– Sylvia Plath
Do not act out words. Never act out words. Never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. Never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death. Do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love.
– Leonard Cohen
Poetry Will Save the World
I prefer not to make definitive or
bold claims. But consider that this
is neither definitive nor bold, just
a noted truth. Not that the world
needs saving. Not that poetry has
a grand plan. Just that it is nearly
impossible to act in violence when
in full attendance of your life,
which a poem asks of you to be.
Just that an awakened heart, for
which poetry is a key, has no desire
beyond the greatest of desires—
to love the earth, to protect its
possibility, and then to pass it on,
to let it all go.
– Moudi Sbeity
The Document
by Noor Hindi
The document mistranslates. You live / to collect your loved one’s losses / Their archive. Their quiet. What did you leave behind, oh ache ? / Oh whimper? / You are everyone I kn(o/e)w. When I stood in Al Akhdar I heard the streets calling your name. I heard the men / stomping their feet & I wept & I wept & I wept across the Dead Sea, across (mis)memories of my mother pacing / that miserable street. Somewhere you are smoking argeela Playboy / sunglasses clasped to your shirt. Somewhere I am sleeping next to you & you are asking me about death & I am too young too young too young to know loss / & I promise you we’ll live forever. There at the edge / of Jaafar Al-Husseini Street my father returns / home all briefcase & sweaty hands. Once, a rooftop wedding. Once, a certificate of death. My father collected / every report card of mine growing up — A Pleasure to Have in Class A Pleasure / to grow up in the states, a pleasure to be untouched by the news to hold a Certificate / of Participation for Your Obedience to the State. You Live Long Enough in the United States & You Mistake an Israeli Warplane for A Shooting Star my friend says / her eyes / offering me a photo of the Sea. In Amman, I Don’t Have an Address to Your Grandmother’s Home, my 3amo says, but I Can WhatsApp You the Coordinates. From Dearborn Ramleh is 5,977 miles or 9619.049 kilometers away / depending on who we audience. In Amman I was Case No. 2530400000131915 because I lost my Passport & when the man with a cigarette asks me where I lost it I mishear him / I mistranslate & I am afraid / to cough from the smoke in that too small room & lose another country not mine. The Air Here . . . I tell her . . . If It’s Anything Like Cairo It’s Like Sand + Salt + Warmth + Also Somehow Sweet. It Fills Your Lungs Different. It’s Easier to Breathe, she tells me. In Palestine — I can’t tell you about Palestine / I’ve never been but I have my Father’s Documents to prove us / The documents that rename me / refuse me / spectacle our birth & our death The Document as map as fiction as shame as eviction Please Rate Your Experience Please / stand in this Assembly / Line of Loss / Please: We’ve all wanted to be loved / by an impossible thing / it’s why the monarch butterflies keep following us around & This Is How It Is Habibti / Things Happen Until You Die / & All You Can Do Is Not Break
The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found an enemy is manufactured.
– Chris Hedges
It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man.
– Henri de Lubac
The exceptionals get rewarded differently.
– JJ Omojuwa
The true use of music is to become musical in one’s thoughts, words, and actions.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan, Sufi mystic
An overdose of praise is like 10 lumps of sugar in coffee; only a very few people can swallow it.
– Emily Post
God did not create evil. Just as darkness is the absence of light, evil is the absence of God.
– Albert Einstein
Where love, grounded in truth, is absent, sin disorders speech and conduct, and offense is not accidental but inevitable.
– Sophion A. Theophilus
To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.
– Mahatma Gandhi
If you’re really successful at bullshitting, it means you’re not hanging around enough people smarter than you.
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
I am far from being bad and just as far from being good. I can be as soft as satin, or as hard as a coral stone. … I am simply man.
– Giacomo Casanova
Like a novelist who never outlines a book, I’d never plotted my future.
– Tom Grimes, Mentor
It’s the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.
– Jennifer Egan
No one carries the best parts of themselves. The best parts are those held inside of others.
– Daniel Kraus, Whalefall
One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
– Thomas Sowell
Authors are like tulips trampled beneath tyranny. In their desperation to preserve draconian regimes, oppressors attempt to shackle truth itself — yet the pen forever remains sovereign in its own dominion.
– Zargar Ishfaq
If we are to continue to exist, we will require more than intelligence. We will require wisdom.
– David Attenborough
Society corrupts the best of us. It is a little unfair to criticize a person for not sharing the enlightenment of a later epoch, but it is also profoundly saddening that such prejudices were so extremely pervasive. The question raises nagging uncertainties about which of the conventional truths of our own age will be considered unforgivable bigotry by the next.
– Carl Sagan
Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.
– Rene Descartes
An old error is
often more popular
than a new truth.
– German proverb
When you resist evil you are in fact celebrating life, and it’s okay to have a good time.
– Bruce Cockburn
The Self is the silent listener to the music of the spheres.
– Adi Shankara, Vivekachudamani
And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.
– Samantha Harvey
An artist can’t strive to make art any more than a monk can strive for enlightenment.
– Shozan Jack Haubner
If you go into the dark in this super graduated titrated way, what I found over and over is the darkness will show you the way.
– Andrew Holecek, On Dark Retreat
Witness is its own riddle that suspects it must create a world to say the world is real.
– Dan Beachy-Quick
If not for those black scratches
On the page
Where would I be?
Words connecting
The world
To the wound,
Connecting them both to me.
– Gregory Orr
Each of us, when in extremity, may, in that moment, find it impossible to escape the net of anguish, but a single person with a simple gesture can open such a door for us.
– Douglas J. Penick
A life-illusion is never wholly untrue. It is a vaporous eidolon of yourself that walks about with you wherever you go. It is a shadow. And because it is a shadow it has truth.
– John Cowper Powys
The whole task of art is to unexpress the expressible, to kidnap from the world’s language, which is the poor and powerful language of the passion, another speech, an exact speech.
– Roland Barthes
I will survive the wrong / I’ve done. All the love / that didn’t serve me.
– Leila Chatti
I find the blueprint
of the universe
in a leaf’s veins
in the breath
that weaves the morning
– Mark Gordon
Whenever the digital age encourages us to prize our rights over those of others, it overturns society as we know it and propels us ever farther from our best and deepest interests.
– Pico Iyer
With our thoughts we make ourselves unhappy because we are attached to the idea of trying to satisfy ourselves.
– Kosho Uchiyama Roshi
There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist
and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man.
You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover.
You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have
to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within
you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of
childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to
everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself.
You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek.
You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself.
You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you!
– Hermann Hesse
We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.
– Carl Rogers
…part of the problem was I had surrounded myself with the fiction writers instead of the poets. I had chosen the wrong world to immerse myself in; the poets were nightclub docents of mourning and melancholia and the fiction writers were real estate agents.
– Patrick Cottrell
To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life
Among strangers.
– Gerard Manley
Great art has often been made by bad people. So what? Expecting the artist to be a good person was a sentimental canard of Victorian moralism, rejected by the “art for art’s sake” movement led by Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.
– Camille Paglia
On my way home, I ask the sky to come down and keep me company, but the sky prefers its own boundlessness.
– Yuki Tanaka
The Other is not any one thing found in any particular place. It is a quality of (or rather visible in) all things, like a specific color. It shines through them at us. We see it and it sees back, as in a dialog…
– Philip K. Dick
To be nothing implies tremendous inward meditation. That is real meditation.
– Krishnamurti
Something in both of us
never got born:
too late to hack it out,
or to unlearn
needed, familiar pain.
Come, little thorn.
– Jay Macpherson
We are simply returning to the primordial ground of our own consciousness. This invites us to understand enlightenment not as becoming something sublime, but as returning to who we truly are—our original nature.
– Anam Thubten
That’s the way
it would be, everyone slender as drinking straws
nobody leaky
or hurting or abjectly religious, everything
allbillowyellowyorangeyflowywonderfulness
– C. D. Wright
If you don’t have a song to sing, you’re okay
You know how to get along, humming
– Fiona Apple
People make use of writers only in order to work off their own excess energy on them, in the form of agreement or disagreement.
– Robert Musil
ENGLISH
What language is this
that equates I love you
with I love turnips?
Can we not have another word
for passion, steady passion,
the agony that launched a thousand ships?
And let it be fresh,
yet one we’re used to:
I home you. You breathe me. We stallion.
If you cannot be a singer, be a story.
If you cannot be a story, be a song.
Say it, now,
to yourself, your love, your other:
I Rome you.
You Pompeii me.
I wouldn’t Judas you.
– Joceh Fasano
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.
– Herman Melville
Losing a Language
We were born with a
large door on our backs. When will
we know if it opens?
– Victoria Chang
They are so damn ‘intellectual’ and rotten that I can’t stand them anymore….I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those ‘artistic’ bitches of Paris.
– Frida Kahlo
It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard.
– Carl Rogers
The moment you choose truth over fear…
Everything begins to shift.
Not because the world changes —
but because you do.
Alignment starts quietly.
Doors open subtly.
Your light doesn’t force its way forward…
It simply stops hiding.
– Bill Philipps
Remember, you are the untouched presence observing the entire battles and drama of the person. You don’t need to move the mind aside to get to Truth, for Truth is not apart from you. Simply recognize and stay as the witnessing self.
– Mooji
I prefer to think of my patients and myself as fellow travelers, a term that abolishes distinctions between ‘them’ (the afflicted) and ‘us’ (the healers).
– Yalom
Writers are sorcerers of this realm. They take reality (and its neurologic recreations: dreams, memories) and turn it into a reality that is not reality but contingent on reality, a reality with the ability to alter reality in an endless feedback loop of forms and characters.
– delonix regia
This very day start your new life. Approach every experience in a new frame of mind with a new state of consciousness. Assume the noblest and the best for yourself in every respect and continue therein.
– Neville Goddard
Give your real being a chance, to shape your Life. The sinner and the saint are merely exchanging notes. The saint has a past and the sinner has a future. Therefore do not judge.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Long I sought you, late I found you,
Straying on the farther shore:
You indeed? a swaying phantom
Fades, that flickered on before.
Lost, no rescue: only dreams our
Wandered, wandered loves restore.
– Jay Macpherson
Home where I come from, well that all flow from, than memory
Deeper, the dreamland sluice that restores our friends:
Distant, sealed with a stone, but murmuring always:
If I forget thee, O secret fountain, forget not me.
– Jay Macpherson
When we get busy, we cut out the very things that will benefit us the greatest for the future, like training and personal development. If we miss these “upgrades,” when a change comes we will be less ready to embrace it.
– Cy Wakeman
What next device will fill the air with burning dollars
…
May we consent?
Consent to what? Nobody knows.
Yet the computers are convinced
Fed full of numbers by the True Believers.
– Thomas Merton (1961)
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves .
– Henry David Thoreau
God cannot be limited (even by his own Foundations) – of which St Paul is the first & prime example – and may use any channel for His grace.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
If Luther’s day expand to Darwin’s year,
Shall that exclude the hope—foreclose the fear?
– Herman Melville
Simplicity is not an end in art, but we usually arrive at simplicity as we approach the true sense of things.
– Constantin Brâncuși
We don’t know how long our lives will be or what misfortunes we may encounter later that may make it difficult to make real moral progress. So there is no time to lose!
– Jay L. Garfield
In olives ripened on the tree the very proximity of decay lends a special beauty to the fruit.
– Marcus Aurelius
The most honest artistic statement would read “I make stuff and figure it out later.
– Airea D. Matthews
There’s nobody living who couldn’t stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall. It’s a simple experience; you become lighter & lighter in weight. I want to draw a certain response like this––that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind
– Agnes Martin
It is easy to believe that we partake of certain virtues when we share in the defects they imply.
– Nicolás Gómez Davila
The Buddha is not in the ruins but in the continuous devotion of the people who visit.
– Philip Ryan
Even when the character is ourselves, in a memoir or essay, authors must find ways to allow readers deeply into their minds, their hearts, their skin.
– Tiffany Yates Martin
The poison was never forced;
it was offered gently,
until you forgot it was poison at all.
– Mark Twain
A master is always a friend, but his friendship has a totally different fragrance. It is less friendship and more friendliness. Its intrinsic part is compassion. He loves you because he cannot do anything else.
– Osho
I believe in the value of books and in reading, and the impact of small things, like a brief note with a few kind words. For me, the response acknowledges that they’ve been heard, that their request matters, and that they matter too.
– Andrea A. Firth
To come up with a good line is like briefly discovering that you are sane.
– Geoffrey Hill
Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.
– C.S. Lewis
“Read between the lives,” and “write between the lines.” “Be committed to something outside yourself…”
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The most feminine women are actually the most masculine within.
– Carl Jung
Technology is not only the thing that moves the human race forward, but it’s the only thing that ever has. Without technology, we’re just monkeys playing in the dirt.
– @naval
Nervous system regulation will change your whole world because reality looks completely different when you look at it from a place of inner peace. I see this shift every single day with my clients. It’s reality bending and world changing work.
– Nika Solé
At some point you discover the light in the darkness. You discover the lightness of being at your core, the jewel of freedom in the midst of all experiences. You discover that there really are no opposites in life … only those you create in your mind.
– Amoda Maa
You don’t have to hurry to get somewhere that has already been prepared for you. You just need to make sure that you’re the absolute best version of yourself when you arrive.
– Nika Solé
I want to talk about everything with at least one person as I do with myself.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Just because you are soft doesn’t mean you are not a force. Honey and wildfire are both the color gold.
– Victoria Erickson
Transference arises spontaneously in all human relationships … and the less its presence is suspected, the more powerfully it operates.
– Freud
If a father bathes his children, both will laugh, and if a son bathes his father, both will cry.
– Turkish proverb
There is no hurry, and in a way, there is no future. It is all here — so take it easy, take your time, and get acquainted with it.
– Alan Watts
We lost the plot when we started viewing the Earth as a giant store or landfill instead of a life-supporting miracle we are part of.
– @OrevaZSN
By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.
– H. D. Thoreau
I’ve always told people that all they have to do is read. But that’s the hardest thing to do.
– Hélène Cixous
I pray for your career. / That you aren’t crushed by the stupid and the vacant. / For whatever is left / of imagined, impossible careers: / dyspeptic soda jerk dying in Frazier, Indiana; / a librarian in Pompeii
– Paul Guest
If you cannot call wrong as wrong, you’re at the last stage of slavery.
– Che Guevara
early dawn light
the tea glowing
on its own
– @BashoSociety
We are all
voyeurs of
the universe.
– David Starzynski
lying in a hammock on St. Mark’s Place sorting my poems
in the rancid nourishment of this mountainous island
– Frank O’Hara
Bedouin of the London Evening
Ten years in your cafés and your bedrooms
Great city, filled with wind and dust!
Bedouin of the London evening,
On the way to a restaurant my youth was lost.
And like a medium who falls into a trance
So deep, she can be scratched to death
By her Familiar – at its leisure!
I have lain rotting in a dressing-gown
While being savaged (horribly) by wasted youth.
I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown
My private modern life has gone to waste.
– Rosemary Tonks
Poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to remember what they are risking. What I see as poetry is a sample of the human scene, its incurably acute melancholia redeemed only by affection.
– David Schubert
If you get your back up when someone questions your ideology, it’s because your ideology has become your identity. Don’t do that.
– Kenneth Folk
Language becomes for us, not a tool invented by individual minds, but an echo reverberating from the source of all individual minds, of all individual selves.
– Owen Barfield
Without hard work, you‘ll develop neither judgement nor leverage.
– @naval
The infinite is bliss. There is no bliss in anything finite. Only the Infinite is bliss. One must desire to understand the Infinite.
– Chandogya Upanishad
Spirituality gets stuck on thinking that you need to dissolve your self. Like you can’t have human emotions or a backbone. But I don’t think that’s true at all. The integration of and existing as all of it is, to me, the entire point.
– Nika Solé
But what if we take forgiveness off the table?
His question dangles in the silence between us.
Unanswered, yet spacious.
– Rachel Newcombe
The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?
– Emil Cioran
fading light
as the day
releases its hold
– Ogawa
One benefit of doing shadow work is most people’s insults towards you won’t work anymore because you’ve been reflecting on that part of yourself for years.
– Laura Matsue
subjectivity or self-aware consciousness is not an attribute I would attach to a river […] one way to imagine the life of the river is to consider the multiplicity of lives concentrated in this moving, directional form …
– Lisa Robertson
Every person sooner or later invents a story that they take to be their life.
– Max Frisch
Your own tactic is to train yourself in the art of becoming enigmatic to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubled himself to guess your riddle–what joy, then, would you have in it?
– Søren Kierkegaard
Weakness on both sides is, as we know, the motto of all quarrels.
– Voltaire
Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.
– Rene Magritte
I no have education. I have inspiration. If I was educated I would be a damn fool.
– Bob Marley
Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
– Matthew Arnold
If your work comes from a place deep within, its authenticity will be communicated.
– Robert Greene, Mastery
Everything in the Universe was as the Creator willed it – nothing superfluous, nothing lacking – a harmony.
– Joseph Hertz
Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one.
– Matthew Arnold
People have to go through dark times;
the mark of a person is can they do it.
– Martin Short
The things that seem insignificant to most people such as a note, song or walk become invaluable treasures kept safe in your heart to cherish forever.
– Bob Marley
The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.
– Henry David Thoreau
They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life.
– Louise Glück
Methinks that the moment my legs began to move, my thoughts began to flow.
– Henry David Thoreau
Time ripens all things; no one is born wise.
– Miguel de Cervantes
What is war? War is when you really want to live.
– Svetlana Alexeivich
What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I know what they’d like, they’d like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly.
– Patricia Highsmith
Wisdom is sold in a desolate marketplace where none can come to buy.
– William Blake
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
– Sigmund Freud
You can take a man’s show, but you can’t take his voice.
– David Letterman
Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.
– Richard Dawkins
Of course, grown-ups won’t believe you. They imagine they need a lot of space. They think they’re as important as baobab trees.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Love is a sacred mystery.
To those who love, it remains forever wordless;
But to those who do not love, it may be but a heartless jest.
– Khalil Gibran
We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.
– George Eliot
The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
– Matthew Arnold
It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Imagine a world where belonging is the foundation of life… the air is filled with laughter, the streets with trust, and the homes with love.
– Ken Breniman
The world is incomprehensible. We won’t ever understand it; we won’t ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as it is: a sheer mystery.
– Carlos Castaneda
Most writers are at once their own readers — as they write — and that is why so many traces of the reader appear in their works — so many critical considerations — so much which is the province of the reader and not the writer.
– Novalis, Teplitz Fragments
To keep our hearts open is probably the most urgent responsibility you have as you get older.
– Leonard Cohen
Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.
– Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
The Celtic imagination always sensed that beneath time there was eternal depth. This offers us a completely different way of relating to time. It relieves time of the finality of ending. While something may come to an ending on the surface of time, its presence, meaning, and effect continue to be held and integrated into the eternal. This is how spirit unfolds and deepens. In this sense, eternal time is intimate; it is where the unfolding narrative of individual life is gathered and woven. Eternal life is eternal memory; therefore, it becomes possible to imagine a realm beyond endings where all that has unfolded is not canceled or lost, but where the spirit-depths of it are already arriving home.
– John O’Donohue
Fiction writers really expect to be heard.
Whereas poets don’t. Poets go into writing poetry knowing it’s speculation.
– Fanny Howe
All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression “metaphysical exile” had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.
– Emil Cioran
a sight of Manahatta in the towering needle
multi-faceted insight of the fly in the stringless labyrinth
– Frank O’Hara
The universe is exactly the size
that your soul can encompass.
Some people live in extremely
small worlds, and some live in a
world of infinite possibility.
– Kevin Hearne
Maintain the merry theme of life.
– Martin Short documentary
This is one of the deep motives for literature, or for art of any sort: that one is defeating the formlessness of the world. One is cheering oneself up [and] instructing oneself by giving a form to something that is, perhaps, alarmingly formless.
– Iris Murdoch
where is the summit where all aims are clear?
– Frank O’Hara
I talk to God but the sky is empty.
– Sylvia Plath
Silence is the ally of reason. It allows thoughts to grow. It is the seed of kind words.
– Paweł Cwynar
To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind.
– William Hazlitt
As any good therapist will tell you, you cannot heal what you do not acknowledge, and what you do not consciously acknowledge will remain in control of you from within, festering and destroying you and those around you.
– Richard Rohr
Cosmology does, I think, affect the way that we perceive humanity’s role in nature. One thing we’ve learnt from astronomy is that the future lying ahead is more prolonged than the past. Even our sun is less than halfway through its life.
– Martin Rees
There are times when the spirit is completely darkened because it needs to be reborn.
– CG Jung
We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works.
– Gabrielle Zevin
The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back?
– Patricia Highsmith
The need to belong is not just a product of weakness and a need to join forces with something or someone stronger than myself. Often the intense desire to belong has its roots in my own strength — I want to belong so that my strength doesn’t prove to be pointless, but can be used to shore up another person or thing.
– Clarice Lispector
Socialists spent decades warning capitalism would eat itself. The cruel joke is that it ate them first.
– The Economist
The flower in the vase smiles, but no longer laughs.
– Malcolm de Chazal
Genuine beginnings begin within us, even when they are brought to our attention by external opportunities.
– William Bridges
You cannot champion a culture while distancing yourself from the language that gives it life.
– Nekeisha Burchell
If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
– Leo Tolstoy
I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with ‘you’ in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.
– Christopher Hitchens
I’m astounded by people who want to ‘know’ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.
– Woody Allen
You were convinced before you understood why. That is not weakness — that is the image doing its actual work.
– @rrose.selaivy
the reason why black people designed jazz to sound like it does, is because we knew if white people couldn’t understand it, they couldn’t steal it from us.
– Miles Davis
Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.
– Ray Bradbury
What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?
– Robert Nozick
The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay … More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.
– Matthew Arnold
Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.
– Albert Einstein
Today we call them ‘angels’ and ‘demons’… tomorrow, we will call them something else.
– Aleister Crowley
There are thoughts so heavy they punish you simply for having them…
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
– Matthew Arnold
Wisdom requires not only the investigation of many things, but contemplation of the mystery.
– Jeremy Narby
I have a naive trust in the universe – that at some level it all makes sense, and we can get glimpses of that sense if we try.
– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
– Max Planck
Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative.
– Matthew Arnold
The problem with hoarding is you end up living off your reserves. Eventually, you’ll become stale. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish. . . . Somehow the more you give away, the more comes back to you.
– Paul Arden
When you re-read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in yourself than there was before.
– Clifton Fadiman
Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
– Matthew Arnold
Here is the simple truth about people: Love the ones you want to keep.
– Iain Thomas
Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.
– Edward Abbey
I never removed anyone from my life
They all died in the accident of trust
– Fyodor Dostoevesky
Don’t bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality.
– Bob Marley
Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.
– Matthew Arnold
The heavens are full of floating mysteries.
– Thomas Buchanan Read
Not deep the poet sees, but wide.
– Matthew Arnold
The fundamental idea of good is thus; that it consists in preserving life, in favoring it, in wanting to bring it to its highest value; and evil consists in destroying life, doing it injury, hindering its development.
– Albert Schweitzer
I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations which constitute a picture.
– Henri Matisse
Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.
– Barbara Brown Taylor
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
– Matthew Arnold
American free-market capitalism generates—it allows things to be brought to life. Socialism merely distributes what is. And in the end it always relies on lies, the first of which is always that it works.
– Peggy Noonan
It is the dim haze of mystery that adds enchantment to pursuit.
– Antoine Rivarol
To be human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.
– Matt Haig
There is an ocean of endless opportunities, and there are so many things that one can do. I’m so fortunate that I’ve grown up with this sort of a philosophy and mentality.
– Hafez Nazeri
The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
– Ken Kesey
Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.
– Henry Rollins
If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.
– Leonardo da Vinci
Men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
– Matthew Arnold
My life is only important if i can help plenty of people.
– Bob Marley
Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another.
– Ottessa Moshfegh
Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.
– Matthew Arnold
At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity.
– Rachel Naomi Remen
Today, this hopeless case is healed.
– Sy Montgomery
Never in human history has an entire generation had it as good, on average, as the Western Boomers, namely Americans and Western Europeans who came of age catching cheap houses, free-or-cheap college, rising wages, booming markets, and a welfare state still intact behind them.
This isn’t a grievance post. The Boomers didn’t engineer their luck, and guilt/shame doesn’t seem to work well as a foundation for politics. But that luck wasn’t accidental either. It was the result of a progressive era—the New Deal, the GI Bill, strong labor unions, public universities, the whole postwar social contract—that their parents and grandparents fought for and built. They inherited a wave and rode it well. Many of them are still riding it. The job now, theirs, ours, all of us downstream of that era, is to build the next one. And it can’t be a remake (like seemingly every movie coming out today).
The first progressive era was, let’s be real, a deal cut largely for white Americans and Western Europeans, financed in no small part by what was extracted from everyone else. The next one has to be wider. Across generations, yes. But also across the borders and histories we’ve spent a century pretending don’t connect to our prosperity. A progressive era worthy of the name shares the wave—with the Millennials and Zoomers locked out of housing, with the Global South we built our wealth on top of, with the generations not yet born who’ll inherit whatever world we leave them.
The Boomers got the ride of a lifetime. The question isn’t whether they deserved it. The question is whether the rest of us have the political imagination to build something bigger, and the moral conviction to actually share it.
– Vince Horn
Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization. Complete analogy.
– Simone Weil
Most of us have been conditioned… Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.
– The Dalai Lama
It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting them on this earth.
– Joseph Conrad
At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people.
– Anton Chekhov
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
– E.M. Forster
Indeed, intolerance is essential only to monotheism; an only God is by nature a
jealous God who will not allow another to live.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The most common sort of lie is that by which
a man deceives himself: the deception of
others is a relatively rare offense.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
You think that you can only establish true practice after you attain enlightenment, but it is not so.
True practice is established in delusion, in frustration.
If you make some mistake, that is where to establish your practice.
There is no other place for you to establish your practice.
We talk about enlightenment, but in its true sense perfect enlightenment is beyond our understanding, beyond our experience.
Even in our imperfect practice enlightenment is there.
We just don’t know it.
So the point is to find the true meaning of practice before we attain enlightenment.
Wherever you are, enlightenment is there.
If you stand up right where you are, that is enlightenment.
– Shunryu Suzuki
Rest is a weapon given to us by God. The enemy hates it because he wants us stressed and occupied.
– Elizabeth Elliot
He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.
– Horace
Some people are so much sunshine to the square inch.
– Walt Whitman
Absolute care is love. Without this love, there can be no change in society.
– Krishnamurti
A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.
– Mark Rothko
The old dreams were good dreams; they didn’t work out, but I’m glad I had ’em’.
– Robert James Waller
With open arms we welcome the stranger and discover the friend.
– Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out
Life is not about how fast you run or how high you climb, but how well you bounce.
– Vivian Komori
“How old are you?”
“Old enough to have regrets. Young enough to write it down.”
– Eugene Thacker
Don’t ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on.
– Marshall McLuhan
If I close my eyes, I see things better than with my eyes open.
– Henri Matisse
We can have capitalism without monopolies. Everything is owned by a monopoly, yet we were taught in school that they were illegal.
– Mergers & Aquisitions, Private Equity
The law works fear and wrath; grace works hope and mercy.
– Martin Luther
In short, there are mysteries of science and of soul that will never be understood no matter how hard we measure, no matter how strongly we believe, no matter how deep our think tanks and how high our aspirations. But as anyone will tell you—for we all know this within our hearts—the impossible happens and grand cosmic mysteries are solved on a regular basis, although most of the time the solutions lead to even greater mysteries.
– Neal Shusterman
Earthly possessions dazzle our eyes and delude us into thinking that they can provide security and freedom from anxiety. Yet all the time they are the very source of anxiety.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
Colours have their own distinctive beauty that you have to preserve, just as in music you try to preserve sounds. It is a question of organization, of finding the arrangement that will keep the beauty and freshness of the colour.
– Henri Matisse
Truth needs not flowers of speech.
– Alexander Pope
Life is a reciprocal exchange. To move forward, you have to give back.
– Oprah Winfrey
If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control.
– Elizabeth Gilbert
When I paint green, it doesn’t mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn’t mean sky.
– Henri Matisse
If you look at the moon, you’ll see the beauty of God. If you look to the sun, you’ll see the power of God. If you look the mirror, you’ll see the God’s greatest creation. So believe in it.
– Charlie Chaplin
Other human beings are not our enemies. Our enemy is not the other person. Our enemy is the violence, ignorance, and injustice in us and in the other person. When we are armed with compassion and understanding, we fight not against other people, but against the tendency to invade, to dominate, and to exploit…
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth ever afterward resumes its liberty.
– Walt Whitman
The mind is like a wild forest; it must be cleared with the tool of mindfulness.
– Gautama Buddha
Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.
– bell hooks
There is no misery in art. All art is about saying yes, and all art is about its own making.
– John Currin
Every hour of every day is an unspeakably perfect miracle.
– Walt Whitman
Experience, the only logic sure to convince a diseased imagination and restore it to rugged health.
– Mark Twain
The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
– E.L. Doctorow
The habit of giving only enhances the desire to give.
– Walt Whitman
Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village… a simultaneous happening.
– Marshall McLuhan
A story is rarely the full sky — it is usually just one person’s horizon.
– Tomi Arayomi
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
– Marshall McLuhan
Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.
– Marshall McLuhan
Nothing is more highly to be prized than the value of each day.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Future generations depend on whether humanity learns stewardship instead of greed and responsibility instead of destruction.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.
– Hermann Hesse
Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.
– CS Lewis
The hardest thing is facing yourself. It’s easier to shout “Revolution” and “Power to the People” than it is to take a look at yourself; find out what’s real inside you and what isn’t, when you’re pulling the wool over your own eyes and your own hypocrisy…that’s the hardest one.
– John Lennon
If you want to hear the sound of birds, don’t buy a cage. Plant a tree.
– Bruce Newman
You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.
– Salvador Dalí
The world suffers when pride, division, and hatred become louder than compassion, humility, and love.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
A generation connected to screens but disconnected from peace must learn again how to heal the mind, soul, and heart.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
If what we already know were simply applied to all the agricultural land of the world and the problem of proper distribution were given consideration, the world could feed itself well.
– Louis Bromfield
I have always been fascinated by
the law of reversed effort.
Sometimes I call it “the backwards law.”
When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float.
Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure—contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves.
– Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
Humanity needs emotional healing as deeply as it needs education, because wounded minds can silently destroy destinies.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
Ideas are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.
– Carl Schurz
If you’re overwhelmed, it means you still care. Let that be your compass—not your curse.
– Lawrence Nault
My life is sustained by the world of beauty which you will see where ever you rest your eyes, and this beauty is nature itself.
– Kahlil Gibran, Before the Throne of Beauty
It’s a funny feeling to work with people who you consider your colleagues and to realize that they actually are young enough to be your children.
– Alan Alda
None of us know enough to be dogmatic. All that we wisest can say is, “At the present time, such and such appears to be true”; if we be wise, we add, “But fuller knowledge may make a change of opinion necessary.”
– J.W. (John Wesley) Hanson
Without enough wilderness America will change. Democracy, with its myriad personalities and increasing sophistication, must be fibred and vitalized by regular contact with outdoor growths – animals, trees, sun warmth and free skies – or it will dwindle and pale.
– Walt Whitman
I loved watching her at the dinner table, speaking passionately about her work. And I would think to myself: this is home.
– Haruki Murakami
So much had fallen into the sea. Hats fell in to the sea. Hearts fell into the sea. So much had fallen into the sea.
– Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light
The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting it around and changing the rules and so forth. No, any world is a living world if it’s alive, and the thing is to bring it to life. And the way to bring it to life is to find in your own case where your life is, and be alive yourself, it seems to me.
– Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
– Joseph Campbell
Imagine a world where empathy replaces fear, equity dismantles hierarchies, and safety becomes a right, not a privilege.
– Ken Breniman
In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
Ask for work. If they don’t give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.
– Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays
From Jung I took courage to tell my patients not to put their faith in abstract concepts. Put your faith in your own unconscious, your own dreams.
– Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work
Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
– Walt Whitman
Before there were gods, there were patterns. The gods are the patterns wearing faces.
– Unknown
Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one’s soul. This turning is done through one’s own affirmation of one’s worth – an affirmation fueled by the concern of others.
– Cornel West
Don’t try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.
– Henri Matisse
Our telling shapes what the past becomes.
– Jen Gippel
I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea –
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch –
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience –
– Emily Dickinson
We cannot find our enlightened minds while continuing to be estranged from our neurotic ones.
– Mark Epstein
We are, from a purely biological perspective, simply breathing pieces of defecating meat, no more significant or enduring than a lizard or a potato.
– Sheldon Solomon
The point is not to pay back kindness but to pass it on.
– Julia Alvarez
A wise woman puts a grain of sugar into everything she says to a man, and takes a grain of salt with everything he says to her.
– Helen Rowland
“Work” does not exist in a non-literate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
– Marshall McLuhan
An artist is a title that you earn. And it’s a little embarrassing to hear people refer to themselves as artists. It’s like referring to themselves as a genius.
– Charles Eames
If you feel like nothing after you have lost something, it means that the thing you lost was your everything.
– Tim Keller
Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Man is not the partial component but the final product. He is not a part of the All but rather the all its living expression.
– R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz
How in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again?
– Robin Wall Kimerer
Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
– William Hazlitt
Salt is born of the purest parents: the sun and the sea.
– Pythagoras
Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all.
– Nelson Mandela
Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex.
– Oscar Fingal O’Fflahertie Wills Wilde
Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.
– M. F. K. Fisher
Let fortune do her worst, whatever she makes us lose, so long as she never makes us lose our honesty and our independence.
– Alexander Pope
It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe to venture to instruct, even our friends.
– Charles Caleb Colton
We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.
– Bill Vaughan
There’s nothing more political than the lens through which we use to view the world. Only if we learn to look at the world differently can we act differently.
– Clara Mattei
The Imaginal Stage
by D. A. Powell
turns out
there are more planets than stars
more places to land
than to be burned
I have always been in love with
last chances especially
now that they really do
seem like last chances
the trill of it all upending
what’s left of my head
after we explode
are you ready to ascend
in the morning I will take you
on the wing
You tried to change, didn’t you? Closed your mouth more, tried to be softer, prettier, less volatile, less awake…You can’t make homes out of human beings. Someone should have already told you that.
– Warsan Shire
It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
– Sigmund Freud
The great Buddhist truth is that we have been whole from the very beginning: we only need realize it.
– Taylor Plimpton
One can only say that a person who has no myth or solid idea about the meaning of life, or simply believes what he reads in the newspapers, is neurotic and is to be pitied, for he is caught in believing in only ideological half-truths.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other’s opposite and complement.
– Hermann Hesse
A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all evidence that would unseat it.
– Gordon W. Allport
Intentionally regulating emotions is a slippery slope toward suppressing them.
– Margaret Cullen
I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be to forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you.
– C.S. Lewis
Only when the distress reaches a certain proportion are we likely to look within, to reexamine the principles and perceptions that govern our lives, or to enter a serious self-examination. Yet it is in those moments that the opening to a larger life begins.
– James Hollis
The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
– Rollo May
The greatest courage is not needed for war,
but for ordinary people growing old.
– Red Hawk
You are accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not seek for anything. Do not perform anything, do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.
– Paul Tillich
The fact is that there are people, good people who,
not because they want to
but all the same,
fall in love with the wrong thing.
– Anne Carson
Page by page I slowly and lucidly reread everything I’ve written and find that it’s all worthless . . . What grieves me is that my best is no good, and that another whom I dream of, if he existed, would have done better. Everything we do, in art or in life, is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing.
– Fernando Pessoa
they say we’re at war
i think we’re falling in love
with the human race
– John Paul Lederach
I believe that the spirits are your parents and their parents and their parents and their parents and they are in your bloodstream, and they run through your body constantly. Because they want you to live on, because they want to live on. And they’re trying all the time to tell you shit and if you just spend a few minutes listening to yourself, you would hear them.
– Gil Scott-Heron
The inability to remember is itself perhaps a memory.
– John Berger
I feel as if I am an ad
for the sale of a haunted house:
18 rooms
$37,000
I’m yours
ghosts and all.
– Richard Brautigan
When you encounter those who are wicked, unrighteous, foolish, dim-witted, deformed, vicious, chronically ill, lonely, unfortunate, or disabled, you should think: “How can I save them?” And even if there is nothing you can do, at least you must not indulge in feelings of arrogance, superiority, derision, scorn, or abhorrence, but should immediately manifest sympathy and compassion. If you fail to do so, you should feel ashamed and deeply reproach yourself: “How far I have strayed from the Way! How can I betray the old sages?” I take these words as an admonition to myself.
– Ryokan
When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.
– Alexandre Dumas
The real culprit was, and remains, something that neither Democrats nor Republicans have shown any willingness to tackle seriously: unprecedentedly high and growing levels of income and wealth inequality. Since the 1970s, economic gains around the world have been heavily concentrated at the top of the income ladder. The wealthy are spending more now on everything simply because they have more money, and this has spawned the changes in spending patterns that have made it much more difficult for low- and middle income families to achieve basic life goals.
– How Inequality Caused America’s Affordability Crisis
I need my memories. They are my documents. I keep watch over them. They are my privacy and I am intensely jealous of them. Cézanne said, ‘I am jealous of my little sensations.’ To reminisce and woolgather is negative. You have to differentiate between memories. Are you going to them or are they coming to you? If you are going to them, you are wasting time. Nostalgia is not productive. If they come to you, they are the seeds for [your work].
– Louise Bourgeois
The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The porter runs to the heavy load and takes it from others,
knowing burdens are the foundation of ease
and bitter things the forerunners of pleasure.
See the porters struggle over the load!
It’s the way of those who see the truth of things.
Paradise is surrounded by what we dislike;
the fires of hell are surrounded by what we desire.
– Rumi
For me, the challenge is to play music that makes the audience imagine they are playing it too. Maybe they think or have been told that they are not artists and can’t perform. Then, when they hear music, they get the feeling that they can do what they had thought they couldn’t.
– Wayne Shorter
In the Green Morning, Now, Once More
In the green morning, before
Love was destiny,
The sun was king,
And God was famous.
The merry, the musical,
The jolly, the magical,
The feast, the feast of feasts, the festival
Suddenly ended
As the sky descended
But there was only the feeling,
In all the dark falling,
Of fragrance and of freshness,
of birth and beginning.
– Delmore Schwartz
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith, being crowned,
Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight
And Time that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of natures truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow;
And yet, to times, in hope, my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
– William Shakespeare
Fascist and Nazi totalitarianism…do not occur because a Hitler or Mussolini decides to seize power. When a nation…is psychologically and spiritually empty, totalitarianism comes in to the fill the vacuum; and the people sell their freedom as a necessity for getting rid of the anxiety which is too great to bear any longer.
– Rollo May
We build a fire in a powder magazine, then double the fire department to put it out. We inflame wild beasts with the smell of blood, and then innocently wonder at the wave of brutal appetite that sweeps the land as a consequence.
– Mark Twain
Landscape is my religion.
…God in a green legend, I lean over the pool
In a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood
Before me in a cool cave roofed with branches
And floored with a skin of water.
– Norman MacCaig
Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.
– C.S. Lewis
[…I]t’s taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid, so thank you for that […].
You also asked after the meaning of my practice of letter writing,
calling it quaint and impractical […]. [H]ere is a secret: my letters have been far more meaningful to me than anything I did with the law. […] Writing letters was easier for me than speaking; it still is. […]
Imagine all that you have said to another, all the commentary you have exchanged with friends over drinks, over the phone with colleagues and distant relatives, all the prattle sent quickly, mindlessly over e-mail, messages typed into your cellular phone, and really, the sum of this interpersonal communication is the substance of your life, relationships being, as we know by now in our old ages, the meat of our lives; but all of that is gone. Vanished!
And yet, if one has committed oneself to the page, the tragedy I’ve just laid out will not apply. Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?
– Virginia Evans, The Correspondent
Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice.
– Kurt Vonnegut
It is a pity that there are no big creatures to prey on humanity. If there were enough dragons and rocs, perhaps mankind would turn its might against them. Unfortunately man is preyed upon by microbes, which are too small to be appreciated.
– T.H. White
Now many crises in people’s lives occur because the hero role that they’ve assumed for one situation or set of situations no longer applies to some new situation that comes up, or–the same thing in effect–because they haven’t the imagination to distort the new situation to fit their old role. This happens to parents, for instance, when their children grow older, and to lovers when one of them begins to dislike the other. If the new situation is too overpowering to ignore, and they can’t find a mask to meet it with, they may become schizophrenic–a last-resort mask–or simply shattered. All questions of integrity involve this consideration, because a man’s integrity consists in being faithful to the script he’s written for himself.
I’ve said you’re too unstable to play any one part all the time–you’re also too unimaginative–so for you these crises had better be met by changing scripts as often as necessary. This should come naturally to you; the important thing for you is to realize what you’re doing so you won’t get caught without a script, or with the wrong script in a given situation. You did quite well, for example, for a beginner, to walk in here so confidently and almost arrogantly a while ago, and assign me the role of a quack. But you must be able to change masks at once if by some means or other I’m able to make the one you walked in with untenable. Perhaps–I’m just suggesting an offhand possibility–you could change to thinking of me as The Sagacious Old Mentor, a kind of Machiavellian Nestor, say, and yourself as The Ingenuous But Promising Young Protégé, a young Alexander, who someday will put all these teachings into practice and far outshine the master. Do you get the idea? Or–this is repugnant, but it could be used as a last resort–The Silently Indignant Young Man, who tolerates the ravings of a Senile Crank but who will leave this house unsullied by them. I call this repugnant because if you ever used it you’d cut yourself off from much that you haven’t learned yet.
It’s extremely important that you learn to assume these masks wholeheartedly. Don’t think there’s anything behind them: ego means I, and I means ego, and the ego by definition is a mask. Where there’s no ego–this is you on the bench–there’s no I. If you sometimes have the feeling that your mask is insincere–impossible word!–it’s only because one of your masks is incompatible with another. You mustn’t put on two at a time. There’s a source of conflict, and conflict between masks, like absence of masks, is a source of immobility. The more sharply you can dramatize your situation, and define your own role and everybody else’s role, the safer you’ll be. It doesn’t matter in Mythotherapy for paralytics whether your role is major or minor, as long as it’s clearly conceived, but in the nature of things it’ll normally be major. Now say something.
– John Barth
Consciousness is all there is, flowing, streaming through these instruments in a manner which, in accordance with the perfect unfolding of totality, is perceived as discreet individual entities autonomously performing actions, but in truth this is not the case. There is no individual, no entity, no separate self here to do anything or to be anything, awakened or enlightened included.
– David Carse, Perfect Brilliant Stillness
The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it’s you I’m addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You’ve read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don’t go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where’s your shame?
– John Barth
Once Miles Davis asked me, “How do you play from nothing?” And I said, “You know, you just do it.” And that actually is the answer. I wish there were a way to make “I don’t know” a positive thing, which it isn’t in our society. We feel that we need to “know” certain things, and we substitute that quest for the actual experience of things in all its complexity. When I play pure improvisation, any kind of intellectual handles are inappropriate because they get in the way of letting the river move where it’s supposed to move.
– Keith Jarrett
Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she’d see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her…and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.
– John Barth
Human beings have launched satellites into outer space, and yet they still grovel on earth looking at their own feet like wild dogs. What is to become of our planet?
– Akira Kurosawa
Too late she saw: what she’d favored him with in jest he had received with adoration.
– John Barth
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.
– Anne Lamott
If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.
– Dwight D Eisenhower
It’s about all of us wanting to stand where he stands and to include as he does. It is less about what it is we are to do at the margins, and more about what will happen to us if we stand there.
– Gregory Boyle
The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.
– Tom Stoppard
When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.
– Baltasar Gracian
Humans have a tendency to fall prey to the illusion that their economy is at the very center of the universe, forgetting that the biosphere is what ultimately sustains all systems, both man-made and natural. In this sense, ‘environmental issues’ are not about saving the planet—it will always survive and evolve with new combinations of atom—but about the prosperous development of our own species.
– Carl Folke
According to an old Native American legend, one day there was a big fire in the forest. All the animals fled in terror in all directions, because it was a very violent fire. Suddenly, the jaguar saw a hummingbird pass over his head, but in the opposite direction. The hummingbird flew towards the fire!
Whatever happened, he wouldn’t stop. Moments later, the jaguar saw him pass again, this time in the same direction as the jaguar was walking. He could observe this coming and going, until he decided to ask the bird about it, because it seemed very bizarre behavior.
“What are you doing, hummingbird?” he asked.
“I am going to the lake,” he answered, “I drink water with my beak and throw it on the fire to extinguish it.” The jaguar laughed. ‘Are you crazy? Do you really think that you can put out that big fire on your own with your very small beak?’
‘No,’ said the hummingbird, ‘I know I can’t. But the forest is my home. It feeds me, it shelters me and my family. I am very grateful for that. And I help the forest grow by pollinating its flowers. I am part of her and the forest is part of me. I know I can’t put out the fire, but I must do my part.’
At that moment, the forest spirits, who listened to the hummingbird, were moved by the bird and its devotion to the forest. And miraculously they sent a torrential downpour, which put an end to the great fire.
The Native American grandmothers would occasionally tell this story to their grandchildren, then conclude with, “Do you want to attract miracles into your life? Do your part.”
You have no responsibility to save the world or find the solutions to all problems—but to attend to your particular personal corner of the universe. As each person does that, the world saves itself.”
– provenance unknown
…like this definition of love, or caritas: “to earnestly desire the achievement of wholeness by the beloved.” Notice that it doesn’t say, “To give the gift of wholeness to the beloved” or “To impose wholeness on the beloved.” This can be hard to remember when it comes to one’s own children, who are, as Kahlil Gibran said, “the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.” Kahlil Gibran didn’t actually have any children, incidentally; he just wrote lovely things about them. “How do you do it all?” a woman who doesn’t know me asked when she heard that in addition to being a law enforcement chaplain and a writer, I am mother to six children (including steps). “I do quite a lot of it badly,” I said.
– Marriage and Other Acts of Charity: A Memoir by Kate Braestrup
Two of their young hunters rescued a dragonfly stuck in the mud. It gave them the usual wishes you get in these stories. One wished to be the smartest man in the world. The dragonfly said, ‘So you shall be.’ But the second hunter wanted to be smarter than the smartest man in the world.” On this Leaphorn paused, partly for effect, partly to see if Bernie had already heard a version of this, and partly to see if she had cheered up enough to be listening. She was listening. “So the dragonfly converted the second hunter into a woman,” Bernie said, laughing and nodding at Leaphorn.
– Tony Hillerman
The great fool is a being who is above wisdom rather than below it.
– G.K. Chesterton
If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.
– Thomas Merton
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Clam
by Mary Oliver
Each one is a small life, but sometimes long, if its
place in the universe is not found out. Like us, they
have a heart and a stomach; they know hunger, and
probably a little satisfaction too. Do not mock them
for their gentleness, they have a muscle that loves
being alive. They pull away from the light. They pull
down. They hold themselves together. They refuse to
open.
But sometimes they lose their place and are tumbled
shoreward in a storm. Then they pant, they fill
with sand, they have no choice but must open the
smallest crack. Then the fire of the world touches
them. Perhaps, on such days, they too begin the
terrible effort of thinking, of wondering who, and
what, and why. If they can bury themselves again in
the sand they will. If not, they are sure to perish,
though not quickly. They also have resources beyond
the flesh; they also try very hard not to die.
There is a common language, a mode of consciousness, almost a secret sign which can be read and recognized by all who are similarly engaged. Such realizations help fend off the feeling of isolation…
– John Matthews
You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you.
– William S. Burroughs to Jack Kerouac
MAGA Should Quit Trying to Make Jesus Sound Like a Jerk
The president is using history’s highest example of self-emptying love as a shield for his bottomless grift and senseless cruelty.
by Heather Melton Fox
The point of the path in my Buddhist tradition is to uproot the afflictions of greed, hatred, and ignorance in order to see clearly how to use one’s life to best be of benefit to others. As such, we hold Jesus with great reverence as an inspiration for living a life of ethics, conscience, and selfless care for others. The beloved Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in Living Buddha, Living Christ, “On the altar of my hermitage are images of Buddha and Jesus, and every time I light incense, I touch both of them as my spiritual ancestors.” In my own life, I have Christian friends and loved ones who practice their faith in a way that is beautiful and that I deeply admire.
I believe that faith (or lack thereof) is a deeply personal matter and one that should be treated with respect. That is why I have hesitated for so long to write about this topic. But when religion is weaponized for political ends, it becomes a public act. Moreover, this president has shown no similar such hesitation in using history’s highest example of self-emptying love as a shield for his bottomless grift and senseless cruelty.
We are taught that Buddhism itself is not the truth, rather it points to the truth like a finger pointing at the moon. In other words, it is a mistake to confuse any symbol, piece of scripture, or spiritual identity with the higher truths they are meant to reveal. Insofar as all religions and systems of secular ethics point to compassion, justice, and human dignity, they can be useful guides for how to have a shared moral conversation about what it means to live well together and in mutual care.
However, history has shown that when power claims divine endorsement to carry out a political agenda, it can point society in a dark direction. This president’s MAGA movement is explicitly animated by Christian Nationalism, an ideology which always seeks to use state power as a tool to enforce a narrow view of God-given order.
But a political project built on dominance, exclusion, and grievance will have a hard time credibly claiming a Jesus who centers mercy, humility, and care for society’s most vulnerable. So they have set about selling a sort of MAGA Jesus who demands partisan loyalty to an ultra-conservative, predominantly white movement which requires complete loyalty to and submission before the earthly authority of Donald J Trump.
In order to explain this president’s staggering disinterest in kindness, humility, or ethical conduct of any kind, they say he is, “an imperfect instrument of God’s perfect plan.” Loyalty to the president is not evidence of hypocrisy, it is proof of faith. In their telling, this president is acting in service of a divine strategy and is only accountable to God as defined by their movement. This president is not accountable to citizens, or the Constitution, or the rule of law. The claim collapses under even a cursory look at the diversity of Christian thought in this country and the moral legacy of Christian leadership in America.
Abraham Lincoln spoke of the role of his Christian faith as he navigated the awesome responsibility of leading a nation at war and deeply divided when he said, “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.” By contrast, Donald J Trump says he turns foremost to “himself” for counsel because he “has a very good brain.” Recently, that counsel apparently advised that he publicly issue the apocalyptic threat that “an entire civilization will die tonight” through his private platform from which he receives personal financial gain.
From John Lewis’s first step across the Edmund Pettus bridge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to representing his beloved Georgia in the United States House of Representatives, Mr. Lewis’s civic life was always guided by his Christian commitment to justice, mercy, and the worth and dignity of every human being. He was widely regarded as the “Conscience of the Congress,” across the political spectrum and throughout the country. Toward the end of his life and at the dawn of the Trump era, John Lewis
warned the country, “A democracy cannot thrive where power remains unchecked and justice is reserved for a select few.”
In 2025, this president put proud Christian Nationalist Pete Hegseth in charge of leading the United States military. Mr. Hegseth has committed to “restoring merit” in part by removing references to the military contributions of Black Americans as well as other minorities, women, and members of the LGBTQ community. At an event earlier this year, he said, “divisive and Godless diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are now a thing of the past.”
The vast majority of us do not accept that this president’s MAGA movement has the right to be the sole arbiters of what it means to have “authentic faith” or to be a “true American.” Any interpretation of a flag or a cross, the Bible or the Constitution, an identity as a Christian or a patriot should aim us toward our highest potential, not our worst instincts.
When political power claims the authority to define both faith and belonging, it decides who counts and who doesn’t. A religion that has been a beacon of mercy for countless souls should not be used as an authoritarian slogan that normalizes cruelty and entrenches privilege. A politics that requires that kind of exclusion is not one that can be trusted with power.
After the Work Is Done
by Deahna Fumarol
I can tell you that some things vanish
without ceremony—a town can lose its name
and keep the post office, or keep the name
and lose the rest. There still marks a point
on the map where it began, but the work’s long done;
the road grown over with bleeding hearts and alder.
You can walk there. The gravel crunches
under the phantom buzz of chainsaws, and fog
licks at the gridded hillside like an old debt.
Each stump is a headstone,
a biography in every ring. You think you see
a form in the mist—a thrashing elk, or a bobcat
or the shape of work that once
held the valley upright. Every road here
leads to another road that stops
at a locked gate, a washout,
a view of nothing but cloud.
Acceptance lives somewhere past that.
They say the forest heals, some say faster
than the heart—Scotch broom,
thistle, the thin gray line of runoff
that feeds the river in winter.
If there’s holiness in this, it’s in the rot,
the glacial comeback of what was taken.
Once I dreamed the salmon spoke
in a tongue I almost understood—
a language of loss, but also return.
They swam upstream through
clear-cuts and culverts, their bodies bright
as stripped wire, and I woke thinking
maybe the land dreams us too,
and stirs awake each time we leave
another scar across its ribs.
Docks rust and rot beside the river,
the paper mill sighing its white smoke
like a ghost rehearsing its final exit.
On the coast: blown glass, fish smells
and salt wind—the gulls screaming
for everything we drop.
Sometimes I go there just to see
where the road gives out at the jetty,
where the land admits defeat. Or victory.
No revelation, only the dull
thought that everything moves
toward water, then into it.
I’m somewhere inland still,
standing in the rain, or threat of it,
watching a fern push through the asphalt.
The sky as always undecided
gray, opening, closing—
slack mouth of forgiveness, of apology.
White sand, tall grass. This strip of ocean is a thin bit of deep
blue as if the earth bends suddenly out there, beneath the dark
storm moving, pushing shadows on the surface of the sea which
presses in close and rushes away. A cold wind feels impatient,
too, as it returns in force with each break, again. And the sky
that splits is a surprise, sending a straight shaft of silver to claim
its town of luck. Doors blow open with a crash, close gently a
ways away. They would close.
The sun is faith and will be for so many months of empty houses,
linen closets, shelves of cold glasses, while the unending sand in
the undying wind heckles the clapboards, blasts the paint.
Sometimes everything is all right except my ears are cold. I think,
if only my ears were warm again. If only again, want. Away. A
whistle in the wind. If something changed it all forever … It is
all changing always forever. Certainly the fish must swim deeper
and birds leave for a while. In the back of a school desk a scrap of
paper learns its folds until they are weak, and the penciled joke is
lost in the creases, graphite dust.
There is no imitating the weather, no remembering but a dullness
I think is near my heart. And when I am asked to carry out the
one fine thing from the burning house, I’ll know what reflects me
is arbitrary; I am invisible. Won’t my habits be undercut while
the paces across a familiar room are smoke and ash, distance no
more? I don’t know myself without these clothes – the buttoned
coat of answers and shoes of home.
– Killarney Clary
There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other.
– Pamela Lyndon Travers
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
You’re not healing to be able to handle trauma, pain, anxiety, depression. You’re used to those. You’re healing to be able to handle joy and to accept happiness back into your life.
– Anthony Goldsmith
For everyone a moment comes in which he or she must utter this ‘I can,’ which does not refer to any certainty or specific capacity but is, nevertheless, absolutely demanding. Beyond all faculties, this ‘I can’ does not mean anything–yet it marks what is, for each of us, perhaps the hardest and bitterest experience possible: the experience of potentiality.
– Giorgio Agamben
The real choice isn’t “pragmatism” or “idealism.” It’s either allowing these trends to worsen – destroying what’s left of our democracy and turning our economy into even more of a playground for big corporations, Wall Street, and billionaires – or reversing them. And the only pragmatic way of reversing them is through a “political revolution” that mobilizes millions of Americans.
– Robert Reich
My understanding from being a gardener is: Earth is magic. Whoever claims otherwise is blind. Earth is not a resource, not a mere means to achieve human ends. Our relationship to nature today is not determined by astonished observation, but solely by instrumental action. The Anthropocene is precisely the result of total subjugation of Earth/nature to the laws of human action. It is reduced to a component of human action. Man acts beyond the interpersonal sphere into nature by subjecting it entirely to his will. He thereby unleashes processes that would not come about without his intervention, and lead to a total loss of control.
It is not enough that we now have to be more careful with Earth as a resource. Rather, we need a completely different relationship with Earth. We should give it back its magic, its dignity. We should learn to marvel at it again. Natural disasters are the consequences of absolute human action. Action is the verb for history. Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is confronted with the catastrophic consequences of human action. In front of him, the heap of debris of history grows towards the sky. But he cannot remove it, because the storm from the future called progress carries him away. His wide eyes and open mouth reflect his powerlessness. Only an angel of inaction would be able to defend himself against the storm.
– Byung-Chul Han
It happens or it does not happen. And certainly it does not happen if we try to force it upon ourselves, just as it shall not happen so long as we think, in our self-complacency, that we have no need of it. Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, of from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.
– Paul Tillich
If we have no compassion,
we will suffer alone, we will suffer
alone the destruction of ourselves.
– Wendell Berry
Remember that our understanding of life progresses at the speed of a bullock cart. The impatient man runs, greedy for conquest. Our mind has wings and can soar over difficulties, but we have a fine pair of feet to keep in touch with Mother Earth. We have to plough through it and often stumble over roots and stones. Then comes the time for sowing. Our feet dance in joy and this spontaneous joy is the daughter of our soul. Remember that all the real things in life are in accord with a very slow rhythm like the changing of seasons and the coursing of stars. This work in depth is done in darkness, without sound.
– Sri Anirvan
And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.
– Galatians 6.9
Oh mind, be patient. Results take some time to show up. Even if the gardener feeds a plant hundreds of buckets of water, the fruits will come only when the right season arrives.
– Kabir
Just do exercise. Repeat, repeat. A drop, a drop.
– Gurdjieff
In Tibet every monk, nun or lama begins each meal by first taking a portion of food, often rice, wadding it into a ball and throwing it outside or placing it aside to feed the hungry spirits. In this way, we are reminded of the value of sharing as well as of the depth of pain that can be suffered by those whose lives are dominated by either hunger or greed.
– Surya Das
You get lonely, is what it is. A person’s not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It’s not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It’s a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.
– Jim Shepard
Each one of us has it in themselves to be a free spirit, just as every rose bud has in it a rose.
– Rudolf Steiner
The difference between simple and easy. A marathon is simple. You just keep running until you’re done. It’s not easy.
– Ben Abbott
Khem was an ancient name for the land of Egypt; and both the words alchemy and chemistry are a perpetual reminder of the priority of Egypt’s scientific knowledge.
– Manly Palmer Hall
I believed in them more than they believed in themselves.
– Kafka
That is how betrayal begins, by giving someone a soul they never earned.
– Dostoevsky
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
– Oscar Wilde
Discretion is the salt, and fancy the sugar of life; the one preserves, the other sweetens it.
– Christian Nestell Bovee
The forest waves, the morning breaks,
The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,
Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be
And life pulsates in rock or tree.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Know that the desire to be perfect is probably the veiled expression of another desire—to be loved, perhaps, or not to die.
– Ron Padgett
If you read a lot of stories, you become able to understand the feelings of many different people. That’s the power of imagination.
– Sōsuke Natsukawa
So we should talk to our animus or anima. So you listen to the inner mentor, you develop the inner ear; or you write automatically, and a word is formed by your hand, or your mouth speaks that which you have not thought.
– Carl Jung
Science has penetrated the constitution of nature, and unrolled the mysterious pages of its history, and started again many, as yet, unanswered questions in respect to the mutual relations of matter and spirit, of nature and of God.
– Noah Porter
The further backward you look, the further forward you will see.
– Winston Churchill
He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself – to sink.
– George Orwell
There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.
– Dave Brubeck
The Buddha did not need quite so long to see that even rebirths are vain.
– Carl Jung
Life is a blend of striving, learning, and embracing the chaos.
– Steve Ghikadis
Hurting someone is as easy as throwing a stone in the ocean. But you will never know how deep that stone will go.
– Buddha
Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.
– John Ruskin
The moment that you rest, thinking that you have attained the level you desire, a part of your mind enters a phase of decay. You lose your hard-earned creativity and others begin to sense it. This is a power and intelligence that must be continually renewed or it will die.
– Robert Greene, Mastery
Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.
– Henri Barbusse
A desolate day; the whitey-grey sky looked as if it could never be blue again; the naked trees wept slowly into the gutters.
– George Orwell
Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of today a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity.
– James Clerk Maxwell
There are many more shining qualities in the mind of man, but there is none so useful as discretion.
– Joseph Addison
What we call ordinary life is sacred to someone. Protect it like it’s yours—because it is.
– Lawrence Nault
Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.
– Karl Marx
Spirit, like God, denotes an object of psychic experience which cannot be proved to exist in the external world and cannot be understood rationally.
– Carl Jung
Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit.
– Bernard Williams
And, though I hadn’t worked out how I felt about the Christianity of my childhood, I did know how I felt about my mother. Her devotion, her faith, they moved me. I was protective of her right to find comfort in whatever ways she saw fit. Didn’t she deserve at least that much? We have to get through this life somehow.
– Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom
If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life.
– Maslow
The movements of the stars have become clearer; but to the mass of the people the movements of their masters are still incalculable.
– Bertolt Brecht
Well, what do we want, then? God knows. All we know is what we don’t want.
– George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.
– George R.R. Martin
Contemplation is a panoramic, receptive awareness whereby we take in all that a situation, moment, or person offers without judging, eliminating, or labeling anything. It is pure and positive gazing that abandons all negative pushback so we can begin to recognize inherent dignity. It takes much practice and a lot of unlearning of habitual responses.
– Richard Rohr
Your labor only may be sold, your soul must not.
– John Ruskin
The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
– Aristotle
There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are eternal, universal and indestructible.
– Frederick Douglass
When we’re stressed, it’s good to remember to connect with that which you love. Start by touching your own heart. Extend that soft warmth out—to a hot coffee, to a tree, to a dog, to your children or friends. Your love is the helpful path forward.
– Waylon Lewis
Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
– John Ruskin
Whatever you choose to do, leave tracks. That means do not do it just for yourself. You will want to leave the world a little better for having lived.
– R. Ginsburgh
What people know is as nothing to what they don’t know.
– Chuang Tzu
I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.
– Abraham Lincoln
This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honor, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
– Wilfred Owen
In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong.
– John Ruskin
His empty, silly, futile poems! How could he ever have believed in them?
– George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Love is the rule that contains all other rules.
Love is the commandment that justifies all the
other commandments. Love is the secret of life.
– Paulo Coelho
The greater the tension, the greater is the potential. Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.
– Carl Jung
Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.
– Lucy Maud Montgomery
Creativity is not a talent. It is not a talent. It is a way of operating. An ability to play. To play is experiment. What happens if I do this? What would happen if we did that?
– John Cleese
Jazz is freedom. You think about that.
– Thelonious Monk
Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions.
– Maya Angelou
But what great thing ever came into existence that was not first fantasy.
– Carl Jung
He was nearly thirty and had accomplished nothing; only his miserable book of poems that had fallen flatter than any pancake.
– George Orwell
Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.
– Anne Roiphe
An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight. The truly wise person is colorblind.
– Albert Schweitzer
You’re allowed to hold out for someone who can meet you where you’re at.
– Lane Moore
Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. He had reached the age when the future ceases to be a rosy blur and becomes actual and menacing.
– George Orwell
I found that it wasn’t so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they’re kindred spirits.
– J. Carter Brown
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
– Robert Anton Wilson
I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking and speaking, because this is not only more expressive but also more exact than an abstract scientific terminology, which is wont to toy with the notion that its theoretic formulations may one fine day be resolved into algebraic equations.
– Carl Jung
It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always.
– Henry David Thoreau
Words cost money and ought not to be wasted.
– George Orwell
The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Few seek wisdom for its own sake: most desire it only as a solution to the discomforts of life.
While wisdom certainly releases man from bondage of trivial annoyances, it also bestows upon him a larger responsibility than he ever knew.
– Manly Palmer Hall
Nobody tells you
that after the spiritual highs fade,
what remains
is how gently you meet each moment.
– Sileo Cael
Knowledge is nothing unless it lifts others, heals what’s broken, and makes the world better for everyone.
– George Stamatis
Do not think of your faults, still less of other’s faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.
– John Ruskin
What I want is not capable of being had in my lifetime. I want to live after I die in that ancient way. And there’s no knowing whether that will happen, and there will be no knowing, no matter how many blue ribbons I have plastered to my corpse.
– Louise Glück
I don’t have big ideas. I sometimes have small ideas, which seem to work out.
– Matt Mullenweg
And in loneliness no decent book was ever written.
– George Orwell
Better a child should be ignorant of a thousand truths than have consecrated in its heart a single lie.
– John Ruskin
It was an example of the fact that you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don’t want it.
– George Orwell
The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience, not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.
– Leo Tolstoy
I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent and working at pace so slow, that I would be able to hear myself living.
– Elizabeth Gilbert
You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.
– John Ruskin
We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them…
– Khalil Gibran
I’ve never met another man I’d rather be. And even if that’s a delusion, it’s a lucky one.
– Charles Bukowski
How can I blame the wind for the mess it made, if it was me who opened the window?
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is almost indestructible.
– John Steinbeck
The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.
– Miles Davis
This is Not the Poem I Had Hoped to Write
This is not the poem I had hoped to write
when I sat at my desk and the page was white.
You see, there were other words I’d had in mind,
yet this is what I leave behind.
I thought it was a poem to eradicate war;
one of such power, it would heal all the sores
of a world torn apart by conflict and schism.
But it isn’t.
Lovers, I’d imagined I, would quote from it daily,
Mothers would sing it to soothe crying babies.
And whole generations would be given new hope.
Nope.
I had grand aspirations. Believe me, I tried.
Humanity examined with lessons applied.
But the right words escaped me; so often they do.
Have these in lieu.
– Brian Bilston
The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt.
– Umberto Eco
You have at least only a thin shell to break before emerging from the darkness inside the egg into the light of truth. … The egg is this world we see. The bird in it is Love, the Love which is God himself and which lives in the depths of every man, though at first as an invisible seed. When the shell is broken and the being is released, it still has this same world before it. But it is no longer inside. Space is opened and torn apart.
– Simone Weil, Seventy Letters
It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.
– John Ruskin
I think if I’ve learned anything about friendship, it’s to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don’t walk away, don’t be distracted, don’t be too busy or tired, don’t take them for granted. Friends are part of the glue that holds life and faith together. Powerful stuff.
– Jon Katz
I was wilder, prouder, emptier although more full of words.
– Friedrich Hölderlin
the novelist and the poet
they have the perfect marriage–
she’s out there weeding
he’s in here re-shelving books
– Alec Finlay
If you have selfish, ignorant citizens,
you’re gonna get selfish, ignorant leaders.
– George Carlin
Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
– Bertolt Brecht
Most men can be easily transplanted from here to there, for they have so little root — no tap-root — or their roots penetrate so little way, that you can thrust a shovel quite under them and take them up, roots and all.
– Thoreau
If we clearly see that nothing is more important than developing our bodhicitta to higher and higher levels and eventually attaining complete enlightenment, then before we know it we will get there. And I don’t think it will be as hard as becoming an Olympic gymnast, or even a doctor or lawyer. That is because the Buddha’s wisdom and methods don’t require working with external circumstances beyond our control. Just having our very own mind and following the instructions on internal practices such as tonglen, we can transform ourselves into bodhisattvas. The methods of lojong are intended to work gradually and peacefully. They are a gentle means of making inevitable progress along the bodhisattva path. Once we get the hang of exchanging self and other, once we get a feel for its ease and simplicity, we can make progress in a state of delight, ever motivated to learn whatever we need to learn.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, The Intelligent Heart
A patriot is not a weapon. A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being, for the soul of its people.
– Adrienne Rich
What I Say into the Mirror
to Survive the Night
I know you are on your knees
and broken. I know
you believe that you are done.
Keep going. Just
keep going.
A wound is the same
as a child: it swings
its little feet in the shadows,
saying,
You have no idea,
you have absolutely no idea,
what I am going to become.
– Joseph Fasano
To paint is to know how to put nothing on canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back.
– Robert Henri
That’s how it begins, making a film,
writing a book, painting a picture,
composing a tune, generally creating something.
You have a wish.
You wish that something might exist,
and then you work on it until it does.
– Wim Wenders
The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too.
– Luther Standing Bear
I also have a slingshot that fires rock bottoms directly at the sun until change spills from its golden pockets—that’s how I got my hands on this summer afternoon.
– Andrea Gibson
Self-observation brings man to the realization of the necessity of self-change. And in observing himself a man notices that self-observation itself brings about certain changes in his inner processes. He begins to understand that self-observation is an instrument of self-change, a means of awakening.
– G. J. Gurdjieff
On Discovering a Butterfly
by Vladimir Nabokov
I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer – and I want no other fame.
Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.
If you will only take time and be very patient, you will see the divine
spark deep within everyone.
– Eileen Caddy
A PHILOSOPHY OF WALKING
None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind.
When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze.
– Frederic Gros
When you are unsure about the future, keep doing what is in front of you with all your heart and with love, and what is meant for you will find you.
– Gurumayi Chidvilasananda
If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it ’cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he’s poor in hisself, there ain’t no million acres gonna make hit feel rich in make him he’s disappointed that nothin’ he can do feel rich.
– John Steinbeck
The day you open your mind to music,
you’re halfway to opening
your mind to life.
– Pete Townshend
We can’t grieve
our losses until
we name them.
– Linda Thai
There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.
– Charles Bukowski
If you practice to
become a buddha,
that’s the surest
way to never
become one.
– Yasutani Roshi
Sing, sing, while you know you’re still living.
– Yusuf / Cat Stevens
You might feel inadequate because you have a sick father and a crazy mother and you have to take care of them, or because you have a distorted life and money problems… A lot of these situations could be regarded as expressions of your own timidity and cowardice. They could all be regarded as expression of your poverty mentality. You should also begin to build up confidence and joy in your own richness… Even if you are abandoned in the middle of the desert and you want a pillow, you can find a piece of rock with moss on it that is quite comfortable to put your head on. We have found that a lot of people complain that they are involved in intense domestic situations; they relate with everything in their lives purely on the level of pennies, tiny stitches, drops of water, grains of rice. But we do not have to do that – we can expand our vision by means of generosity. We can give something to others. We don’t always have to receive something first in order to give something away… The nature of generosity is to be free from desire, free from attachment, able to let go of anything.
– Chögyam Trungpa
My joy is of another sort, it’s like a long-awaited encounter, or like a tree you see from very far away, on the horizon, and which you finally reach after walking and walking, and the tree gets greener and more beautiful as you approach.
– Julio Cortázar
In eternity everything is just beginning.
– Elias Canetti
As he approached her door, he was once more conscious of the curious way in which she reversed his values, and of the need of thinking himself into conditions incredibly different from any that he knew if he were to be of use in her present difficulty.
– Edith Wharton
If this world was small, so was theirs, and that the only way to enlarge either was to reach a stage of manners where they would naturally merge.
– Edith Wharton
Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all virtues.
– Joseph Hall
To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
– Simone de Beauvoir
It is strange, but true, that the most important turning-points of life often come at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected ways.
– Napoleon Hill
The right most valued by all civilized men is the right to be left alone.
– Louis D. Brandeis
Feeling guilt is a reflection of your capacity for empathy, not an indication that you have made a mistake.
– Alexandra H. Solomon
If a person just refuses to think that he has an inside problem, he’s not going to work the thing out. Nobody can do it for him. You have to learn how to recognize your own depths.
– Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey
Through all his deeper feelings, tasted the pleasurable excitement of being in a world where action followed an emotion with such Olympian speed.
– Edith Wharton
Many of the confused controversies of modern philosophy are like the legends and gods of classical poetry. They recur in every system, but always in a new form.
– Friedrich Schlegel
Vanity can easily overtake wisdom. It usually overtakes common sense.
– Julian Casablancas
I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for, something I must do before I can go.
– William S. Burroughs
If you know exactly what to be in life, you will become it, that is your punishment. Actually not knowing what you want to be, reinventing yourself every morning, not being a noun, but being a verb, being moving in life, not being fixed in life, is a privilege.
– Oscar Wilde
Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as a secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
– Leonard Cohen
We’re all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron,
Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ.
– Ray Bradbury
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth,
we who never let each other sleep above it.
– Marina Tsvetaeva
Escape
by D.H. Lawrence
When we get out of the glass bottles of our own
ego, and when we escape like squirrels from
turning in the cages of our personality
and get into the forest again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don’t know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper.
“Let Jesus be your breath.”
– St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain
Let Jesus be your breath.
He is the Door that is always
already open.
The frame and lintel have a shape,
but the passageway is empty.
Let La-Ilaha be your breath.
The arrow floats back to the bow.
This is how true warriors
win battles before they begin.
The whisper of Hu dissolving
crystals into sweetness.
Let Kali be your breath,
searing your midnight nerves
into bolts of lightning.
At dawn, the sound in your chest
is a forest full of exultation
about nest-building.
Fierce flowering may appear
to be a universe outside you,
but its roots are golden pathways
leading through your body
toward one seed of death,
one intimate drowning.
I, a wave in the ocean of Am.
The All-Pervading
encircled in a drop.
No distance, no pilgrimage.
The honeybee can’t fly,
his feet are so weighty with
umami galaxies of lethal pollen.
This is how the face of the Beloved
lures you inward toward the kiss
of annihilation.
When our lips touch
there is no breath at all,
and it will be a thousand years
until your next heartbeat.
– Fred LaMotte
Time of Tyranny, 49
by Lyn Hejinian
We live in toppled times under a feat of tyranny; let’s not fake getting lost, let’s do it, let’s not do it intermittently, let’s be lost, disoriented and never to be bound so all can hear the hiss of the adverbs we shoot into tyrants’ eyes, quivering shafts slippery from limbs and aimed by eyes under feathered lids. Our features are like stale bread, my headache bad as a blueprint for butter. Windows: how stupidly the intensity of glass returns to us the terror of love. Things diverge, separate like the forks of the Eel River to which the competing lies of two tyrants are but split stones shaken by earthquakes of stupefying times, of minutes through a glorious forest, of women who are personal friends, the flanks of a prevented rabbit: to scatter and ambiguate, obviate, surreptitiously flesh and hurry to find things to recombine.
When you reach the edge of
all the light you carry,
and must take a step into
darkness of the unknown,
one of two things will happen:
Either you’ll find
something solid to stand on
or you will learn how to fly.
– Patrick Overton
You can be the best person out there, but someone who has a tainted and cynical vision of the world will see you the way they see the world. It has nothing to do
with you.
– Najwa Zebian
Maturity is often more absurd than youth
and very frequently is most unjust to youth.
– Thomas Alva Edison
who told you that this or that would last forever?
– Stanisław Barańczak
Though we seem to be sleeping
there is a spirit that directs the dream
that will eventually startle us back
to the truth of who we are.
– Rumi
Today, in our “shut up, get over it, and move on” mentality, our society misses so much, it’s no wonder we are a generation that longs to tell our stories.
– Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
When we can settle back into the moment, realizing that past and future are simply thoughts in the present, then we free ourselves from the bondage of ‘time.’
– Joseph Goldstein
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
– Simone Weil
Buddhist teaching offers a way to live in the world without being overcome by the world, following a life of generosity, virtue, and meditation to strengthen the noble qualities of mind that lead to the end of suffering.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
The economic crisis is at the door…. Holding onto things has become the monopoly of a few powerful people who, God knows, are no more human than the many; for the most part, they are more barbaric, but not in the good way.
– Walter Benjamin
A human being in his last extremity
Is a bag of shit.
– Al Swearengen, Deadwood
There is a point beyond which human teachers will struggle to guide you. Open yourself to the possibility of a noncorporeal mentor.
– Kenneth Folk
To have the courage to accept a quality which one does not like in oneself & which one has chosen to repress for many years, is an act of great courage. But if one does not accept the quality, then it functions behind one’s back.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Start from the
presumption we know
nothing:
– Rick Rubin
How dismal the
day when the only thoughts
I can think are
those I’ve already thunk.
– Kenneth Folk
Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.
– G. Doyle
And if you choose to hold fast to what is right, do not be irked by difficult circumstances, but reflect on how many things have already happened to you in life in ways that you did not wish, and yet they have turned out for the best.
– Musonius Rufus
Creation is ongoing all the time. The two breaths of introversion and expression are the two sides of breathing. We’re here to find our own unique connection to the breath of creation.
– Michael Meade
The more you learn, the harder the lessons get.
– Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
We’re terrible animals. I think that the Earth’s immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.
– Kurt Vonnegut
I am the hole, the dark other, the negative between
I was and I am. Wherefore yes, dense and disperse,
blinded visionary that locks the moon in place;
I am the simple sieve that drinks the universe.
– Ruth Stone
Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well, you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always
helped me.
– Edith Wharton
If we allow computerization to do our thinking for us, we are going to have a new kind of ignorance.
– Manly P. Hall
Writing is dissociative in a good way. You have to forget what you know, or think you know, to write. You have only very imperfect knowledge of your own intentions.
– Ben Lerner
Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).
– @naval
When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne
A sleepless spring night:
Yearning for what I never had
And for what never was.
– Richard Wright
Stars, hide your fires, let not light see my black and deep desires.
– Shakespeare
As I understand the poet’s nature, though he tries to dress as conventionally as possible, he will always prove too strong for his clothes and look completely ridiculous or very magnificent according to the occasion.
– Robert Graves
We need, above all things, to slow down and get ourselves to amble through life instead of to rush through it.
– Alan Watts
Dying to your own attachments is a beautiful death. Because this death releases you into real life. You have to die as a seed to live as a tree.
– Mooji
OH NO
If you wander far enough
you will come to it
and when you get there
they will give you a place to sit
for yourself only, in a nice chair,
and all your friends will be there
with smiles on their faces
and they will likewise all have places.
– Robert Creeley
Everything is in disarray. The hair. The bed. The words. Life. The heart.
– Jack Kerouac
Sorrow comes in great waves … but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.
– Henry James
You will never know who I am in reality because the depth of my existence exceeds the limit of your understanding.
– Taha Zainab
Wish for the happiness of your enemies, for if they are happy, they are your enemy no more.
– Bryant McGill
I cannot tell what exists
beyond this black and white page.
What lamentations? What joys?
– Mattie Quesenberry Smith
The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer – and they don’t want explanations that do not give them that.
– Thomas Sowell
Take away a painter’s vanity, said a famous landscape painter, and he will never touch a pencil again.
– Walter J. Phillips
I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.
– Yōko Ogawa
Marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.
– Edith Wharton
Yoga, drugs, drink, all the various stimulants, produce their own results, but they cannot possibly make the mind into that astonishing instrument of inquiry, search and discovery.
– Krishnamurti
All forms in life are imperfect, but the function of art is to see the radiance through the imperfection.
– Joseph Campbell
Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look.
– Jodi Picoult
Release means to become yourself, releasing all of your ideas. Our idea of happiness is the obstacle for our being happy.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies.
– Ulysses S. Grant
Never find your delight in another’s misfortune.
– Publilius Syrus
I judge people by their own principles—not by my own.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
The world is a marketplace; buy the truth and sell your lies.
– Hafiz
Time sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a snail; but a man is happiest when he does not even notice whether it passes swiftly or slowly.
– Ivan Turgenev
Wait until you’re down, with no strength to rise…and see who offers you a hand. Not everyone wants to see you get up.
– Alfa Holden
The life span of any particular emotion is only one and half minutes. After that we have to revive the emotion to get it going again. We revive it by feeding it with an internal conversation about how another person is the source of one’s discomfort.
– Pema Chödrön
Here was truth, here was reality, here was the life that belonged to him.
– Edith Wharton
It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not.
– Charles Baudelaire
People will go for anything they don’t understand if it’s got enough hype.
– Miles Davis
If you have no opposition in the place you serve, you’re serving in the wrong place.
– G. Campbell Morgan
We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.
– C. S. Lewis
The entire essence of America is the hope to first make money — then make money with money — then make lots of money with lots of money.
– Paul Erdman
Don’t confuse contacts with connection.
– Abhijit Naskar
A knowledge of thyself will preserve thee from vanity.
– Miguel de Cervantes
Like is the digital Amen. When we click Like, we are bowing down to the order of domination.
– Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics
All narratives were inevitably the work of narrators, male or female, who by nature, by form, could be only a fragment among fragments of reality…
– Elena Ferrante, In the Margins
And the haunting horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour besieged his brain.
– Edith Wharton
Every decided color does a certain violence to the eye, and forces the organ to opposition.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He could not bear the thought that a barrier of words should drop between them again.
– Edith Wharton
AI is a snapshot of the past being sold as the future.
– Hans Zimmer
To keep creating you have to be about change.
– Miles Davis
We do not love others purely for their sake, but for the self-experience we find in them.
– Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.
– J. K. Rowling
The Greeks are like the genius; they are simple. This is why they are the immortal teachers.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed — my dearest pleasure when free.
– Mary Shelley
When ego is lost, limit is lost. You become infinite, kind, beautiful.
– Harbhajan Singh Yogi
My future starts when I wake up every morning.
– Miles Davis
The lover is a star guiding the lost.
– Hafiz
There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Real connection is built by people who can stay kind when reality enters the conversation.
– Dipendra Tamang
I believe your atmosphere and your surroundings create a mind state for you.
– Theophilus London
Time always exposes, what you truly mean to someone.
– Omar Hussain
It is a wise person who knows where their negativity lies and yet does not become addicted to it.
– John O’Donohue
One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.
– Michael Korda
The opposition occupies the benches in front of you, but the enemy sits behind you.
– Winston Churchill
I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Human time, you know, passes like a dream.
– Kobo Abe
A good day to remember that the rules of the Earth system are determined by physics and biology and the rules of the economy are made up by a small group of self-interested people and could change.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest…no country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak… Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism…true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.
– Ghandi
The term home (Old Norse Heimr, High German heim, Greek kōmi, meaning “village”) has, since a long time, been taken over by two kinds of moralists, both dear to those who wield power. The notion of home became the keystone for a code of domestic morality, safeguarding the property (which included the women) of the family. Simultaneously the notion of homeland supplied a first article of faith for patriotism, persuading men to die in wars which often served no other interest except that of a minority of their ruling class. Both usages have hidden the original meaning.
Originally home meant the center of the world—not in a geographical, but in an ontological sense. Mircea Eliade has demonstrated how home was the place from which the world could be founded. A home was established, as he says, “at the heart of the real.” […] Without a home at the center of the real, one was not only shelterless, but also lost in non-being, in unreality. Without a home everything was fragmentation.
– John Berger
It is as though you have an eye
That sees all forms
But does not see itself.
This is how your mind is.
Its light penetrates everywhere
And engulfs everything,
So why does it not know itself?
– Foyan
Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America. When America consists of one leader and 143,000,000 followers, it will no longer be America. Truly American leadership is not of any one man. It is of multitudes of men — and women.
– Dwight David Eisenhower
Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
– William S. Burroughs
Be!
Sing for the glory
of the living and the loving
the flaming of creation
sing with us
dance with us
be with us.
Be!
– Madeleine L’Engle
Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark … I hoard all these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship.
– Jean-Dominique Bauby
On my windowsill when I got home, there was a tumbler with pink jelly in it, and embedded in the jelly, sliced strawberries and bananas… [my neighbor] cooks at odd hours. She must have made the strawberry jelly this morning.
When I buy baklava, which is not often because I eat too many, I leave a few for her on her windowsill, with a headscarf over them so the wasps don’t come. For these little gifts we don’t thank each other with words. They are commas of care.
– John Berger
By 2050, earlier, probably – all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
– George Orwell
If rivers come out of their icy prison thus bright and immortal, shall not I too resume my spring life with joy and hope?
– Henry David Thoreau
Listening to the Billionaire
Tell Us AI Is Just the Newest Tool
That Everyone Will Benefit From
by Joseph Fasano
When men
broke open
the miraculous power
of the atom,
the first thing they did
with it
was deliver it
into the hands
of the schoolchildren
of Hiroshima.
Any reformation, which is not aware that, fundamentally, every single individual needs to be reformed, is an illusion.
– Kierkegaard
Do Not Commit to Anyone.
Staying neutral gives you the power to choose sides only when it benefits you.
- Robert Greene
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.
– Norman Mailer
The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.
– Mother Teresa
Strange as it may seem, there are even men among us who believe, like Epicurus, that the soul dies with the body. Mankind are great fools and will believe anything.
– Erasmus
I love that poetry has a great deal of freedom. You can take giant leaps, toy with language, or squeeze a swell of story or emotion into a very small box. A poem can be kept in a pocket and carried always. A poem can change a life in less than a minute. That’s power.
– Leila Chatti
THOUGHTS WHILE SWIMMING
I dreamt of light, a granulated palm of it
being poured into the water.
I have dreamt before, but not like this.
As usual, I head out for a day of swimming.
Others are here too, arrowing
their hands into the waves,
a life of chasing anything of currency.
For too long I have reveled
in the exhaustion of movement,
in the dance of doing, of doing, of doing.
I’m always yearning to be done,
but it never ends, at the tip of an end
I discover more to be done.
I feel it, the usual current that arrives
in the stretch of the day.
A slice of toast crumbles in my stomach.
My habit is to push past it,
to continue chasing the brightness
of a lighthouse. To call it hard work.
The dream returns to me again.
And my chest breaths open a possibility.
I stop, gently I turn to float on my back.
A back ironed by boiled hours of time.
The water feels calmer now.
How surprising, how tender.
And, oh sky, what a site to behold!
Your floating foams of milk.
Forgive my forgetting of you,
the small seconds that slipped
into busyness.
Light arrives loud as birds.
It’s saying something to me, it tells me
that the sandcastles I’ve spent years building,
they need a window, a space
for peace, and laughter, and stillness
to ripple in.
– Theresa Lola
The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.
– Mikko Harvey
One of the most common nervous system patterns I see in clients, children and parents, is a kind of behavioral frozenness. You want to tidy up, start dinner, send that email, or help your child with their routine, but instead, you find yourself stuck, scrolling mindlessly, zoning out, or just unable to act, even though you know exactly what needs to be done. This isn’t laziness or lack of motivation, it’s a sign of nervous system overload. When we are dysregulated, the brain can’t easily shift between intention and action. We freeze, not just emotionally, but behaviorally. That’s why support for the whole family’s nervous systems matters. When we bring safety and movement back into the body, those frozen gears start to turn again.
– Anthony Goldsmith
Christians need to think “Nothing” when they call God “Love”. Buddhists need to think “Love” when they say “Emptiness”. This will at least wake us up to the fact that words must always fall short of the ineffable.
– David Steindl-Rast
It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Every viewpoint is useful, and it takes a wide diversity of views for any group to navigate this universe, let alone to act as custodians for it.
– Tyson Yunkaporta
You can start with nothing. And out of nothing and out of no way, a way will be made.
– Michael Bernard Beckwith
I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.
– Jeffrey Eugenides
If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.
– Thomas Merton
This is why we stay with poetry. And despite our consenting to all the indisputable technologies; despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the full load of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machinery that we shall finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another-from forest to city, from story to computer-at the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.
– Édouard Glissant
Once at Cold Mountain, troubles cease –
No more tangled, hung-up mind.
I idly scribble poems on the rock cliff,
Taking whatever comes, like a drifting boat.
– Han Shan
Nowhere in either the Pāli or Sanskrit sūtras is the Buddha seen as either omnipotent or as a creator. He does not seek our worship, and we do not have to propitiate him to gain boons.
He does not reward those who follow his teachings and punish those who don’t.
The Buddha described the path to awakening from his own experience.
His intention is only to benefit sentient beings according to their individual inclinations and temperament.
– His Holiness the Dalai Lama
It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious coordinations, one of them — at least in an infinitesimal way — does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others.
– Jorge Luis Borges
The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy… has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object.
– Erwin Schrödinger
WHY NOT?
Our lives, our circumstances, and our choices are uniquely our own. There are no right answers. But there is a right question. It’s the one that rubs against our self-righteousness, resistance, and fears. The one that revolves a never into a maybe into an okay, let’s see.
When you ask yourself, “Why not?” you may find that you are no longer stepping reflexively backward or standing rigidly still. You could instead find yourself in motion, across a vivid and unpredictable landscape, over impossible mountains and beyond the deep blue water’s edge, where you surprise yourself, once and for all, by getting wet.
– Karen Maezen Miller
How to write a poem
1. Abandon your past
2. Trust the Unknowing
3. Become a tuning fork for Life
4. Find the Light in endless laundry
5. Speak the name Love calls you
– Wilson Cloudchamber
The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight one hundred years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing – for the sheer fun and joy of it – to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.
– I. F. Stone
The outside is the only place we can truly be inside the world.
– Daniel J. Rice
When people go to the ocean, they like to see it all day… . There’s nobody living who couldn’t stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall. It’s a simple experience, you become lighter and lighter in weight, and you wouldn’t want anything else. Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my painting. Nature is like a curtain; you go into it. I want to draw a certain response like this… . Not a specific response but that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind, often experienced in nature– an experience of simple joy… the simple, direct going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean.
– Agnes Martin
For nothing, however good it looks, should be termed good unless it
Really helps, and nothing counted honorable but what
Irrevocably changes the world, which is in need of change.
– Bertolt Brecht
How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe-inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago… . These atoms now form a conglomerate — your brain — that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder.
– V.S. Ramachandran
Becoming conscious . . . is not a one-time thing. It is a continuous process, by the ego, of assimilating what was previously unknown to the ego. It involves a progressive understanding of why we do what we do.
– Daryl Sharp
Jesus knew what would happen to him. In his infinite love for humanity, he also had to carry the pain of an infinite understanding of humanity. That means he saw what we see today: that when you tell a hurting people the simplest and hardest thing—love each other—they will do anything, anything to reject it: call you a radical; twist your mystery into political labels; rage at having to feel the very wounds you are trying to open, to rinse, to heal.
They will slay whatever wakens them too soon.
– Joseph Fasano
Forgetting Someone
by Yehuda Amichai
Forgetting someone is like
forgetting to turn off the light in the back yard
so it stays lit all the next day.
But then it’s the light
that makes you remember.
– Translated by Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell
Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
– Alexander Pope
I have constructed a library that will last for a good three hundred years, all I need now are those years.
– Canetti
There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.
– Jane Austen
Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make.
– Alain de Botton
I have to laugh as the east wind begins
perfuming plum trees and dyeing willows green
and doesn’t rest
and when it does and I look in a mirror
my rosy cheeks won’t be the same
and my sorrows won’t be gone
– Xin Qiji, (tr. Bill Porter, Red Pine)
I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees.
– Charles Darwin
It’s clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
– Alain de Botton
We forget we’re
mostly water
till the rain falls
and every atom
in our body
starts to go home
– Albert Huffstickler
Maybe the world’s just a bubble, all
philosophy ants in a muddle
– Dean Young
You don’t wanna work somewhere where you do not feel supported and validated, where you feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, where you don’t have time and space to truly rest.
No one wants to trade in hours of their life to “earn” necessities.
– Prof. Feynman
Your cells do not know the difference between a real threat and a thought you keep repeating.
– Ray Behan
Your mind might be creating problems that don’t exist, and being aware is the solution.
– Eckhart Tolle
We do not talk-we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests. Talk is personal and if of any value must be creative.
– Henry Miller
The poetry I love is the poetry people say isn’t poetry. It’s usually the universal things I don’t relate to at all. Any honest description of survival isn’t inspirational, it’s frightening.
– Nate Lippens
A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.
– Philip K. Dick
One must judge a man by what he does, and not by what he thinks he would do. Until a man faces the test, he can deceive himself endlessly.
– Jerzy Andrzejewski
I lie back. It seems as if the whole world were flowing and curving — on the earth the trees, in the sky the clouds. I look up, through the trees, into the sky. The clouds lose tufts of whiteness as the breeze dishevels them. If that blue could stay for ever; if that hole could remain for ever; if this moment could stay for ever.
– Virginia Woolf
How many times in your life have you had a seeming negative experience or difficult challenge, but then thank to the gift of time, you were able to realize the wisdom, life lessons and maturity, that you accumulated from them?
– James Blanchard Cisneros
We have to practice losing everything. We are deer, we are headlights. We are the road where they collide.
– Richard Siken
An thou wouldst keep thyself hale, keep thyself from needless fighting.
– Sir James (Howard Pyle, Men of Iron)
Who on the brown earth
Knows himself one?
Life is in the lichens
That sleep as they run.
– Yvor Winters
Watch your thoughts as you watch the street traffic. People come and go; you register without response. It may not be easy in the beginning but with some practice you will find that your mind can function on many levels at the same time and you can be aware of them all.
– Nisargadatta
The field of combat between synchrony and diachrony … is the domain of poetry.
– John Hollander
Whatever you can see is not you. You are the seer, not the seen.
– Ramana Maharshi, Who Am I?
Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
– Louise Erdrich
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.
– Ray Bradbury
THE THIEF
by Jose Hernandez Diaz
A man in a “The World Is Burning” shirt appeared in front of an LA County judge. It was the first day of Spring. The man in a “The World is Burning” shirt was being accused of stealing a neo-expressionist painting by Chicano artist GRONK from a local museum. / don’t believe in stealing, the man said. Sometimes we do things we don’t believe in, said the judge. I can assure you / was at home watching the Lakers game, he said. The Lakers didn’t play that day, the judge said. I was at church singing “Old Time Religion” in the gospel choir. You are sentenced to 15 years’ solitary confinement in your studio apartment. I enjoy solitude, the man said. / will read and paint. Very well, then, said the judge. Off you go. Thank you, judge, said the man in a “The World Is Burning” shirt as he walked out of the courtroom calmly, indifferent.
The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
– William James
I tangled with
the world to
let it go
but couldn’t free
it: so I made
words
to wrestle in my
stead and went
off silent to
the quick flow
of brooks, the
slow flow of stone.
– A. R. Ammons
A peak and isle of rock it was, black and gleaming hard: four mighty piers of many-sided stone were welded into one.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
Sanctum Sanctorum
by Chris Forhan
I think I’ve lived enough now to be lonely
and be mad about it. I might as well rent out
a warehouse and sit there, scowling, every
goddamn light on, surrounded by loneliness.
I might as well hire back the angel who quit me,
spent veteran of my staying up too late
thinking. I’d make him put on some grimy
coveralls, sweep up the place now and then,
and stagger a half block, hauling the trash can
out in the rain to the empty street, and then
I’d make him come back again.
Want to be unhappy? It’s easy!
1. Harbor the past
2. Fear the future
3. Ignore the present
– Pat Parkinson
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to completely push that ambition to the side. But I’ll try, with my new understanding of craft and impermanence, of fleeting beauty. How nothing that we’re doing now is going to last. The sun will explode. Everything will be gone.
– Lauren Groff
You have been conditioned to believe that your physical body is real. But in actuality, it’s your energy body that is real and the physical around you is a reflection of your state of energy.
– Anita Moorjani
The grand plan on which the unconscious life of the psyche is constructed is so inaccessible to our understanding that we can never know what evil may not be necessary in order to produce good by enantiodromia, and what good may very possibly lead to evil.
– C.G. Jung
Forget – forget these things!
For these things have an adder’s tooth;
And beauty like a scorpion stings,
And cruel -ah, cruel is youth!
Let me feel on my forehead the wind
That blows from the classic shore
Where the wise and lonely shadows find
Rest and need love no more!
– John Cowper Powys
This is the perfect description of the ‘automatic cultural man’—man as confined by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that he has an identity if he pays his insurance premium, that he has control of his life if he guns his sports car or works his electric toothbrush.
– Ernest Becker
I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme.
– John Hawkes
The more precisely we note the bodily sensations that come with emotions, the more clearly we see their vibrant and amorphous characteristics.
– Marie Mannschatz
The legacy we leave is not just in our possessions, but in the lives of those we have touched.
– Patti Davis
Some of our problems are so vast that they define our personalities; without them we’d be different people.
– Sarah Manguso
Showing up in full authenticity in this world means that you’ll come up against many people who are acting as. Wearing a mask. Wanting something from you and shaping into the form they think will get it. But the good news is, authenticity sees right through all of that.
– Nika Solé
All human wisdom is
contained in these two words,
Wait and Hope.
– Alexandre Dumas
I am getting nearly as unbendable as an Ent.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The nervous system speaks the language of truth way better than the mind. Regulation is learning how to listen to it.
– Nika Solé
Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
Within me, there is a universe – a different kind of universe. When I close my eyes and focus within, the outside world stops and the world within begins.
– Prem Rawat
The psychoanalyst is, in fact, a historiographer who shows us that our personal histories are precisely the ways through which we conceal the past from ourselves—ways through which we simultaneously accept and deny it.
– Reza Miri
Because I used to make of love a wrong calculation: I thought that, adding up the understandings, I loved. I didn’t know that, adding up the incomprehensions, is how one truly loves.
– Clarice Lispector
Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.
– Denis Diderot
I am lost, quite lost in the middle of the desert… I have found a landscape that matches the landscape of my heart.
– Angela Carter
Eventually soulmates
meet, for they have the
same hiding place.
– Robert Brault
One should stick by one’s soul, and by nothing else. In one’s soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one’s own soul-knowledge, one is the worst of traitors.
– D.H. Lawrence
So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.
– Graham Greene
The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings.
– Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.
– Voltaire
drifting through twilight
the balloon’s
blank face
– Miharu Sugi
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But it also gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
– Thomas Mann
Void Only
I cannot escape from you.
When I think I am alone,
I awake to discover
I am lost in the jungle
Of your love, in its darkness
Jewelled with the eyes of unknown
Beasts. I awake to discover
I am a forest ascetic
In the impenetrable
Void only, the single thought
Of which nothing can be said.
– Kenneth Rexroth
Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting.
– Charles Bukowski
Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability.
– Karl Popper
Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that.
– Erich Heller
There is a whole scale of melancholy: it starts with a smile and a landscape, and it ends with the sound of a broken bell in the soul. Hence the difference in the taste of tears.
– Emil Cioran
Don’t underestimate the paradigm shift required for the act of beholding, just how different it is from our everyday lives and just how shiny and compelling our everyday life will seem when we propose pausing for some time beholding.
– Amy Frykholm
For what sustains all love is precisely this: a certain relationship between two unconscious knowledges.
– Jacques Lacan
losing a bond you thought you’d have forever really changes u.
– @onlystresstoday
Every theory of love, from Plato down,
teaches that each individual loves in the
other sex what he lacks in himself.
– G. Stanley Hall
You are living in the presence of mystery. And you tell me you have nothing to write about?
– Richard Rodriguez
summer mountains
the sound of a waterfall
before it appears
– Basho
The liberal does not dream of a perfect consensus of opinion; he only hopes for the mutual fertilization of opinions, and the consequent growth of ideas. Even when we solve a problem to universal satisfaction, we create, in solving it, many new problems over which we are bound to disagree. This is not to be regretted. Although the search for truth through free rational discussion is a public affair, it is not public opinion (whatever this may be) which results from it. Though public opinion may be influenced by science and may judge science, it is not the product of scientific discussion.
– Karl Popper
Our great instrument for progress is criticism.
– Karl Popper
The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.
– Bertrand Russell
The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning.
– Emil Cioran
How many wounds did
you endure because the
person holding the knife
was the one you loved?
– Nipuna Mehta
The magic wrought by simple poems I will always defend, for their universality is such that you can quite often slot yourself effortlessly into them and find a pocket of unquantifiable freedom waiting for you.
– Sara Teasdale
He who has waited long enough, will wait forever. And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.
– Samuel Beckett
When the Greeks gave their gift of the wooden horse, the Trojans took it. That’s the story we all know.
But I always imagine there was one man, an old Trojan, who laid his ear on the ankle of the great horse.
The Trojans hurried this man away; he was old and unkempt, and only a madman would press his ear against the newest gift, the latest triumph, his eyes burning with attention.
When the enemies emerged from the horse in the night, and razed the city, they found the old man last of all. He was sitting at his table, thinking of a long-gone love, of a terrible tyrant, of his own haunted heart, of everything in his past that had betrayed him.
“This,” he said, just before the soldiers slew him, “this is the fate of those who do not listen.”
– Joseph Fasano
Plant real listening in your heart and the new life will begin to ripen.
– Joseph Fasano
A young man who travels a lot is older than an old man who stays in the village.
– African Proverb
We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, and yet we have not learned the simple art of walking the earth as brothers [and sisters].
– Martin Luther King Jr.
I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it’s not like that. It happens overnight.
– Haruki Murakami
Despair is the silence of a soul that cannot find its echo in existence.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Stop waiting for life to become peaceful before you rest into being. Life may never become the fantasy the mind imagines.
– Amoda Maa
The night is a sentinel.
– John Ashbery
What we call ‘personality’ is, in many ways, the residue of a child’s best efforts to manage the impact of another’s mind.
– @proud_penelope
O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.
– Auden
AI cannot connect with the divine via the subconscious, the soul, the muse, whatever one likes to call that part of us that converts deep feeling into sound, word, image and movement and therefore AI cannot create anything that binds one human to another via artistic experience.
– John F. Duffy
most days i am a
museum of things i
want to forget.
– E.E. Scott
Cardio helps you lift weights.
Weights help you run faster and prevent injury.
A fit body doesn’t do one or the other. It’s does both.
– Dan Go
No one understands the death instinct, not even Freud. I think what Freud was trying to address was the scale of destructiveness of two world wars. He’s also addressing self-destructiveness, meaning sometimes people enjoy their suffering.
– Adam Philips
The closest I have felt to God has never been on a summit. It has been in the valley. Cold, broken, asking for help.
– Bear Grylls
The ash tree growing in the corner of the garden was felled. It was lopped first: I heard the sound and looking out and seeing it maimed there came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die and not to see the inscapes of the world destroyed any more.
– GM Hopkins
So many of us are losing friends to brainrot. They communicate in TikToks and reels. They do not read. They do not think. Their attention span has dwindled to mere seconds. This new generation thinks in memes, viral sounds, and sound bites; their opinions are not their own, but a mixture of whatever slop the algorithm is serving today.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Ask who benefits from you being illiterate and having the attention span of a goldfish. It’s not you. We have more power than we think. But we must get our minds back.
– Laura Matsue
The person is not a system of algorithms.
– Pope Leo XIV
Steve Jobs explains exactly why he thinks Microsoft makes “third rate products”
“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste”
“I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way. They don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their products”
“Proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books. That’s where one gets the idea. If it weren’t for the Mac, they would never have that in their products”
“I’m saddened not by Microsoft’s success. I have no problem with their success, they’ve earned it for the most part”
“I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third rate products”
The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still the one that Spinoza saw so clearly… Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?
– Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari
Even now, I pause over articles. A memory or the memory? A silence or the silence? The difference is subtle, but it changes everything. One opens a door. The other assumes you are already inside.
– Etya Vaserman Krichmar
I will live, even if life betrays me and
I will dream, even if dreams abandon me.
– Mahmoud Darwish
It doesn’t matter which method of destruction you choose.
Someone buries themselves in a library, someone in a pub.
– Emil Cioran
There is a difference between technical honesty and genuine transparency. Many who overtly claim to tell the truth utilize linguistic precision, qualifiers, omissions, or selective framing to evade that which they do not wish you to know, for example answering qualified questions in a narrowly accurate way while knowingly avoiding the broader reality being sought – thus, they remain factually correct while strategically obscuring the truth. These patterns will usually occur not only around more salient concerns, but also within minor passing remarks.
Trust your instincts. The micro-idiosyncratic flickers and oddities your intuition silently tracks them on are often more revealing than their words. Those who enjoy opaqueness through such means usually become comfortable over time, and the very same linguistic patterns can then be used to observe the undercurrent of truth which you seek. Patterns always exist.
– @buridansridge
Your body should be your best asset.
Not your greatest liability.
– Dan Go
Nothing will shape your worldview as much as simply reading how humans from the past thought.
You realize very quickly that our time is a radical anomaly in human history.
– @thinkingwest
I think the mother is language. The woman controls the language economy.
– Rachel Cusk
Logoi were much more than signifiers, if they were signifiers at all. They were understood as active living forces or energies that could leave an imprint on reality, not just in a metaphorical sense but quite literally, & could give birth to new living entities.
– Hanegraaff
Nearby there was one of the darker birdcalls , the more mature one, already sung inwardly, which was to the others as a poem is to a few words–how it shone toward God, already, already…
– Rilke
As each of us awakens, it impacts consciousness at a collective level. It is like dropping a tiny pebble of light into a dark pool of unconsciousness. Ripples of light!
– Leonard Jacobson
Allowing periods without food helps the digestive system recover. Frequent snacking with no pause can harm gut health.
– Dr. Eric Berg
It is spiritual poverty, not material lack, that lies at the core of all human suffering.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Man is an animal, and his happiness depends upon his physiology more than he likes to think. This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it. Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.
– Bertrand Russell
The easiest person to deceive is the one who thinks he’s smarter than you.
– Robert Greene
Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?
– Carl Sagan
The only thing that can cause me to suffer is when I believe a thought. Without believing thought..we are in harmony with life as it is. Enlightenment is really nothing more than no longer believing your thinking.
– Adyashanti
It is essential to die to the experience of yesterday and to the sensations of today, otherwise there is repetition. And the repetition of an act, a ritual, a word, is vain.
– Krishnamurti
Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.
– Andrew Marvell, The Definition of Love
Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility … what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life …
– Iris Murdoch
We need to normalize not being on any medications as the default of human existence.
– Suneel Dhand MD
Thus, the location of a tree, the type of soil beneath it, other trees behind and beside it, exert a great influence on its formation.
– Goethe
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
– Carl Jung
From a psychoanalytic perspective, modern man is as much a survivor of his history as he is its maker.
– Reza Miri
Sometimes intelligent people romanticize simplicity. They look at disciplined people and think:
“If only I could stop thinking.”
But the way out is not becoming less intelligent, but becoming less governed by intelligence alone.
You do not need to amputate your mind.
You need to put it in right relationship with action.
– @Kpaxs
Language transcends us and yet we speak.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The universe offers no final blueprint. Reality is a sequence of challenges, not a fixed order. We face it step by step, problem by problem.
– Karl Popper
The life so short, the crafts so long to learn.
– Geoffrey Chaucer
The Seven Streams
by David Whyte
Come down drenched, at the end of May,
with the cold rain so far into your bones
that nothing will warm you
except your own walking
and let the sun come out at the day’s end
by Slievenaglasha with the rainbows doubling
over Mulloch Mor and see your clothes
steaming in the bright air.
Be a provenance of something gathered,
a summation of previous intuitions,
let your vulnerabilities walking on the cracked sliding limestone
be this time, not a weakness, but a faculty
for understanding what’s about
to happen.
Stand above the Seven Streams
letting the deep down current surface
around you, then branch and branch
as they do, back into the mountain
and as if you were able for that flow,
say the few necessary words
and walk on, broader and cleansed
for having imagined.
The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.
– Geoffrey Chaucer
The whole
universe then
began to laugh at
me.
– Albert Camus
I am tired of myself tonight,I should like to be somebody else.
– Oscar Wilde
We’re born unequal we die equal, in the ashes all men are leveled.
– Seneca The younger
Science can flourish only in an atmosphere of free speech.
– Albert Einstein
The awakening begins when a man realizes that he is not going anywhere, and that he does not know where to go.
– G. Gurdjieff
Long have you been caught in the bonds of identification with the body.
– Ashtavakra Gita
The best prophet of the future is the past.
– Lord Byron
By practicing Buddha’s teachings, we protect ourself from suffering and problems. All the problems we experience during daily life originate in ignorance, and the method for eliminating ignorance is to practice Dharma.
– Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
Filth and old age, I’m sure you will agree, are powerful wardens upon chastity.
– Geoffrey Chaucer
Once I Pass’d Through A Populous City
ONCE I pass’d through a populous city, imprinting my brain, for
future use, with its shows, architecture, customs, and
traditions;
Yet now, of all that city, I remember only a woman I casually met
there, who detain’d me for love of me;
Day by day and night by night we were together,—All else has long
been forgotten by me;
I remember, I say, only that woman who passionately clung to me;
Again we wander—we love—we separate again;
Again she holds me by the hand—I must not go!
I see her close beside me, with silent lips, sad and tremulous.
– Walt Whitman
Nearly everyone who is out trying to solve other people’s problems has problems of their own.
– Manly P. Hall
It was when I stopped searching for home within others and lifted the foundations of home within myself I found there were no roots more intimate than those between a mind and body that have decided to be whole.
– Rupi Kaur
Some reluctant readers don’t admit they’ve started enjoying books.
Because being a reader wasn’t part of how they saw themselves.
So they read quietly. Privately.
Returning books before anyone notices they finished them.
If a child in your life is doing this, don’t mention it.
Don’t celebrate too loudly.
Just keep finding them books and putting them somewhere they’ll find them.
– Kevin McLeod
You can’t compete with someone who is having fun.
– Tiago Forte
Put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why else even be here?
– Steve Jobs
Safransky: You are saying, in effect, that jealousy is not a psychological problem.
Schwartz: Our so-called psychological problems take place in a fantasized realm that has almost nothing to do with the actual space in which human life is unfolding. These problems seem so real because the attention is consumed by thinking, and the real space is sacrificed to a substitute reality.
So much of what we call psychology is actually a mystification of experience. The question of where an experience actually takes place is rarely addressed. When someone comes to a psychologist and says, “I’m lonely,” how often does the psychologist ask, “Where is the loneliness?” Or, “What is it like to be you having this loneliness? Is it in the upper chest, the stomach? Is it vertical, horizontal? Does it permeate the whole body?” These questions change the nature of our feeling experience. The loneliness becomes felt in the body instead of remaining dangerous and abstract.
The work of compassionate self-care does not involve trying to find out why a particular psychological problem exists, but dropping out of the problem altogether and merging into the natural spaciousness that exists in and around the body.
[…]
In this work, the mental struggle is not ignored. It is attended to and then dissolved through a practice in which a rhythmic interplay is developed between feeling the pain in the body and expressing the dilemma as it appears in the mind. We come back to the body, feel the body, attend to the body, and alternately speak about the problem, even in great detail. Over time, the mind’s grip on its particular point of view is increasingly defused of power, and something else becomes available instead. It may be pain. No matter what it seems to be at first, we have entered another side of our experience as human beings. We have found the gateway to mystery.
We don’t enter into this process to gain an insight which will allow us to see through the problem. Our goal is simply to recognize that on some level the problem is a fabricated story, a substitution for a sublime truth about ourselves and each other.
[…]
If we look at ourselves from a slightly different angle, a little more compassionately, perhaps, we can see that there are no negative emotions and there are no positive ones either. At the heart of every emotion is an innocent wave of energy which is inherently free from psychological and moral dichotomies.
Feelings are energy and by their very nature ascending or expansive. They are trying to create, expand, grow, and move in various ways. Thoughts about feelings exert a downward pressure, creating a stranglehold on that ascending force. The purpose of the self-care process is to touch the ascending force and transcend the downward force.
It is vital that we look at the human being as an exotic life form, rather than as some familiar thing that we’ve grown so accustomed to, something we are bored with. We are a mobile life form, moving about on a planet, in a universe that we know almost nothing about, but we carry a bizarre unconscious assumption that we know almost everything about it.
– The Sun: Interview with Stephen R. Schwartz
Howdy Horn Honkers.
A friend called me in tears tonight.
She’s not one of my closest pals, but I adore her, and I was grateful she called because the person she needed to talk about — not wanted, needed — was someone she loved deeply, someone who had hurt her badly, and she needed a soft place to set the grief down for a while.
We all do, eventually.
It’s just part of being human.
And being human can be brutal. Even the most beautiful journeys have stretches of road littered with wreckage: loss, betrayal, misunderstandings, hurt feelings that calcify into silence.
The friend who called me was devastated because someone she had considered a dear, lifelong friend had simply…dropped her. No explanation. No fight. No final conversation to point to and say there — that’s where it broke.
She told me she’d spent months replaying every interaction in her mind like surveillance footage, searching for the moment everything went wrong.
She found nothing.
A few times, she admitted quietly, she’d cried herself to sleep over this.
I didn’t know what to tell her, exactly.
Romantic relationships usually leave evidence behind. Even when they end painfully, there are clues in the rubble. But friendships can die in stranger ways.
They can slowly circle the drain while you stand there helpless, watching the water pull them under. Sometimes you’re too tangled in emotion to act. Sometimes you lack clarity or courage. Sometimes you simply don’t know what to do, so you do nothing at all.
And that kind of helplessness produces its own kind of grief.
She said she didn’t feel she could engage the other person because she genuinely had no idea what had caused the fracture. How do you repair something when you can’t even find the crack?
As I listened, I realized I didn’t have much wisdom to offer.
I’m one of those “let’s talk about it” people. I’d rather hear a hard truth than sit alone inventing ten worse ones. To me, clarity — even painful clarity — is kinder than silence. But not everyone works that way. I know that.
So instead of advice, I shared something.
I told her something similar happened to me this year. Someone I adored, someone I’d known for years, suddenly began treating me as though I no longer existed. No explanation. No conflict. Just cold and complete absence.
It knocked the wind out of me, and at a very bad time when I didn’t have the wind to lose.
I’ve survived enough loss in my life that when something wounds me deeply, my instinct is to retreat inward and go quiet. Very quiet. I disappear.
I retreat to lick the wounds where no one can see them.
Because really — what else can you do?
You cannot force people to love you. You cannot force them to remain. Friendship is voluntary magic. A gift exchanged freely. Sometimes loud and chaotic, sometimes tender and unspoken, sometimes ridiculous and joyful. But when it’s real, it quietly shapes your world.
And when someone you love – friend or family or friends you consider family – suddenly shows you they no longer care whether you’re in their life at all, it’s disorienting in a way that’s difficult to explain.
Psychologists have language for it, I’m sure. But all I know is it feels like reaching for a stair in the dark and discovering it isn’t there. You inevitably end up faceplanting emotionally, and I think that’s where this sweet soul was when she rang me.
In my own situation, I told her, I just walked away.
Maybe the other person noticed. Maybe they didn’t. Usually, by the time someone realizes your silence means you were hurt, too much distance has settled in between to cross comfortably.
Or maybe they never notice at all.
And if that’s the case, leaving was probably the right thing.
The only part that still haunts me is this: I told this person things about my life I had never shared with anyone else. Pieces of myself I had kept locked away for years.
Boy howdy, do I regret that.
I truly believed I was standing in safe territory. Instead, I handed someone a map to one of the softest and scariest parts of my life and then had to watch them walk away carrying it.
There’s no undoing that. No taking the words back once they’ve been spoken.
That realization sits like a tattoo on the inside of my eyelids that I can see every time I close my eyes.
While talking with my friend tonight, I realized something: when you’re wounded somewhere you never expected to be wounded, adulthood offers you a hundred ways to cope and absolutely no instructions for choosing the right one.
Emotions become weather. Sometimes you navigate through them and emerge wiser, gentler, and more aware of yourself and others. Other times, you get swallowed whole in the swamp.
Hurt hurts.
There’s no profound philosophy that changes that.
Yes, you can try to talk things through. Sometimes you should. Sometimes people are willing. Sometimes they aren’t.
Sometimes the timing is wrong.
Sometimes pride gets in the way.
Sometimes one person wants clarity while the other wants distance.
Sometimes hearts go looking for answers in places where none exist.
Talking to someone uninvolved in the situation can help. I hope the sweet soul who called me tonight feels lighter for having reached out.
I think there’s a lot of damn courage in admitting when and how much you hurt.
But I still wasn’t sure what to tell her.
My own method — disappearing quietly like smoke from someone’s life — isn’t necessarily the healthiest. It’s just survival. And survival strategies are not always wisdom.
So I’ll ask you instead. You with your life experience, you with your successes and scars: What do you do when a friendship dies without a funeral?
What advice do you have for her? For any of us?
– Therra Cat Jaramillo
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
– William Faulkner
The blue seems eternal.
– Virginia Woolf
Family Memoir
We carried the furniture out of the burning house—
it was a blistered finger chore—
And then hurried all of the chairs, sofas, and beds
into the burning house next door.
– Sherman Alexie
Random thoughts and recollections that come to us seemingly out of nowhere tend to have greater existential value to them than the ones arrived at via the deliberate process of searching through our minds; but without that assiduous search there would be no sudden illuminations: no spark of mental fire is possible without the dishearteningly lengthy and generally thankless effort of rubbing together two sticks of readily available memories and familiar concepts.
– Mikhail Iossel
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.
He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
– William Faulkner, Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech, 1949
America’s immense heritage of idealistic ability is squandered by a system which divides all power between the prejudices of the ignorant many and the ruthlessness of the plutocratic few.
– Bertrand Russell
And it’s a relief, or a small death, to be standing, dressed in the simplicity of night, for once not crumpled by ecstasy, anticipation or senseless joy. Silently, you greet the ocean, this pliant metaphor for anything we feel at a given time. As of tonight, you ascribe to it no meaning, no truth, no character. But planted firmly in its moving sands, your mere presence is a question: is it true that everything will pass before your dry eyes, even this night stripped of tomorrow?
– Kapka Kassabova
Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
– Milan Kundera
They do not know the sleeping giant that they just awakened. Because it is not a coincidence, and our whole country must understand, that it was not until voting rights were ratified in this country that we got the Great Society. Because when Black Americans have the right to vote and that vote is protected, our schools get funded. When voting rights are protected, healthcare gets expanded. When voting rights are protected, our country moves forward. And Montgomery, that’s what they’re actually afraid of. They’re afraid of us coming together. They’re afraid of us protecting one another.
– Heather Cox Richardson
So, what’s it like to be me? You can ask yourself, “What’s it like to be me?” You know, the only way we’ll ever know what it’s like to be you is if you work your best at being you as often as you can, and keep reminding yourself: That’s where home is.
– Bill Murray, Dharma Talk
Look at the epic of your life, at the people in it, all heroic. And to think
it began with an accident. Somebody looked up at the night sky and saw a star,
somebody in Cracow or Belgrade, maybe, or the city where you live now.
Carbon, nitrogen … there was an explosion, and now you have to pay attention
to everything.
– David Kirby
Corruption of politics has nothing to do with the morals, or the laxity of morals, of various political personalities. Its cause is altogether a material one. Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world, the mottos of which are: “To take is more blessed than to give”; “buy cheap and sell dear”; “one soiled hand washes the other.”
– Emma Goldman
Answers tell us where we’ve been. Questions get us on our journey, and I’ve often said to people in psychoanalysis, “This is not about curing you because you’re not a disease, you’re a process. This is about making your life more interesting to you.
– James Hollis
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
– Zadie Smith
A person who has no compassion is like a temple without an idol. It is just an empty building.
– Kabir
Tragedy is so personal, but it doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened before, to someone, somewhere—it’s what helps us to understand and bring solace to others, knowing something of what they feel.
– Jacqueline Winspear
Love is metaphysical gravity.
– R. Buckminster Fuller
Nothing can refute the skeptic — nothing can do what epistemology hoped to do.
– Richard Rorty
No persons are more frequently wrong than those who will not admit they are wrong.
– François De La Rochefoucauld
I’m like a man who’s been half-asleep all his life, trying to find out what he was like before he woke up.
– Daniel Keyes
The function of education is to help you from childhood not to imitate anybody, but to be yourself all the time.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
It is better to know nothing than to half-know many things.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet, big, though small.
– Alberto Álvaro Ríos
There is no gravity in the Planet of Love; everything floats in the air.
– Mehmet Murat Ildan
The aim of totalitarianism is not simply to keep you uneducated but to instill in you a contempt for the educated, and thus a hatred of education, so that you never, through the empowerment of education, develop the language even to articulate your discontent to yourself.
– Joseph Fasano
One who is beyond the world is neither happy nor sad, neither attached nor detached, neither living nor dead.
– Ashtavakra
Powerful truth has its own gravity and eventually pulls people back to it.
– Dan Brown
In essence, String Theory describes space and time, matter and energy, gravity and light, indeed all of God’s creation as music.
– Roy H. Williams
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
– John Updike
Finance capital, literally, one might say, spreads its net over all countries of the world.
– Lenin
Gravity is only the bark of wisdom’s tree, but it preserves it.
– Confucius
Repeat the Name of God constantly in your mind. This practice creates a steady current of peace that stays with you in all activities.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
A person who is already dead is not worried about anything.
– Nisargadatta
You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.
– Vandana Shiva
The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played.
– George Orwell
Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.
– Sir Walter Scott
Strings of gravity vibrate at a different frequency than strings of light.
– Roy H. Williams
To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.
– Oscar Wilde
Look at the sky. We are not alone. The whole universe is friendly to us and conspires only to give the best to those who dream and work.
– A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the word a better place.
– Jeff Koons
Empathy, at its core, is knowing how not to hurt each other.
– Stephen Kuusisto
It’s worth everything, isn’t it, to keep one’s intellectual liberty, not to enslave one’s powers of appreciation, one’s critical independence.
– Edith Wharton
You are never stronger…than when you land on the other side of despair.
– Zadie Smith
I don’t know how to force the world into a shape I can manage.
– Charlotte McConaghy
Some people have uphill dreams but downhill habits.
– John Maxwell
When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.
– Sigmund Freud
You don’t understand because you haven’t yet guessed how you’ve changed things for me.
– Edith Wharton
The people with the best vibe are the ones who naturally enjoy being kind to others.
They have no strategy or hidden agenda.
They just know how hard life is and how kindness has the power to make the day brighter.
– Yung Pueblo
It is terrible when people do not know God. But it is worse when people confuse God with what is not God.
– Leo Tolstoy
There shall be one law for the citizen and the stranger. Justice must apply equally to everyone, not only to those born with power or privilege.
– Ex. 12:49
But remember… Most of mankind is not all of mankind.
– James Baldwin
Seems like our politicians think our democracy is something to be subverted. This government today is not worthy of honoring 250 years of democracy.
– allinbin66
One person vibrating at the frequency of pure love will counterbalance the negativity of 750,000 people who do not.
– Dr. David Hawkins
It’s amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.
– Louisa May Alcott
I think in terms of the day’s resolutions, not the years’.
– Henry Moore
The dream state is the initial state of our life, from the dream we awake; wakefulness comes after, not sleep.
– Maria Zambrano
You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!
– Hermann Hesse
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
– Alfred, Lord Tennyson
real poem (personal statement)
by Rachel Zucker
I skim sadness like fat off the surface
of cooling soup. Don’t care about
metaphor but wish it would arrive
me. There’s a cool current of air
this hot day I want to ride.
I have no lover, not even my love.
I have no other, not even I.
If the cosmos took billions of years to make you, if the iron in your blood was forged by stars, if your hair is stardust, if your heart is starlight, why, why would you waste your life thinking you’re here to be anything other than the greatest flame in the frozen darkness: love
– Joseph Fasano
If we can observe and understand how our thoughts are impacting us, we can change who we’re being and how we’re experiencing the world.
– Lori Deschene
lone wolf
Goodnight, moon. Or rather, goodbye.
I’m tired of the tricks you’ve played on me.
I’d rather go through night after night
unilluminated and just a bit forlorn,
a lone motorcyclist heading for home,
than wander among your sharp shadows,
sit on your white boulders, look down
into the silver river, any longer.
– Aaron Belz
The wise are wise only because they love. And the foolish are foolish only because they think they can understand love.
– Paulo Coelho
The voice in the head has a life of its own. Most people are at the mercy of that voice; they are possessed by thought, by the mind. And since the mind is conditioned by the past, you are then forced to reenact the past again and again.
– Eckhart Tolle
Yoga also means skill in action, not just doing a few exercises.
– Krishnamurti
Final Stop
by Ravi Shankar
When the railroad first built a station on the city outskirts,
families gathered on hillsides to watch black smoke plume,
hitched horses and abandoned stagecoaches to whisper
about “Pullman Palace Cars” with velvet seats, brass rails,
gas lights, knuckle couplers, air brakes: five stars for a fee.
When the railroad first threatened the forest’s tree line,
shackled men with skin dark as bark and forced to work
in quarries and mines began to hack at stumps in hummus
with shovels. They left their lives in leaf fall and the roots
regenerated. Unlike us, forests grow slow, in no time zone.
The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.
– William James
I never again shall tell you
what I think.
I shall be sweet and crafty, soft
and sly.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
Every deep thinker is more
afraid of being understood than
of being misunderstood.
– Friedrich Neitzsche
…if people are better off for having studied the Liberal Arts, then it might make sense to support institutions that teach them.
– Michael Drout
Ego says: “Once everything falls into place, I will find peace.”
Spirit says: “Find peace and everything will fall into place.”
– Padma Bhadra
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
– Anaïs Nin
Stop comparing yourself to a world that you were never meant to fit into.
– Nika Solé
The appreciation of beauty in art or nature is not only the easiest available spiritual exercise; it is also a completely adequate entry into the good life, since it is the checking of selfishness in the interest of seeing the real.
– Iris Murdoch
Throughout it all, she has insisted that gender is maya (illusion), relevant only to the mundane world.
– Amnuaypond Kidpromma, PhD
When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.
– Sylvia Plath
It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.
– Edwidge Danticat
Strength and intelligence without empathy wouldn’t make you a good person, let alone a good leader.
– Picazo Basha
A picture means I know where I was every minute. That’s why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary.
– Andy Warhol
No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.
– Yaa Gyasi
There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.
– Lyndon Johnson
No truly great thing is created suddenly.
– Epictetus
There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.
– Saul Bellow
Overindulgence had shattered his lambent rationality into myriad splinters, each consisting of an insight unrelated to any other, each brightly reflecting a star-hot whiteness now blazing in his stomach; he thought he might vomit.
– Jonathan Franzen
I think everybody should like everybody.
– Andy Warhol
They tore out our fruits, cut off our branches, burned our trunk, but they could not kill our roots.
– Poema Náhuatl
People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something—always, in a word, seeking.
– Bodhidharma
Recalibration of the mind means clearing our perceptions and recovering our capacity for pure observation.
– Ilchi Lee
The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.
– Winston Churchill
There should be a course in the first grade on love.
– Andy Warhol
Let them bury me with the Romantics.
– Louise Glück
But what is of great importance to me is observation of the movement of colors.
– Robert Delaunay
As a Neurologist I need to tell you that the original data centers were the artists, writers, and storytellers who recorded our histories and passed on wisdom for future generations.
– Dr. Philippe Douyon
An odd phrase, “by heart,” (…) as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
– A.S. Byatt
That a poem may use the same words as a Company Report means no more than the fact that a lighthouse and a prison cell may be built with stones from the same quarry, joined by the same mortar. Everything depends upon the relation between the words. And the sum total of all these possible relations depends upon how the writer relates to language, not as vocabulary, not as syntax, not even as structure, but as a principle and a presence.
– John Berger
If you are working inwardly, Nature will help you. For the man who is working, Nature is a sister of charity; she brings him what he has need of for his work. If you need money for your work, even if you do nothing to get it, the money will come to you from all sides. In another case, Nature will cut off all a man’s resources if it is necessary for his work.
[To another student]: Do you understand? For instance, had you had money a certain evening, you would have gone to a cafe but having none, you stayed at home and worked. Nature is more intelligent than you; she knows better than you which are the best conditions for your work; and if you work, Nature calls on conscious spirits who will arrange for you the conditions you need. For ordinary man, for the man who does not work, there is nothing but chance. But for the man who works, Nature gives him through conscious spirits all that he needs.
– G.I. Gurdjieff
The ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it.
– Margaret Mead
For many years I wanted to save the world. I told people that God loves them, but nothing seemed to change. I was disappointed. Then one day I decided to stop telling people this, and just love them myself. This made all the difference. I learned that the world doesn’t want to be saved, it wants to be loved. That’s how you save it. I once thought I had to love people to God who would heal them, not knowing that God was the love I was giving. Turns out I didn’t have to be more like Jesus. It was enough to be Jim.
– Jim Palmer
Jorge Luis Borges
by Jorge Luis Borges
But after all
writing poetry
is nothing more
than a guided dream
and now now advanced age
has taught me
to resign myself
to being Borges.
None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze.
– Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
In silence, in the dark, the tides shine, get slippery, their fluidity turns them into a mirage. There’s a persistent hum to the ocean that translates into a back-and-forth movement of our body. Walls disappear and new visual formations invade the imagination. One is not in usual dimensions. Sleep belongs to the past, and the hours too. Luminosity enmeshed with darkness makes us cross over new territories. You move into galaxies in a few seconds, space-time becomes just a game.
Thinking is dimmed when familiar forms of reality disappear. This is not a loss. Long periods of inner silence favor clearings, they let the light in, the flooding, the blinding, the bedazzlement. We need spaces for the reshuffling of new cards, need to be nowhere. Thinking doesn’t always come from preceding thoughts: I suspect it’s always being born, even when it seems related to the past.
– Etel Adnan
God lurks in the gaps.
– Jorge Luis Borges
In Hebrew the term dabar means both ‘word’ and ‘deed.’ Thus to say something is to do something. I love you. I hate you. I forgive you. I am afraid. Who knows what such words do, but whatever it is, it can never be undone. Something lay hidden in the heart that is irrevocably released through speech into time, is given substance and tossed like a stone into the pool of history, where the concentric rings lap out endlessly. Words are power, essentially the power of creation. By my words I both discover and create who I am. By my words I elicit a word from you. Through our converse we create each other.
– Frederick Buechner
He who sees a need and waits to be asked for help is as unkind as if he had refused it.
– Dante Alighieri
Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also.
– G. K. Chesterton
It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.
– Rachel Carson
One existence, one music, one organism, one life, one God: star-fire and rock-strength, the sea’s cold flow And man’s dark soul.
– Robinson Jeffers
Many years ago I was very lucky to make this wonderful discovery, not because I was intelligent, but out of utter failure. Zen students do a lot of meditating and following the breath. It seems very concentrated, but what often happens is that you think you are following your breath, and then you realize that you are following your mind into some story. It’s like trying to discipline a dog that refuses to be trained. Some people seem to be good at that kind of practice. They hold their focus and stay with it and become quiet. I, on the other hand, never had the capacity to hold my mind like that, so I wasn’t very good at it.
After complete failure time and time again, I heard my teacher say, “You have to find your own way.” Instead of closing in on a narrow focus, I found my own way was just to be present, which was to become totally open. This is more like listening than focusing.
In that listening, I discovered a very natural state, a state that is actually the only state that isn’t contrived. From that state that is like listening, I started to see that every effort to contrive created another state. As soon as I made an effort, a state would be manufactured out of thin air. I could manufacture beautiful states, terrible states, concentrated states, and all sorts of states; but there was only one state that was totally natural and absolutely effortless. In that state, I found access to the deepest Self, which is freedom.
– Adyashanti
The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth—that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community—and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.
This happens—it is happening—because the alignment of wealth and power permits economic value to overturn value of any other kind. The value of everything is reduced to its market price. A thing not marketable has no value. It is increasingly apparent that we cannot value things except by selling them, and that we think it acceptable, and indeed respectable, to sell anything.
– Wendell Berry
Any Morning
by William Stafford
Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.
People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.
Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won’t even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.
Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has / so much to do in the world.
– William Stafford
You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there is new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.’ That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.
– President Obama, 2015
If you ask for grace to realize who you are, ask also for the courage you will need to do so. To realize who you are, you will have to walk through all the shadows in your inner landscape. It is not easy. You will need to give up all your views about yourself again and again, each time they crystallize into a pattern. You will have to experience and release all the pain in your life. You will have to embrace your death. You will have to bear everything to realize everything. A perfect divine economy.
– James Thornton
I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of “sin”–this sense that it was possible to go “too far”, and that many people were doing it–this was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.
– Joan Didion
Lower your head, shut your eyes, breathe out gently and imagine yourself looking into your own heart. Carry your mind, that is, your thoughts, from your head to your heart.
– St. Symeon the New Theologian
Practicing Being Present :
You find relief when your pulled away from it. ( distraction ) “Just like elastic, your naturally brought back to it and so you find relief. It really is natural to be present; and the further we are pulled away from being unnatural, the stronger that elastic will pull us back. The more we live in a world of chaos the more that elastic will pull us back to search for peace. In a meaningless chaotic world this instinct for meaning will drive us ever more powerfully to seek and seek and seek until we find. Which again you see is this wonderful natural balance that is there behind the scenes, you could say it is the will of God, which maybe out of mind may be out of fashion, but it’s still there the secret power behind the scene that keeps the whole world as in the saying” “is in God’s hands.”
– John Butler
The fusion of all three movements—movement of breath, movement of thought, movement of body—gave rise to a radically new all-encompassing unitary movement. A shift from many movements to One Movement.
– Ahmed Salman
How else do you occupy yourself? You stand on a mountaintop. You feel the mist on your skin. You fall in love.
– Kay Chronister
Existence in the physical universe, is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn’t going anywhere, that is to say, it doesn’t have some destination that it ought to arrive at. But, it is best understood by analogy with music. Because music, as an art form, is essentially playful. We say you play the piano. You don’t work the piano. Why? Music differs from, say, travel. When you travel, you are trying to get somewhere. One doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest. Same when dancing – you don’t aim at a particular spot in the room, that’s where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance!
– Alan Watts
Move your arms as if you are free from gravity. Open your mouth if you like, but do not breathe as you breathe on land; rather remember that breathable blue by closing your eyes. Then open your eyes. You can breathe underwater now. We all can. We all did. Before time. Now let your body sink rather than float. When you reach the bottom of the ocean, let your feet find the sand, let your weight come, stand up. From here, you can walk wherever you like. Starfish and turtles are here with you now. An electric eel swims by you, arched like an S, spotted yellow and blue. Look at your hands. Can you imagine fins? Spread your fingers wide. There was a time before fingers, arms, legs. Before the landlife. There is no alone in the ocean. There is only the lifedeath of water. Thriving.
– Lidia Yuknavich
Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand.
– Leo Tolstoy
The Summer Before The War
by Huw Williams
All on a Saturday, bright as a bell
Early and just for the ride
We took a trip, cycling down to the sea
You, and your lady, and I
And oh, what a summer
And oh, what a sun
Right to the blue sky it clung
One day at Whitson
The sea had the shore
The summer before the War
Warm summer places,
where you could taste the country air
Chasing our shadows, we’d fly
Down through the narrow lanes,
racing the slow trains
And the last of an age going by
And we had a good time
And we had some fun
There was time then when we were all young
One day at Whitson
The sea had the shore
The summer before the War
Young hearts and young souls
Young minds to unfold
Knowing the untold, somehow
One day at Whitson
The sea had the shore
The summer before the War
Everybody gets so much information all day
long that they lose their common sense.
– Gertrude Stein
Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The majority of people aspire to contribute to the world and to each others’ lives. The majority understand that the greatest joy and meaning in our lives comes from what we give to others, not what we take. Most of us also understand that going against someone else’s welfare will undermine our own welfare. This kind of logic makes sense to people. That is why it will prevail over confusion and ignorance.
From this point of view, we are not living in a dark age. We are living in the dawn of light. Even though there could be more goodness and altruism, even though greed, injustice and aggression cause tremendous suffering every day, we must take some time to reflect on what is going right. Those who inflict pain on others out of their confusion and ignorance are a small majority of this world’s seven billion plus people. If we lose perspective and overestimate their prevalence, then our inspiration will be hijacked by skepticism and negative thinking. There are those – especially in extreme religious groups and some portions of the media and politics – who attempt to serve their own agendas by promoting negative, polarizing thinking. There are others who have no agenda but are habitually negative. But if our aim is to open our heart and let its natural, exuberant warmth spread to others, we must not let this kind of thinking infiltrate our mind.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Training in Tenderness
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to
draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
– Carl Sagan
The capacity to see and—equally so—blindness are not divisible. The critical faculty of the human mind is one: To believe one can be seeing internally but blind as far as the outside world is concerned is like saying that the light of a candle gives light only in one direction and not in all. The light of the candle is reason’s capacity for critical, penetrating, uncovering thought.
– Erich Fromm
He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn’t matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.
– Joyce Carol Oates
Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time.
– Thomas Kuhn
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.
– Charles Dickens
Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness-they cannot work and their civilization collapses.
– Frank Herbert
I let the music play me.
– Sonny Rollins
In the Morning, Before Anything Bad Happens
by Molly Brodak
The sky is open
all the way.
Workers upright on the line
like spokes.
I know there is a river somewhere,
lit, fragrant, golden mist, all that,
whose irrepressible birds
can’t believe their luck this morning
and every morning.
I let them riot
in my mind a few minutes more
before the news comes.
Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens.
– Harold Bloom
Art is the act of making choices in a charged field.
– Dean Young
The glare of neon burns
through the night
like a porch light left on.
– Carson Wolfe
The first apostles were women.
That is not a feminist slogan;
it is a historical fact.
– N.T. Wright
Life is full of questions.
Idiots are full of answers.
– Socrates
The letter of our life has
continued to arrive, delivered
even when we couldn’t yet read
the address.
Everything has brought you here,
and you have everything you
need to take the next step.
– Carrie Newcomer
Saint Pier Paolo Pasolini, pray for us.
– John Waters, Prayer to Pasolini
The crowd neither wants nor seeks knowledge, and the leaders of the crowd in
its turn detest knowledge.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Man didn’t come into this world for nothing. Man is a very extraordinary achievement that required enormously long and difficult preparation. This achievement is not complete. It would be quite a considerable cosmic disaster if this experiment with man on this Earth should fail. And therefore, for this reason much is being done to prevent this experiment from failing. Not because man deserves to survive but because he is really needed. But also, you must understand however much we may criticize man, you have to realize I think how difficult it is to be a man. People don’t really grasp this. It is exceedingly hard to be in the true sense a true man, a human being.
We are given powers, creative powers, that are necessary but they are terribly dangerous and man has also got a freedom that is necessary but terribly dangerous. It is not right to have a hostile or negative attitude towards the human race. The higher powers do not have it and we shouldn’t either.
This … one should on the contrary have great compassion, great love for mankind. This struggling creature that is trying to fulfill an almost impossible destiny. We should not feel hostile. In spite of our arrogance, in spite of our selfishness, there is the struggle that is going on the world. Many, many people try to make something better of their lives. Unless we feel great compassion for mankind we can’t do our work in this world. Any kind of hostility, any kind of rejection of our fellow men is against the high purpose and we shouldn’t serve mankind with a feeling of superiority that we are better because we happen to see something or because we have a higher ideal. It is not like that.
We are not better. I am not better than any other man because I am a man and not something else and we are all in the same boat. That feeling that we are all in the same boat must be strong with us. Only in that way can we really have compassion.
– J. G. Bennett
What does your body know? Its ways of knowing will not desert you. Its knowing remains true and will be enhanced through your attention and reliance. The musician Jerry Garcia once said, ‘In the water you’re weightless. It’s so silent you’re like a thought. When I begin to relax, the songs start happening in my head.‘ The body needs to relax to float. If you’re stiff and afraid, the water will not hold you well and you’ll flail and splash…. But if you have faith in the floating, faith in the water, alliances are made from that.
– Patrice Vecchione
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been.
– Margaret Atwood
The cost of daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
– Ian McEwan
I know there is no straight road
No straight road in this world
Only a giant labyrinth
Of intersecting crossroads
– Federico García Lorca
This is indeed the greatest irony of all: the true path to ecstatic joy is through acute melancholia. To take a stance against American happiness–tepid satisfaction–is to stand close to extreme jubilance, rapturous abandonment. The surest way to suffer what Thoreau calls “quiet desperation” is to try to lead the perfectly happy American life. Attempting this, you will always be dissatisfied, for you are repressing that rich darkness of the soul. Allowing this creative gloom into the light, you inexorably move away from the silent worry to Thoreau’s most cherished state, wildness.
– Eric G. Wilson
Red is holy. Nobody understands it. It goes on, on, without the world’s understanding. Blue is holy. Blue goes on without the world’s understanding. And the heart…the heart can’t wait. Revolts without understanding. Boom. Goes on. Without the world’s understanding.
– Tennessee Williams
Maybe I’m not so talented, but if I keep looking and looking and trying to be here, working, applying and so on, one has a breakthrough moment.
The great energy is here, and our responsibility is to open to it, and through painting, the painter is able to let this other force come through. Forget everything except what’s here now in front of you, because only by that… that being here are you able to tap the full resources of the organism.
Otherwise the distraction of thought eats up energies which could be used and applied to the work itself. The demand to be here, to maintain attention for a sustained period of time kind of dispels the clouds which obscure the luminosity we’re speaking of.
So from that point of view, I would like to see a whole-hearted application to the moment, to the job which is in front of me.
And that goes not only for painting – for everything.
When you pick up something or you apply paint or you do anything or when I speak now, I would like to be here entirely despite the distractions of the mind. And that’s very much the secret of good work in anything.
– William Segal
Hard as this may be to grasp, the Buddha, or awakened mind in each person, is whatever we are experiencing in the moment – the wind in the trees, the traffic on the freeway, the confusion we are feeling – if we but surrender to it. Surrendering to it means experiencing it fully, giving it our full attention, without struggling against it or trying to make it something other than it is. In opening to what is, without strategies or agendas, we touch what cannot be grasped – a moment of nowness, sharp and thin as a razor’s edge. And walking on this razor’s edge cuts through the struggle between self and other that separates us from a more immediate presence to life.
– John Welwood
I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads.
It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.
– Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
& the breeze passes by so generously, & the air has the whole earth in its mind and it thinks it, thinks it…
the sensation of falling, the general theory of relativity, the nest of meaning—you can sit in your exile and, to the tune of the latest song, the recording of what was at some moment the song of the moment, the it song, the thing you couldn’t miss—it was everywhere—everyone was singing it—you can find your mind and in the firelight catch up on that distant moment’s news.
– Jorie Graham
I Would Like to Eat Fugu – But Live
by David Kirby
Moderation Kills (Excusez-Moi, Je Suis Sick As A Dog)
I’m tackling this particularly chewy piece of sushi and
recalling the only Japanese words I know,
“Fugu wa kuitashii, inochi wa oshishii, ” meaning,
“I would like to eat fugu – but live!”
which, i’ve read, is something Japanese executives say
when contemplating a particularly risky
course of action, because whereas the testes of the fugu
or blowfish are harmless
yet highty prized as a virility builder, the liver,
which is almost identical
in appearance to the testes, is toxic, so that
a less-cautious individual,
a fisherman, say, who thinks himself as skillful
as a chef who has actually been
educated and licensed in the preparation of fugu,
might eat the wrong organ and die,
face-down in his rice bowl, chopsticks nipping
spasmodically at the air.
Coming in from the vegetable patch, the fisherman’s wife
sees him cooling in the remains
of his meal and shrieks, and I don’t know
the Japanese for this,
“You have eaten fugu – and died!” True, though
for anyone other than the new widow,
why should his death be exclaimed upon as though
it were a failure or defeat,
since the fisherman had finished a good day of work
and was not only enjoying his tasty snack
but also looking forward to the enhancement
of his powers of generation,
this being therefore a fine moment in which to expire
and certainly preferable to
countless moments of life as a fumbling drooler
(since fugu liver can paralyze
as well), a burden to his loved ones as well as
the object of their contempt.
Then someone across the table from me says he’s heard
of a state of mind called boredom
but never actually experienced it, and I wonder,
Can a mind that never sinks
into the cold gray waters of boredom ever rise to
the blue-and-gold heavens of ecstasy?
Then someone else shouts, “Excusez-moi, je suis sick
as a dog!” and disappears
laughing, but that’s okay, because “ecstasy” =
“ex stasis” = “get off the dime” =
“fish or cut bait” = “lead, follow, or get out
of the way,” does it not?
Besides, who’s to say the fisherman didn’t hate
his wife, couldn’t stand her?
And had to eat fugu testes in order to be able
to countenance her and
therefore is better off dead and unknowing than
alive and fully sentient of such misery?
Or hated himself and therefore is better off dead, etc.?
And therefore who is
more admirable, the executive who fears death
or the fisherman who actually dies?
Does the former feel brave merely because
he has talked of taking a risk?
Would the doughty fisherman have said “Fugu wa kuitashii,
inochi wa oshishii” and taken pride
in his temperance? Certainly not –
offered the same challenge under identical
circumstances, he’d have said, and I don’t know
the Japanese for this either, “Moderation kills.”
Being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. We need soft night noises — a mother speaking downstairs. …We need the little clicks and sighs of a sustaining otherness. We need the gods.
– John Updike
All things are words belonging to that language
In which Someone or Something, night and day,
Writes down the infinite babble that is, per se,
The history of the world.
– Jorge Luis Borges
HERE DEAD WE LIE
Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.
Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.
– A E Housman
yes the business folk
by José Olivarez
yes, the business folk rush thru midtown.
they talk math that equates to foreclosures.
yes, the trash has to be taken out
& dinner chewed. when i was a child,
i saw a house on our block burn. the smoke
was a serpent coiling up getting thicker &
then it was gone. the firemen left the house a puddle,
but what about the smoke? it was easy, then,
to forget what i couldn’t see. such is life:
the dishes keep piling up. why stop
just because there’s a warm breeze in January.
there are bills to pay and bills about to come due.
smoke thins into air, the serpent i saw as a kid
never disappeared. it’s not even hiding.
most folks don’t know the sound of smoke.
though they hear it. though smoke gets mistaken
for silence. most folks think they’re saying nothing
when they’re saying the most.
To be free in the world, you must be free of the world. Otherwise your past decides for you and your future. Between what has happened and what must happen, you are caught. Call it destiny or karma, but never-freedom.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Sometimes you have to reason with the unreasonable voices—because every desire has its reasons.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Time has less patience
than it used to.
– Rick Rubin
The death of literary culture began when professors stopped treating novels as works of art and started treating them as ideological evidence.
– Liza Libes
After all, life is not even close to being as logically consistent as our worries; it has many more unexpected ideas and many more facets than we do.
– Rilke
I was crushed at my own carelessness (I always learn the hard way) and at the thought of all my mending work going down the drain, and tears started to my eyes.
– Sylvia Plath
The only rule of the trip is: do not return as you left. Come back different.
– Anne Carson
The pathological power of Greek poetry is its great gift. The Greek poets knew the power of the human heart, in its all-consuming desire, in its heartbreak and hardship, in its want for affection, in its madness and craziness.
– Paul Krause
I was taking questions at an event, and a young student stood up and asked, “Do you have one main message?”
Normally I would say no, as I believe a writer should feel free to change, explore, even contradict himself, all in the pursuit of truth, but I saw in her eyes the child I once was, the children we all are in this world that is so hungry for love and openness and hope.
“Yes,” I told her. “Your life is not a crime.”
– Joseph Fasano
Whatever role we are loved for in our family, we will continue to enact it, despite the toll it takes.
– Catherine Gildiner
Most of us are superficially empty, and it shows itself through the desire for distraction. We want to be amused, so we turn to books, to the radio, we run to lectures, to authorities; the mind is everlastingly filling itself.
– Krishnamurti
Is Writing Hard?
Writing is Hard
Only if you’re paying attention
to the words.
Let the words
lead you and don’t think
about what you’re saying.
You’re just the pencil.
Let the muse
be the hand
holding you.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
I will sit by the river’s trembling edge and look at the water-lilies, broad and bright, which lit the oak that overhung the hedge with moonlight beams of their own watery light. I will pick flowers. I will bind flowers in one garland and clasp them and present them – Oh! to whom?
– Virginia Woolf
For myself, I find I become less cynical rather than more – remembering my own sins and follies; and realize that men’s hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent than the one derived from fear of punishment.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Curl
by Diane Seuss
No longer at home in the world
and I imagine
never again at home in the world.
Not in cemeteries or bogs
churning with bullfrogs.
Or outside the old pickle shop.
I once made myself
at home on that street,
and the street after that,
and the boulevard. The avenue.
I don’t need to explain it to you.
It seems wrong
to curl now within the confines
of a poem. You can’t hide
from what you made
inside what you made
or so I’m told.
When you have a calling placed over your life, there’s no timeline for that. You do what you came here to do for as long as you can possibly do it, and that’s when it’ll be done.
– Nika Solé
The words in poems are for the most part the same as those we find everywhere else. The energy of poetry comes primarily from the reanimation and reactivation of the language that we recognize and know.
– Matthew Zapruder
If the people you most look up to are investors and financiers, then your God is money.
– @naval
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
– Eugene Ionesco
Your Heart is the light of this world.
Don’t let your mind hide it.
– Mooji
For it is proper for a pious poet to be chaste
himself, but there is no need for his little verses to be so
– Catullus
The music that can deepest reach,
And cure all ill, is cordial speech.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I’ve always been suspicious of collective truths.
– Eugene Ionesco
Who am I to tell you what you can or can’t do? The world is a better place when we follow our own flow.
– john zbigniew guzlowski, The Return of Suitcase Charlie
I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.
– Anne Lamott
When your mind is too busy worrying, it can’t receive the guidance that is ever-present in your reality. Showing you the way.
– Nika Solé
One day you will ache for a season you are currently rushing through. You will look back like a man watching a ship vanish beyond the gray edge of the sea and realize the days you treated as obstacles were often the very days you would later give almost anything to enter again. That is the strange cruelty of time: it feels rather ordinary while it’s becoming sacred, like a bell tolling far off in the hills while everyone in the village keeps working as though nothing has changed.
This is why you must stop treating ordinary days like disposable things, as though they were scraps falling from the table of a better life that hasn’t yet arrived. Never despise the smallness of the life in front of you. I say that as a hypocrite that has lived long enough to experience the excruciating pain of doing just that.
– Rob Wood
Civilization is the project of making humans believe they are not animals. Art is the project of admitting they are.
– maddie rune
I’ll admit I’m not always tuned into every single word when listening to an audiobook, but I’m just as capable of spacing out while my eyes scan a written page, and not realizing it until several minutes have passed. I consider this a peril of having ADHD.
– Francesca Leader
Worlds in hordes—or beings—winged beings perhaps wouldn’t astonish me if we should end up by discovering angels—or beings in machines—argosies of celestial voyagers—
– Charles Fort
Enlightenment is not an achievement. Enlightenment is not going to the peak. Enlightenment is a homecoming – you come back to your original nature.
– Sadhguru
Error correction is the most important method in technology and learning in general.
– Karl Popper
Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute.
– Dostoyevsky
I am always happy to be practicing. Period … I enjoy just playing my horn and going into the type of meditation that playing involves. It puts me mentally in a place that is always transcendent and above real life. I love playing just for myself. It’s a great experience.
– Sonny Rollins
I believe you were unhappy in the past because of bad company; it was quite natural — in the shade one cannot sun oneself.
– Franz Kafka, 1904.
I was turning numb. What happened to me didn’t seem to matter. Sometimes I felt angry, but most of the time I felt nothing; I’d never felt so much nothing before.
– Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia
some people only
become themselves
after midnight
– @BashoSociety
Wear scarlet! Tear the green lemons
off the tree! I don’t want
to forget who I am, what has burned in me
and hang limp and clean, an empty dress—
– Denise Levertov, The Five-Day Rain
Among those whose reputation is exhausted in a short time by its own luxuriance, are the writers who take advantage of present incidents or characters which strongly interest the passions, and engage universal attention.
– Samuel Johnson
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
– Heraclitus
Study at a college, a period of leisure and study and reflection at a sensitive period, is the readiest instrument by which to find yourself and your work.
– Wallace Stevens
The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.
– Heraclitus
I always think the best classical music stops feeling like heritage and starts feeling gloriously alive. If it leaves the room a bit changed, it’s done its job.
– Grace Morton
We have to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
– D. H. Lawrence
Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.
– Aldous Huxley
The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make them virtuous, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make them sane.
– Erich Fromm
With no signal
An internal map
Guides external world
– Rachel Newcombe
English majors will read 900 pages of literary theory just to avoid reading literature itself.
– Liza Libes
There are instincts which are deeper than reason.
– Arthur Conan Doyle
Trying to stuff all the positive attributes into a single god, excluding those that are contradictory or embarrassing, has created quite a shadow for most theologies.
– James Hollis, Tracking the Gods
and the budding waltzes
we swoop through in nights.
– Frank O’Hara
How silly it would be to envy a man who was drinking poison out of a golden cup! And yet, who can say that he is any wiser than one who envies any instance of worldly greatness?
– William Law
Self examination is the key to insight, which is the key to wisdom.
– M. Scott Peck
Everything arises from what is formless and descends into that which is changeless.
– Chuang Tzu
A change of fortune hurts a wise man no more than a change of the moon.
– Benjamin Franklin
He who has little problems, shows little love. He who has overcome huge problems, has giant love. Because he understands what it means and won’t have others suffer like he did.
– Dragos Bratasanu, Ph.D.
Nothing is more alluring than someone who has somewhere else to be, even if that place is internal.
– Alexis McElroy
To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.
– Sylvia Plath
Build bridges of insight through empathy, see the world through the eyes of others, understand the world through their experiences, and feel the world through their emotions.
– Tim Brown
Solitude demands a precise assessment of time, I’ve always understood this. It’s like the money in your wallet: you have to know how much time you need to kill, how much to spend before dinner, what’s left over before going to bed.
– Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts
Isn’t it surprising that precision should be paired off with incorrigibility, vagueness with impossibility of verification? After all we speak of people ‘taking refuge’ in vagueness — the more precise you are, in general the more likely you are to be wrong, whereas you stand a good chance of not being wrong if you make it vague enough.
– J. L. Austin
We are a time-starved people, obsessed with fitting huge achievements into our few years. In the process, we often fill our buckets with things that don’t matter or work. But when we give up on trying to change what can’t be changed, and simply embrace what we love, a miracle occurs. We notice that the moment to be happy has already arrived. It’s here, now.
– Martha Beck
No one’s ever sat me down and taught me what empathy is or why it matters more than power or patriotism or religious faith. But I learn it right there in the hallway: I cannot do what’s been done to me to others.
– Zak Ebrahim
We should never wait for science to give us permission to do the uncommon; if we do, then we are turning science into another religion.
– Dr. Joe Dispenza
Nothing in life is more exciting and rewarding than the sudden flash of insight that leaves you a changed person.
– Arthur Gordon Webster
Spirit is the life-essence that knits us together, that keeps us together.
– Mark Nepo
Writing is for me like flatulence: asking who it is for doesn’t quite settle.
– Báyò Akomolafe
At times, we will be initiated into the blue areas of the soul.
Things there are not always as they seem.
– Matt Licata
In Defense of Melancholy
There’s a cultural fantasy, which we also see reflected in many forms of contemporary spirituality and self-help culture, that we are not supposed to feel melancholic, empty, tender, shaky, blue, or uncertain. And if we do, then something has gone wrong. Maybe I’m failing. Maybe I’m not okay. Maybe I need to heal this quickly.
So almost immediately we move into action. How do I replace this tenderness with something more positive, more certain, more solid, more “high vibration,” more together? Surely there must be some practice, some teaching, some technique, some insight that can remove this blueing of the soul.
But what if melancholy is not always a symptom of disconnection?
What if, at times, it emerges precisely because something in us has become more permeable to life?
I’m not speaking here about collapse, despair, or overwhelming depression, which may require real support, protection, accompaniment, and care. I’m speaking more about those quieter blue regions of the soul: the tenderness that can appear when the heart begins to soften a little, when the defenses loosen, when we become less protected against the shimmering and fragile nature of being alive.
Sometimes there is a sadness that comes not because something is missing, but because life itself is overflowing the edges of the heart.
A melancholy born not only of loss, but of contact.
A tenderness that arrives when we can no longer fully defend ourselves against love, beauty, impermanence, longing, or the ache of being human.
The ancient alchemists understood something about this. They knew that not every difficult emotion was pathology. Not every descent required immediate transcendence. Not every darkening was failure.
Sometimes the “blue ones” arrive carrying important information for the soul.
And perhaps part of healing is learning not to abandon these visitors so quickly. Not to fuse with them or drown in them, but to allow them space to speak in their own language.
There is a wisdom available in certain forms of melancholy that cannot be reached through constant positivity, performance, certainty, or self-improvement.
A quiet opening. A breaking of the heart. A softening into mystery.
And maybe, at times, this too is part of the path.
– Matt Licata
The body is much slower to give up the past-old fears of not pleasing others, old eating patterns, old patterns of relationship.
– Marion Woodman
“Believe me when I say I wish I could offer you something like an instant parting of the clouds, a single sentence or practice that would return you immediately to peace. Something simple and universal. A one-size-fits-all path back to center.
“But the truth is, being human doesn’t work that way.
“There isn’t one doorway that fits everyone. There isn’t one instruction that lands the same for every nervous system, every history, every heart. And I don’t want to add more noise to the pile.
“Because lately it feels like everywhere you turn there’s someone telling you how you should be navigating. How you should feel, respond or act.
“The ‘shoulds’ are endless.
“Open any news feed or social platform and there’s another voice prescribing the correct spiritual posture, the right emotional response, the proper way to be awake or aware or evolved.
“Of course, it is exhausting.
“So instead of offering something new or clever, I find myself returning to a couple of very old, very quiet phrases that have stayed with me for years.
“One of them is this from my practitioner teaching days:
Even in the apparent absence of…
Even in the apparent absence of peace, there is peace.
Even in the apparent absence of order, there is order.
Even in the apparent absence of God, there is God.
“If that’s true – if peace or order or presence hasn’t actually disappeared – then the question becomes personal. Not: What must they do? But: What must I do to sense it again?
“How do I soften enough to notice what hasn’t left? How do I untangle myself from the noise long enough to reconnect?
“Another phrase that has steadied me lately is even simpler:
Everywhere I look, I see what I’m looking for.
“If I’m scanning the world for proof that everything is broken, I’ll find it instantly. If I’m looking for outrage, there it is. If I’m looking for fear, it’s everywhere.
“But if the only thing I choose to look for is God – or love, or harmony, or intelligence, or care – then that is what begins to appear.
“So the only real choice I seem to have is this: What am I looking for? And if I can’t see it? Then maybe I’m being asked to be it.
“To be the calm, the listener, the steadiness. To be the hands and feet of the very thing I say I believe in.
“Not as a performance or some conceptual strategy, just quietly, in the way I move through the day.
“I’m not grabbing for followers or outcomes or trying to win arguments. And I’m not pushing anyone away either. I’m practicing being present in the doing.
“No chasing. No clinging. No retaliation.
“Just trusting that what is mine to do will reveal itself when it’s time, and that the right people will find their way here, and others won’t, and that’s okay.
“It has to be okay. Because maybe peace was never something we manufacture. Maybe it’s something we remember.”
– David Ault
The idea of God [etc] is based on a conscious experience: the conscious experience of your own existence. When I become truly aware of my own existence, at that moment I know that I am being seen by something higher than myself. Do you remember when you first looked in wonder at the stars? For a moment, you were being seen by something greater than yourself.
– Jacob Needleman
AWAKENING FROM SPIRITUAL AWAKENING
This is a true story.
Once, at a conference, I watched a spiritual teacher addressing a grieving woman whose precious young son had just died.
Her world had just collapsed.
An old reality had shattered.
She said, “My heart is broken and raw”.
He told her, “Your heartbreak is the activity of the separate self,
and therefore illusory, based in ignorance.
When the separate self dissolves,
there will be no more suffering.
In awareness, there is no death.
Awareness has no son.”
He told her she needed to ‘wake up’.
She needed to recognize herself as ‘Pure Awareness’.
She was pretending to be a victim.
She didn’t know ‘who she truly was’.
And in that moment, I saw a deep sickness and inhumanity at the heart of much of our contemporary spirituality.
The invalidation and shaming of trauma,
the false promises, the power games,
and most of all, the suppression of the divine feminine.
Making our grief, anger, fear and joy a ‘mistake’ or some ‘sign’
that we are not awakened enough, not spiritual enough,
not ‘divine’ enough in our embodied humanity.
The pathologizing of our wildness.
The shaming of our fragility, our sensitivity.
Friends, if this is ‘spiritual awakening’, I simply have no interest.
Let us bow to our fragile, vulnerable humanity! Not run from it!
Let us bless our precious broken hearts! Not pathologize them!
Let us infuse our deepest human experience with empathy, understanding. See it for the miracle it is.
Send a curious, warm awareness deep into our wounds.
Not to mend, not to fix, but to feel!
Not to ‘awaken’, but to penetrate and be penetrated
by love. The awakening of the heart. The remembering
of the magic we knew when we were very young.
Let us embrace our painful feelings.
Not see them as a ‘sign’ of our spiritual failure,
or our inability to manifest,
or our ignorance,
or our lack of strength.
Let us wake up from the old concept of ‘awakening’.
Re-enchant the word itself, drench it with compassion.
Return to the sacredness in our humanity!
Let the Divine shine through our messy human hearts.
Bless them. Infuse them. Let them ache and be transmuted.
Meet each other in the fire of living.
Be present with each other
instead of trying to fix each other.
Say, “Yes my heart is broken and raw too
and you are my sister!”
– Jeff Foster
As rhythms set the mood in a musical flow, determining what feels relevant from moment to moment, feelings shape how we experience the qualitative flows of time. And we’re not the only social animals who cooperate through shared feelings of rhythm-entrainment. Male lions have been photographed marching together in step when they want to look extra tough, as every creature feels its way through its own songs and dances.
Abstractly, we can think of the musical nature of living experience as psychological energy, the fluid feeling tones of your own “time passing.” Those feeling tones coordinate physical immediacies with psychological continuities. As with a melody or a spoken sentence, we all emotionally shape the details of each experience into the feeling of a meaningful whole. Your feelings keep time by tying successive moments into a qualitative continuity. Each of the notes of a tune lasts for a second or less, yet the song goes on for minutes. The whole melody only exists in your mind as relationships between the differently felt sounds of the tune. Every memorable experience also exists as a felt flow that, like a song, becomes a coherent experience you can remember as an understandable “thing.” As a beloved song lives on as a whole qualitative structure in your mind, so do conversations, understandings, dramatic events, and every kind of a story.
– George Gorman
Sometimes the poem is so bright your silly language will not stick to it. Sometimes the poem is so true nobody will believe you.
– Sarah Kay
Any poem could be
As big or as small as it wants to.
No life gets to be
Everything it wants to.
Every thing becomes different
Sooner or later.
Every world continues to be
A wild dream.
– George Gorman
The United States has faced, many times, a conservative Court aligned with bigotry and big business. But the nation has not previously faced a conservative Court aligned with helping the president become a king.
– Lisa Needham
The way I see it, we are all perfectly mediocre day-laborers for God. We forget to punch in, we always forget some important element of inventory; our attitudes sour and fail; we come to act as if we own the store, and then, after all that, we wonder when the raise is coming. And, unlike our earthly supervisors, God bestows upon us, through Christ and the agent of art, which I believe to be God-given, such unfailing love and understanding that we feel we must turn over that new leaf, try to get to work on time, show some initiative, but we never do. In a matter of days—or moments—we are right back to our usual habits, because, as we already know, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. We are only human. We are conceived in sin. We are utterly shit.
I am amazed that in my worst phases, when I was most delinquent, I still knew what I was missing—which makes my dereliction even more fascinating, more pathological than ever.
We like to say that as writers we are own bosses, but I think writers realize more than others just who really is in charge. The blank page, the moistness under the arms and above the lip, the sheer terror of Nothing Happening. I know that it doesn’t come from some nook of the brain when the words start to come. I know that I’m not wrestling forth a novel, a phrase, one perfectly wonderful sentence. I know where it comes from. I can sometimes feel Him slip into me like a thief with good tools. I think Tennessee was permanently in search of his various gods, seeking, hoping. What kills me is that I repeatedly forget the wonder of it—the aid, the completion, the seeking again, the finding again.
– Walker Percy
Fascism Looms,
So We Go to the Library
Fascism looms, so we go to the library
My children roam the stacks, hungry
Here I allow unbridled greed
Fill the cart with everything your heart desires!
Read everything
Fast, fast, quick now
I want to spoonfeed them again like babies
Gobble these books down while you can, love
I will not let your minds go hungry
Paved over with blind patriotism
Meadows and lush forests
bulldozed for oblique obedience
The library is an all-you-can-eat buffet
And we will stay til last call
– Hayley DeRoche
The days of darkness weren’t wasted years. I learned how to walk with the stars.
– Nikki Rowe
Ya never too hot, never too cold; never too young, never too old; never too skinny, never too fat; never too dis, never too dat; ya just where ya are & dat’s where it’s at.
– Dr. John
In yoga, it is known that time and space are limitless, defined only by the constraints we put upon ourselves. For this reason, states of sleep and dream are put into practice, where the parameters of time and space are not fixed. In the depths of meditation, it is possible to abide in the timeless, known as the mahakala, the “Great Time,” unpunctuated by seconds, minutes, hours, and days. In the Zen literature of China it is said, “make this very moment 10,000 years.” When we abide in the timeless realm, we experience unbounded awareness. Like time and space, awareness is beyond measure. Calculation, thought and opinion divvy up awareness, but big mind and big heart have no sides, angles, edges or seams.
So each day, spend one or two hours in undivided awareness. In deep practice, drop into the Great Space outside of any formulation. Become timeless with no before or after. Rest in naked awareness, beyond old or young, back or front, inner or outer. For it is here that the deepest healing occurs.
– Tias Little
This is freedom. This is the face of faith, nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself.
Also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here hands full of sand, letting it
sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not chose words. I am free to go.
I cannot, of course, come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.
– Jorie Graham
It is the solstice. A diamond of energy holds us. We breathe, and what we call the next moment between us, where I take your empty hand and we start home, emptied of attempt and emptied of survival skill, is love.
– Jorie Graham
A very important moment in the work on oneself is when a man begins to distinguish between his personality and his essence. A man’s real I, his individuality, can grow only from his essence. It can be said that a man’s individuality is his essence, grown up, mature. But in order to enable essence to grow up, it is first of all necessary to weaken the constant pressure of personality upon it, because the obstacles to the growth of essence are contained in personality.
– Gurdjieff
Man is, in the full sense of the term, a ‘miniature universe’; in him are all the matters of which the universe consists; the same forces, the same laws that govern the universe, operate in him; therefore in studying man we can study the whole world, just as in studying the world we can study man. But a complete parallel between man and the world can only be drawn if we take ‘man’ in the full sense of the word, that is a man whose inherent powers are developed. An undeveloped man, a man who has not complete the course of his evolution, cannot be taken as a complete picture or plan of the universe—he is an unfinished world.
– P. D. Ouspensky
Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind has built around you.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
The universe is like a dome; it vibrates to that which you say in it, and answers the same back to you; so also is the law of action; we reap what we sow.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan
Silence is radical. When sustained, it has an effect on your perception comparable to that of any number of chemicals with which you might seek change. Your vision transforms, to start with; you suddenly find yourself absorbing what’s on the periphery, massive amounts of once-invisible data assailing your pupils. When you’re not preparing your next remark, your hearing capacity expands, too: the changing rhythms of the wind; the muted thud of a teardrop hitting the wooden floor; your neighbor’s beating heart. And taste, and smell, they’re amplified and shifted, as well — a cup of tea sipped without the surrounding dialogue is a more intricate cup of tea. Silence gives you the opportunity to know any number of an object’s facets that typically disappear behind the verbal screens we erect constantly, unthinkingly, between our selves and our environments. And surely the power of wordless touch is one each of us knows; I need not expand on that.
– Anna Wood
Jorge Luis Borges fantasizes about Shakespeare speaking to God: I who have been so many men in vain want to be one, to be myself. God answered him out of a whirlwind: I too am not I; I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work, and among the forms of my own dream are you, who like me are many, yet no one.
– Katia Mitova
It all matters. That someone turns out the lamp, picks up the windblown wrapper, says hello to the invalid, pays at the unattended lot, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, tells the story honestly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says good night, resists temptation, wipes the counter, waits at the yellow, makes the bed, tips the maid, remembers the illness, congratulates the victor, accepts the consequences, takes a stand, steps up, offers a hand, goes first, goes last, chooses the small portion, teaches the child, tends to the dying, comforts the grieving, removes the splinter, wipes the tear, directs the lost, touches the lonely, is the whole thing. What is most beautiful is least acknowledged. What is worth dying for is barely noticed.
– Laura McBride
We are identifying with what is passing so fear comes. We are trying to make steady and permanent what is by nature impermanent.
– Mooji
Your soul is the whole world.
– Hermann Hesse
Look closely at many Emily Dickinson poems and you will find + signs that indicate a variant in a line. A variant may appear + above a word + to the side of a line + underneath a word + at right angles to the poem + stacked at the end like a solution to an equation. Whole poems + sequences may be variants of each other. Dickinson did not choose among her variants, offering them as concurrent alternatives evocative lace constellations left for us to hold up to our future sky as we try to align the wild nights + noons of her poems + epistolary impulses. Stitched across the surface of her work—plus signs that allow for + stray signals + distortion + that calibrate interior vastness.
– Cori Winrock
…There is only one story…and it is a simple one. The fundamental Tone of the universe was sounded out, and split itself into subtones or harmonics, until differentiation became so complex that an orchestra whose name was Babel was created. In this orchestra, the soloist, the individual player (the divine ‘Sol’ in each of us) is required to tune himself so sensitively as to able to go back through the vibratory ramifications, and to lose identity with his own particular and ludicrously unrelated harmonic. Further, he is asked to realise his dependence upon all other harmonics, who in their turn, are all related to the same One Tone. Thus we are all musicians, whether we are bricklayers, news-vendors, scientists, or poets…..
– Herbert Whone
A ruin is an accidental aesthetic object. If it becomes beautiful, this was certainly not the intention. A ruin is not constructed or maintained. The tendency of a ruin is to crumble down into a heap. The most beautiful parts remain standing despite their wear. The memory of you is what stays up, your body what subsides. Your ghost remains upright in my memory, while your skeleton is in the earth.
– Edouard Leve
Treat every moment as your last … not as preparation for something else.
– Shunryu Suzuki
Writing down verses, I got a paper-cut on my palm. The cut extended my life line by nearly one fourth.
– Vera Pavlova
It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction.
– Simone Weil
We are our memory,
we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,
that pile of broken mirrors
– Jorge Luis Borges, Cambridge
Accelerate. Immediate. Be incessant. Be disindividuated.
– Jorie Graham
For one who stands by the seashore on a stormy day, it is not easy to discern the moment when the tide turns. So in the historical process it is hard for the contemporary student to recognise the signs of a new age. At periods of transition the attention of mankind is diverted by the ebb and flow of the waves of culture and decay from an almost imperceptible change of direction which may be occurring in the course of human destiny. That which will be significant in the perspective of millennia is hidden from those who fix their gaze only upon the fluctuations of current events. The time span of immediate interest is very short for the average man, and the historian, whose profession is to see the process objectively, is usually dominated by the modes of thought that are fashionable in his own time.
– JG Bennett
What is madness but nobility
of soul at odds with
circumstance.
– Theodore Roethke
You know that things become stories about other things. Everyone I used to love lives in my mouth. I let them out when I am afraid. I am afraid. You know that everything good goes away. The great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams. Nothing is ever the way you think it’s going to be.”
– Lauren Ireland
The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons—Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object– This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.
– Abraham Lincoln
Tell them you love them. See what they say.
Or say it to yourself, and see what you say.
– Diana Khoi Nguyen
If we have been tyrannised,
we can be fairly sure
we’re tyrannising
someone else—
at least ourselves,
perhaps our bodies.
As we were treated,
so we treat ourselves and others.
– Marion Woodman
If today was your last day in this body, would the opinions of your mind make any difference to you? Why not then live like this?
– Mooji
Our passing through this earth is so absurd and fleeting, that it calms me to know that I have been authentic, that I have managed to be more like myself as much as I could.
– Frida Kahlo
What do you despise? By this you are truly known.
– Michelangelo
Love is our nature — not something to demand, but something to radiate. When we expect others to behave a certain way to feel loved, we shift from giving to needing. True love flows without conditions. I choose to love as God loves — freely, purely, constantly.
– Brahma Kumaris
The sphere of ‘character’ opens up….. One’s aura interpenetrates with that of the others.
– Walter Benjamin
I was playing my tunes all by myself;
I didn’t know anybody else
who could play along.
Sure, the tunes were sad—
but sweet, too, and wouldn’t come
until the day gave out. You know
that way the sky has of dangling
her last bright wisps? That’s when
the ache would bloom inside
– Rita Dove
Collapse the cycles that keep you looping through who you’ve been so that the new you can get in.
– Nika Solé
Forgiveness is a process of giving up the old for something new. Old experiences and memories that we hold on to in anger, resentment, shame, or guilt cloud our spirit mind. The truth is, everything that has happened had to happen. It was a growth experience.
– Iyanla Vanzant
Pleasure is not poetry. Poetry is merely the power I lack, and how not to dwell on it in the expression of happiness.
– Georges Bataille
In my less exalted moments, all I want to do is enroll in a School of Mindlessness, since it’s whatever is beyond the mind, far deeper than it, that seems most essential and most true.
– Pico Iyer
What Elie Wiesel Knew
Death is the air we breathe.
The bread we chew.
The brother and sister
who stand by us always.
Elie Wiesel knew this
And taught us this
Everyday.
Don’t be afraid.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
I left parts of myself everywhere,
The way absent-minded people leave
Gloves and umbrellas
Whose colors are sad from dispensing so much bad luck.
– Charles Simic
The real purpose of wealth is freedom. Freedom to slow down. Freedom to not rush through your own life. Freedom to spend your days doing things that you actually care about. That’s what money is really for. Not to impress strangers. Not to collect expensive distractions. But to buy back your time. A quiet breakfast without checking emails. Long dinners without looking at the clock. Conversations without feeling rushed. A two-week vacation where your nervous system finally relaxes. Time to read. To think. To explore your interests deeply. That’s real wealth. Everything else is noise.
– Karun Pal
The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty…More briefly, the business of philosophy is not to reassure people, but to upset them.
– Lev Shestov
If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
– Michelangelo
There is a power greater than you that knows how to take care of you without your help. All you’ve got to do is to surrender to it. Surrender your thoughts, your mind, your ego, to the current that knows the way. It will take better care of you than you can ever imagine.
– Robert Adams
I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive.
– Frida Kahlo
The biggest competition you will ever have in this world, is the competition between your disciplined mind and undisciplined mind.
– James Arthur Ray
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick
with bloody blows on its head.
I embraced a cloud,
But when I soared
it rained.
– Frank O’Hara, Mayakovsky
I am not myself with people […] but am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too.
– Susan Sontag
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.
– Georgia O’Keeffe
Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.
– William James
Most of the time when someone needs a break or a vacation, what they really need is for their nervous system to regulate itself. Which means that when you practice regulation in your everyday life, there’s no escape needed.
– Nika Solé
If you have to teach poetry, strike the blackboard with the chalk of light.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Think of your thoughts as plants, & your attention as water. What you “water” will grow. You’ve been conditioned by trauma to “water” self-doubt & self-loathing– so reflexively you probably don’t even realize you’e doing it.
Start noticing what you “water.” It WILL grow.
– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle
Give more.
Give what you didn’t get.
Love more.
Drop the old story.
– Garry Shandling
Sometimes it is true that a stone has a more beautiful soul than people.
– Srečko Kosovel
Granted, if we only have emotional compassion, then our mind will be unstable, and that will make us weak.
– Phakchok Rinpoche and Sophie Wu
I’m tired of being perceived by a third eye blind society.
– Nika Solé
scarier than
a wolf…
winter rain leaking in
– @issa_haiku
a gentle voice
can interrupt
generations of fear
– @BashoSociety
Confession is the place where we say, ‘I am not the person I want to be,’ and where God says, ‘I love you anyway.’
– Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son
Doctors put drugs of which they know little into bodies of which they know less for diseases of which they know nothing at all.
– Voltaire
I’m a bit retarded, like most Americans.
– Henry Miller
Perfection is insane. The entire tyranny of the perfect body, the perfect family, the perfect life is literally a commercial narrative. It has nothing to do with being human.
– Guillermo del Toro
Difficulties will come. Failure may come, but challenges can lead to greater commitment and greater skill.
– Rafe Jnan Martin
and the world once again will come to recognize the human heart as the place where God desires to dwell.
– Pope Leo XIV
mockingbird
a tiny body full
of endless confidence
– @BashoSociety
Sometimes, I feel like
I’ve just come back
from Mars or Jupiter,
and the one I love
is the official
greeting committee
here to hug me
and tell me
she was happy
to see me back on earth
and that the earth
had been lonesome
without me.
And sometimes
I don’t.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
How do we forgive
ourselves for all of the
things we did not become?
– David ‘Doc’ Luben
Aren’t we all waiting to be read by
someone, praying that they’ll tell us
that we make sense?
– Rudy Francisco
Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.
– William Shakespeare
Inspiration is a word used by people who aren’t really doing anything.
– Nick Cave
Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me.
– Dodie Smith
In philology, literary and linguistic study are indissoluble. They ought to be the same thing.
– Tom Shippey
I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many [people] there are in me.
– Anaïs Nin
Don’t let me do
this to you,
you are not those
other people.
– Margaret Atwood
Literature is the greatest expression of human desire. Literature is the greatest treasury for human thought. Literature is the greatest and widest repository for philosophy. Literature and philosophy are true handmaidens.
– Paul Krause
THE PEASANT POET
HE loved the brook’s soft sound,
The swallow swimming by.
He loved the daisy-covered ground,
The cloud-bedappled sky.
To him the dismal storm appeared
The very voice of God;
And when the Evening rack was reared
Stood Moses with his rod.
And everything his eyes surveyed,
The insects i’ the brake,
Were creatures God Almighty made,
He loved them for His sake-
A silent man in life’s affairs,
A thinker from a boy,
A peasant in his daily cares,
The poet in his joy.
– John Clare
a handwritten poem
inside my coat pocket
all spring
– Akari
It has always therefore been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring then secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.
– C.S. Lewis
Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.
– Charles Baudelaire
Each person must discover his own philosophy of life, and it is not fair or right to impose our codes upon others.
– Manly P. Hall
I can assure you that history reveals that people have never, in any age of the human past, ever known what they were doing, that is, what the effects would be of what they were doing.
– Marshall McLuhan
through the woods
a loneliness
made beautiful
– @BashoSociety
Keep on. Take it hour by hour, don’t add the past and the future to the present load more than you can help.
– CS Lewis
To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?
– Christopher Hitchens
midnight rain
old conversations folded
into tomorrow
– @BashoSociety
Poets speak of love because language has no stronger word for annihilation.
– @graveair
The great man is one who does not lose his child’s heart.
– Mencius
Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it is doing seems to be making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.
– Norman O. Brown
I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It’s not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.
– Terence McKenna
I felt there was no point in telling anyone anything that was happening inside me.
– Christa Wolf
Thus Chinese poetry contains beauty in not only form and sound, but also in image, and thus, like all poetry of all languages, remain in my estimation fundamentally untranslatable.
– M.T. Lee
What drivel it all is! . . . A string of words called religion. Another string of words called philosophy. Half a dozen other strings called political ideals. And all the words either ambiguous or meaningless. And people getting so excited about them they’ll murder their neighbors for using a word they don’t happen to like. A word that probably doesn’t mean as much as a good belch. Just a noise without even the excuse of gas on the stomach.
– Aldous Huxley
…‘chronological snobbery’, the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.
– C.S. Lewis
I’ve noticed that I’m reading less by my contemporaries and more by writers of the past.
– Mario Vargas Llosa
We are, and have always been, both clever and stupid in equal measure.
– Brian Cox
People choose the book considered holy by the community in which they are born, and out of that book they choose the parts they like, ignoring the others … And so, even when we have a sacred book, we still choose as truth whatever suits our own prejudices.
– Bertrand Russell
The moment you are disturbed by insult or pleased by praise, you are still a slave.
– Osho
I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written these books. It does not know-how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.
– Albert Einstein
The smartest people are all Self-taught, even if they went to school.
– Naval Ravikant
I think the tragedy in life is to be so timid you don’t play hard enough.
– Charlie Munger
A man’s future lies not in the stars, but in his will and self-control.
– William Shakespeare
The number one reason people fail in life is because they listen to their friends, family and neighbors.
– Napoleon Hill
Trelkovsky had never undestood why people insisted on comparing the noise of birds to music. Birds don’t sing, they scream. And in the morning they scream in chorus.
– Roland Topor, (tr. Francis K. Price)
Become who you are. Do what only you can do. Be the master and the sculptor of yourself.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
On my printer I have pasted a quote from Odysseus who, two and a half millennia ago, said, “I will stay with it and endure through suffering hardship / and once the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces, then I will swim.”
– James Hollis
The test of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.
– James Buchanan
Even a simple ‘Hi’ makes you feel quite extraordinary.
– Wisława Szymborska
Just set one day’s work in front of the last day’s work. That’s the way it comes out.
– John Steinbeck
Like any value, empathy must be acted upon.
– Barack Obama
Empathy is a hand thick with scars offering you a bandage.
– Richelle E. Goodrich
We are all addicted to something, not necessarily a substance. A way of thinking, being, reacting, and it comes from somewhere.
– Gabor Maté
Happy is the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind, and has given up worrying once and for all.
– Ovid
Much of what remains undeveloped in us, psychologically speaking, is excluded because it is too good to bear. We often refuse to accept our most noble traits and instead find a shadow substitute for them.
– Robert A. Johnson
Thus, though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make him run.
– Andrew Marvell
No one lights a lamp in order to hide it behind the door: the purpose of light is to create more light, to open people’s eyes, to reveal the marvels around.
– Paulo Coelho
I find it a challenge to respect capable people who care only for their own interests.
– Brandon Mull
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
– Theodor W. Adorno
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
– Oscar Wilde
Listen with your heart, with your mind, not with the little part of the intellect.
– Krishnamurti
Rembrandt is so deeply mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language.
– Vincent Van Gogh
If only some eternal book existed, primed for our enjoyment and whims, no less inventive in the populous morning as in the secluded night, oriented toward all hours of the world. Your favorite books, reader, are like the rough drafts of that book without a final reading.
– Jorge Luis Borges
A mountain is composed of tiny grains of earth. The ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Even so, life is but an endless series of little details, actions, speeches, and thoughts. And the consequences whether good or bad of even the least of them are far-reaching.
– Swami Sivananda
As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.
– Albert Schweitzer
Shame hates to have words wrapped around it. If we talk about it, it loses its grip on us.
– Brene Brown
If you are careful with people, they will offer you part of themselves. That is the big secret.
– Eve Arnold
Feelings should always be allowed to be free. You should not judge a future love by past suffering.
– Paulo Coelho
The Self is the only sanctuary that is always filled with the peace of God.
– Acharya Kundakunda
We demand from others only what we fail to give ourselves.
– Edward Edinger
Blest that abode, where want and pain repair, And every stranger finds a ready chair.
– Oliver Goldsmith
Transform the world, said Marx; change life said Rimbaud: for us these two watchwords are one.
– André Breton
Let it offend you that someone else could be handed your days and turn them into something greater.
– Seneca
From the same pain, a new dawn will come.
– Gustavo Cerati
Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.
– Irving Howe
When you possess light within, you see it externally.
– Anais Nin
How two human eyes can sometimes save you—eyes that ‘listen’ with profound attention.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
A good friend is a connection to life – a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world.
– Lois Wyse
Echoes, shadows, inversions, fragments — this much writing can do. But the whole enchilada lives on a different plane.
– Zadie Smith
We learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way.
– John Holt
The incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy the human heart.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists – with it all things are possible.
– Ida Tarbell
When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
– Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Instead of asking why they left, now I ask, what beauty will I create in the space they no longer occupy?
– Rudy Francisco
When you don’t give a fuck it doesn’t mean that you are indifferent. Maybe it means that you are comfortable with being different.
– Mark Manson
We must become ignorant of everything we have learned so that we may know the One who cannot be learned, but only experienced.
– Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
Better to love an old man who knows what is love, and not love a lad, who flits around like a hummingbird.
– Spanish Proverb
When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that simple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the Uncarved Block: Life is Fun.
– Benjamin Hoff
Men succeed when they realize that their failures are the preparation for their victories.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Learning how to learn is the most important skill to acquire.
– Robert Greene
The habit of giving up when the present task is half finished and try something else is one of the chief causes of failure.
– Christian D. Larson
You don’t have to be a world leader to have a radical shift in perception
– Gabrielle Bernstein
We are great fools. ‘He has passed over his life in idleness,’ we say: ‘I have done nothing today.’ What? have you not lived? that is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious of all your occupations.
– Michel de Montaigne
If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
– Rachel Carson
Be the most ethical, the most responsible, the most authentic you can be with every breath you take, because you are cutting a path into tomorrow that others will follow.
– Ken Wilber
Some things will untangle themselves when you start pulling so hard.
– Anne Lamott
If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.
– Oscar Wilde
Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.
– Alfred Lord Tennyson
The savior does not come down from heaven but out of the depths of the earth, i.e., from that which lies below consciousness.
– CG Jung
All of us desire a better state of society. But society cannot become better before two great tasks are performed. Unless peace can be firmly established and the prevailing obsession with money and power profoundly modified, there is no hope of any desirable change being made.
– Aldous Huxley
If only we could eat our sunsets, I say, we would all be full.
– J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country
To be a strong and empathetic person always requires us to trust that God will send angels to the people’s heart we tried to reach, but couldn’t.
– Shannon L. Alder
We are all meant to be mothers of God…for God is always needing to be born.
– Meister Eckhart
Too much of anything isn’t good for anyone.
– Ray Bradbury
Creative work is play. It is free speculation using the materials of one’s chosen form.
– Stephen Nachmanovitch
We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.
– H. G. Wells
Serve the people at the bottom. The people at the top don’t need your help.
– Yuri Kochiyama
Our holy text is experience.
– Stephen Fry
The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
– Samuel Johnson
Books do not age as you and I do. They will speak still when you and I are gone, to generations we will never see. Yes, the books must survive.
– Corrie Ten Boom
There is no escaping the magic now… beauty caught me and never let me go.
– Andrea Gibson
I’ll clamp my mouth.
No cry
shall escape my hard-bitten lips.
Bind me to the comets as to horses’ tails,
and gallop me away,
tearing at the stars’ bit.
– Mayakovsky, The Backbone Flute
How dare you call yourself Poet,
and chirp like a grouse—so dull!
Today
with brass knuckles
you’ve got to
cut open the world in your skull.
– Mayakovsky translated by David Burliuk
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.
– O’Hara
If you pour some music on whatever’s wrong, it’ll sure help out.
– Levon Helm
Those bad times are important. They give you a chance to practice, listen, take stock, have a life, get your feet back on the ground, and maybe you’ll live to tell the story.
– Levon Helm
“I don’t know”
is a lot of
freedom.
– Byron Katie
It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.
– Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
It doesn’t matter what Republicans say.
It doesn’t matter what Evangelicals say.
It doesn’t matter what politicians say.
It doesn’t matter what historians say.
It doesn’t matter what “the Bible says.”
It doesn’t matter what any law, amendment, or constitution says.
There is no such thing as a Christian nation.
It doesn’t exist.
It can’t exist.
Not a chance.
Not with Christ.
For Christ cannot be nationalized. He refuses the platform. He rejects any and all power established through vote, people, government, force, or popularity. He seeks no political party, no people group, and no established system of organization.
He cannot be colonized, weaponized, militarized, bulldozed into existence, marched down the street, hammered by a gavel, or flown over a stadium.
He dwells outside of walls, structures, and human constructs. He tears down all that would cage Him, franchise Him, leverage Him, and hoist Him upon a flag.
For Jesus lives in the margins, the cracks, the undefined, and the unconstituted. He cannot be legislated, demarcated, or plotted on a map.
Far beyond theology, denominations, creeds, rules, religion, news networks, social media, speeches, laws, conferences, prayer formulas, mission statements, worship centers, bibles, and books.
He blesses all.
Lives in all.
Claims all… equally.
He is all, in all, and for all, or He means nothing at all.
There is no budget that can commandeer him, no army that can assert Him, no democracy that can elect Him, no dictator that can enforce Him, and no office, house, branch, or anthem that can contain Him.
In fact, you can surely be sure that any person, group, or effort to nationalize Him is not of Him. Not even close.
Perhaps it’s becoming all the more clear. The code has been cracked; the mystery has been solved. The cancer has been disguised as the cure; the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is revealed.
Hidden in plain sight, a Christianity without Jesus is the anti-Christ and the nationalization of this Christianity is his ultimate pursuit.
Because, you can nationalize hate.
You can nationalize greed.
You can nationalize racism.
You can nationalize violence.
You can nationalize injustice.
You can nationalize white supremacy.
But, you can’t nationalize Jesus.
For Christ can’t be nationalized, but all that is anti-Christ surely can.
Within every call, drumbeat, demand, and chorus to nationalize Christianity is the screaming confession that, “we have not, believe not, and worship not Jesus.”
Don’t be fooled, all the pursuits of Christian nationalism and the establishment of a Christian nation. They have nothing to do with Him and cannot exist with Him, by Him, or for Him.
– Chris Kratzer
The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern. To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one’s last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to the old-fashioned. The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns. Literature, classic and enduring literature, does its best work in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment be prone.
– G. K. Chesterton
In the age of instant information man ends his job of fragmented specializing and assumes the role of information-gathering. Today information-gathering resumes the inclusive concept of ‘culture’ exactly as the primitive food-gatherer worked in complete equilibrium with his entire environment. Our quarry now, in this new nomadic and ‘workless’ world, is knowledge and insight into the creative processes of life and society.
– Marshall McLuhan
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
– Theodor Adorno
So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.
– Pope Leo XIV
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
– Albert Camus
I wonder how many times the world will change before we learn that the world IS change. I wonder how long we will struggle against change like a fish on a line, rail against it like children, build fortresses of sand around ourselves only to see the waves of change dissolve them again and again. I wonder how long it will take for us to learn that stability is vulnerability, that resilience is strength…
This is what it means to be resilient: to mourn a thousand endings and celebrate a thousand beginnings, to be as strong as steel and as soft as warm butter, to practice both resilience and acceptance, to cradle both life and death in our arms.
– Ethan Tapper
all ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again:
but winter’s not forever,even snow
melts;and if spring should spoil
the game, what then?
all history’s a winter sport or three:
but were it five,i’d still insist that all
history is too small for even me;
for me and you,exceedingly too small.
Swoop(shrill collective myth)into thy grave
merely to toil the scale to shrillerness
per every madge and mabel dick and dave
–tomorrow is our permanent address
and there they’ll scarcely find us(if they do,
we’ll move away still further:into now
– E. E. Cummings
Dirk turned on the car wipers, which grumbled because they didn’t have quite enough rain to wipe away, so he turned them off again. Rain quickly speckled the windscreen. He turned on the wipers again, but they still refused to feel that the exercise was worthwhile, and scraped and squeaked in protest.
– Douglas Adams
Play — play both in the sense of the slippages and imperfect fits that occur in both machines and in language, and in the sense of joy and playfulness, jouissance if you prefer, that leads the writer to let the language write him or her into meaning — and even a play of styles has led more than one critic to comment that any truly intellectual performance is necessarily a comic act. Critics have written of “the laughter of Foucault”; anyone who reads him long and carefully must hear it. Derrida has said: “I am an intellectual clown.”
– Samuel R. Delany
His whole face was darkened from incessant exposure to the brutal world of dreams.
– Yukio Mishima
Figure out what it is in life you don’t do well, and then don’t do it.
– Doug Coupland
Our job is improving the quality of life,
not just delaying death.
– Robin Williams
Wisdom is not warfare. If there is wisdom in sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then the action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation. One would not expect the great teachings to be as simple-minded as that, trying to be good, fighting the bad. Sense of humor means seeing both poles of a situation as they are, from an aerial point of view. There is good, there is bad, and you see both with a panoramic view.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The schools of a country are its future in miniature.
– Tehyi Hsieh
I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
– Ernest Hemingway
The RAGE of the Holy Her, was so terrifying, the patriarchal scribes buried it within their own mythology.
– Claire Dorey
Borders dissolved into rivers / and no one drowned. We made rafts out of untranslatable words / and let them drift toward morning.
– T. De Los Reyes
Nothing ever becomes real till experienced – even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it.
– John Keats
If we don’t negate our habitual patterns, we can never fully appreciate the world.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Writing should always be exploratory. There shouldn’t be the assumption that you know ahead of time what you want to express.
– Marilynne Robinson
Villages and family ties disappear
then re-appear freshborn and shining in our
myths,
daubed on the doorways to ourselves.
The countrysides
become plots for our nostalgia,
sown from afar,
flourishing with orchards of memory.
Each tree laden with fruit,
each fruit a repository of dreams
where real orchards no longer exist.
They are unmapped places
dedicated to everything we miss.
– Omar Musa
You can’t bear witness
to what you’ve already
decided to let go of.
– David Bedrick
Because the Divine is essentially one, and yet He has subdivided Himself apparently in all beings, and in this way recreated the primordial Oneness. And it is because of this divine Oneness–which, however, appears fragmented in beings–that the Unity is re-established in its essence. And when one becomes conscious of this, one has the joy of the consciousness of this new Oneness. But those who are not conscious–what they miss is the joy of consciousness. But the fact remains the same.
. . .
Whether you know it or not, whether you want it or not, you are all united by the divine Presence which, though it appears fragmented, is yet One. The Divine is One, He only appears fragmented in things and beings. And because this Unity is a fact, whether you are aware of it or not doesn’t alter the fact at all. And whether you want it or not, you are in spite of everything subject to this Unity.
…you think you are separate from one another, but it is the same single Substance which is in you all, despite differences in appearance; and a vibration in one centre automatically awakens a vibration in another.
– Mirra Alfassa
Time
There’s a hole in my bucket of time
and it’s getting bigger as I age,
gushing memory and ambition
to flood the void. Remember
how summer used to drip
then years to trickle, endless
mornings fat with promise,
nights delicious dark and
strange when I could eat
my happiness, feast on joy?
Now I see down through my
clear elixir the bucket’s floor
rising fast. So I tip and sip
at lip the sweet.
– Kim Stafford
You must choose, but choose wisely…
– Grail Knight
What makes the path especially joyful is that as we step out of our small self, we begin to fall in love with sentient beings. When we fall in love, we can’t stop thinking about the person we’re in love with. We think constantly about how to make our lover happy. If we see our lover in pain, we can’t stop thinking about how to clear away that suffering. We forget about ourselves, which makes us feel so incredibly high, like we’ve eaten an aphrodisiac. This decreased self-centeredess also gives us tremendous courage. We feel that we can do for our lover things that we never imagined we were brave enough to do for ourselves.
Bodhisattvas are like us ordinary people when we fall in love, but unlike us, their love goes out impartially to all sentient beings. Their love also differs in that it doesn’t depend on how their lovers meet their expectations. Their love never waxes and wanes. They are always thinking of others, to the extent that they don’t even see a point in thinking of themselves. My teacher Khyentse Rinpoche was incredibly happy whenever he could do anything for others, whether it was small, medium, or large. But when people praised or served him, he was far less delighted. Great bodhisattvas like Khyentse Rinpoche exude joy. You can see it in their presence, in their face, in their eyes. This is the result of their having fallen deeply in love with sentient beings.
– Dzigar Kongtru
Learning to truly value ourselves
happens in layers. It’s ongoing
and stretching work.
Be proud of how far you’ve come.
Be present and patient with the
work in front of you.
– Krista O’Reilly-Davi-Digui
Take stock of yourself and find out what it is deep within that is holding you up.
– Eileen Caddy
A true and healing compassion is not just a mental recognition of suffering—it is a felt sense of tenderness, warmth, and care that arises in the body and heart.
– Tara Brach
If you look closely at your life, you will see that you have always had whatever you have needed in order to get to the next moment, and ultimately, to bring you here, where you are, right now. You may have wanted something more, but you have needed nothing more. All your needs have been met.
– Neale Donald Walsch
Beethoven created his music
out of inner necessity, That is
the only way to make music.
– Johannes Brahms
The Universe does not know
whether the vibration that
you’re offering is because of
something you’re observing or
something you’re remembering
or something that you are
imagining. It just receives the
vibration and answers it with
things that match it.
– Abraham-Hicks
A most unholy trinity dominates the patriarchal tradition: rape, genocide, and war. This trinity is an ideological machine, grinding out incessant warfare, power politics, exploitation of everything exploitable as some kind of objective historical process. And God the Father, in doctrine and in function, legitimizes all earthly patriarchs—bosses, slave owners, global corporations, male-controlled institutions and professions of church, state, university, law, medicine, military—which exist to capture and reify life process. This secular-imperialist tradition has for its model the domination of female matter by male mind. It is piously rationalized by theological doctrine, and exploited endlessly by business and political interests. Its existence requires the sexual and intellectual destruction of women. And any life-form—humans, animals, plants, jungles, mountains, seas—seen as female, i.e., corrupt dumb matter, may also be blasted, bulldozed, exploited, or otherwise “improved” by the all-conquering male mind; with the blessings of all male priesthoods. Women, in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Buddhist-Hindu-Confucian traditions, are seen as some kind of functional mistake. Nature is a mistake. Life is a mistake. And the male mind was born to correct it.
– Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother
“Saint” does not invoke the same
ferociousness as Goddess. Our
violent world necessitates
Brigid’s fierceness.
We need all our Goddesses in
their earliest, savage forms.
– Trista Hendren
When diet is wrong,
medicine is of no use.
When diet is correct,
medicine is of no need.
– Ayurvedic Proverb
America’s 250th birthday seems a bit more
like a funeral than a celebration.
– Give a Shift About Nature
Both Jung and Tolkien were convinced that mankind is in a crucial dilemma, and that transformation must come from the inner man.
– Pia Skogemann
Why don’t you take time out and write some songs about who you are, where all you come from, where all you been, what you was a huntin for, what happened to you along the way, the work you done… the things you want to do.
– Woody Guthrie
The unawakened mind tends
to make war against the way
things are. Much of spiritual
life is self-acceptance, maybe
all of it.
– Jack Kornfield
But perhaps
the world was
never meant
to make you
happy.
Perhaps it
exists for
something
deeper:
to awaken you.
– Eckhart Tolle
The greater part of the truth is always hidden, in regions out of the reach of cynicism.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
– William James
A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
– Ernest Hemingway
Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are over-consuming, the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.
– Aldous Huxley
The most powerful forces are the forces unseen.
– Michael Logue
You can’t calm the storm, so stop trying. What you CAN do is calm yourself. The storm will pass.
– Timber Hawkeye
If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
– William James
We work so hard, and rightly so, to protect the open spaces in our wilderness. But what of the open spaces in our mind? Not just the wild spaces but the fields wide enough in which to get lost. Overdevelop them, and it becomes hard to breathe.
– Pico Iyer
The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline.
– Martin Heidegger
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
– William James
First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.
– William James
“Music” is a mere word. Some music there has been everywhere and always, even before any genuine Culture, even among the beasts.
– Oswald Spengler
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, ‘This is the real me,’ and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
– William James
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas.
– William James
You lack the courage to be consumed in flames and to become ashes: so you will never become new, and never young again!
– Friedrich Nietzsche
None of us are ever who we were yesterday.
– William James
Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
– William James
May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Some prisons
never lock the door.
Only the heart.
– @BashoSociety
fragile things
often outlive
empires
– @BashoSociety
i may have to face countless troubles and deep disappointments, but I have resolved that, in every circumstance, I will treat everyone with courtesy and sincerity. No more than this can be expected of me.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
the nights of separation are long like the curls of your hair,
but the day of our union is so brief like the span of life itself.
– Amir Khusrau
In practice…technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise it, finance it, regulate it, and use it.
– Pope Leo XIV
Teacher is really yourself. You have created a teacher to wake you up. Teacher would not be here if you were not dreaming about the teacher. You have created a teacher out of your mind in order to awaken, to see that there is no teacher, no world – nothing.
– Robert Adams
It’s in the silence that your problems just dissolve. Try it. It really works.
– Robert Adams
hidden threads
still pull stars
towards one another
– @BashoSociety
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
– Voltaire
The poor orphan Tolkien had his own experience of upward mobility as if some divine grace lifting him to higher rank. He brought to his best-known fiction this same confidence that loyal, well-intentioned men rose while corrupt, self-serving men fell…
– John Bowers
There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.
– Lauren Berlant
… wisdom is a woman, Sophia, and sure enough, she loves none but the warrior, but the warrior is not understood to be a being of air, a dancer upon the burial ground. He would be amidst all the dangers, really fighting the battle of life, not dancing in the clouds.
– Jung
The Unknown contain all that was or could have been, and all that shall or would be. The entire field of becoming is open and accessible; past and future co-exist in the eternal now.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Please, read books. Not just captions, or carousel posts, or what made it to the top of your feed. Read books. Long ones. Complex ones. You cannot build a mind with weight on the back of social media ephemerals. Intellectual depth demands patience.
– Your Best Version
wild geese, are you
thinking stay?
or go?
– Kobayashi Issa
We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Philanthropy was much more than it appeared: Giving could spark a cosmic revolution by improving karma for all sentient beings across lifetimes.
– Sara Ann Swenson
My soul comes from better worlds and I have an incurable homesickness of the stars.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
Degrade first the arts, if you’d mankind degrade.
– William Blake
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
– Isaac Asimov
rain against windows
mint tea carrying
the room quietly
– Ogawa
Democracy requires a basic sense of solidarity — the idea that for all our outward differences, we are all in this together; that we rise or fall as one.
– President Obama
shoreline at dusk
everything becoming
its truest color
– @BashoSociety
Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
– Douglas Adams
The true tomb of the dead is the heart of the living.
– Jean Cocteau
The cushion is the training ground; daily life is where the practice becomes real.
– Reverend Amitha Khema
Sugar and sand may be mixed together, but the ant rejects the sand and goes off with the sugar grain; so pious men lift the good from the bad.
– Ramakrishna
nodding our heads
we pass each other like this
for seven years …
my old neighbor’s tribal fear
of the Other [like me]
– Chen-ou Liu
It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical,’ that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is ‘thought-defying,’ as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality.’ Only the good has depth and can be radical.
– Hannah Arendt
an old wedding photo
the river still moving
behind them
– Ogawa
What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
– Theodor W. Adorno
Man is driven, by a longing born from awareness of his own deficiency, to seek eternal union with what is Good and Beautiful.
– Plato
The system does not fear poor people. It fears people who starts thinking.
– Karl Marx
The secret of intellectual excellence is the spirit of criticism; it is intellectual independence. And this leads to difficulties which must prove insurmountable for any kind of authoritarianism. The authoritarian will, in general, select those who obey, who believe, who respond to his influence. But in doing so, he is bound to select mediocrities. For he excludes those who revolt, who doubt, who dare to resist his influence.
Never can an authority admit that the intellectually courageous, i.e, those who dare to defy his authority, may be the most valuable type.
– Karl Popper
Perhaps I am wrong, and you are right; anyway, we can both hope that after our discussion we will both see things more clearly than before, just so long as we remember that our drawing closer to the truth is more important than the question of who is right. Only with this goal in mind do we defend ourselves as well as we can in discussion.
– Karl Popper
Schools are not called to follow the pace of the digital world, but to offer that which the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.
– Pope Leo XIV
When I speak of reason or rationalism, all I mean is the conviction that we can learn through criticism of our mistakes and errors, especially through criticism by others, and eventually also through self-criticism.
– Karl Popper
When I was 10 I wanted to write like Stan Lee
When I was 25 I wanted to write like Kerouac
When I was 40 I wanted to write like Sartre
When I was 60 I wanted to write like John Guzlowski
When I was 73 I wanted to write like mad monk Ikkyu
Tomorrow?
– john zbigniew guzlowski
The Professor had noticed before that whenever he wrote for popular periodicals it got him into trouble.
– Willa Cather
I think the hardest thing in life is figuring out who you are.
– Joaquin Phoenix
If I had done differently I should have done well;
Differently is better, it could not have been worse.
I cannot stand, looking, as into a fire,
Into the past. There is only the charred wood.
– C.H. Sisson
From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence.
– Truman Capote
A man who has read a thousand books is armed for life; a man who has read none is easy prey. The man who has read a thousand books has lived a thousand lives. He has seen cities he has never visited, spoken to men who died centuries ago, and walked in worlds that no longer exist. Reading does not merely inform him; it enlarges him. It stretches the boundaries of his own experience until he becomes something more than himself.
– G. K. Chesterton
Characters in fiction can say anything they want. They’re often quite willful, you know.
– Grace Paley
Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind.
– Nikola Tesla
I’m a moron when I finish a novel. It’s all in there and there’s nothing left in here.
– Martin Amis
To reach the source, you must swim against the current. The world follows the flow of desire; the Sage follows the flow of truth.
– Lu Dongbin
You have been identifying with the world of effect. This is why things appear as they do in your life. You’re trying to change negative to positive, bad for good, but they’re two sides of the same coin, and they both have to go.
– Robert Adams
Forget, forget, and let us live now
only this: how the stars pierce the cleared
nocturnal sky; how the moon’s full disk
surmounts the gardens. We’ve sensed so long
how the darkness breeds many mirrors; how a gleam
takes shape, a white shadow in the radiance
of night. But now let us cross over
and invest this world where
everything is lunar—
– Rilke, (Snow)
the man who does not face his shadow by 35. does not improve.
– Jung
The magic you’re
looking for is in
the work you’re
avoiding.
– Chris Williamson
In America
so far most of us
don’t have to go to jail for long
or be killed for our beliefs yet
I remember when a crazed nun in fifth grade
during the McCarthy era said to us
how many of you would die for your faith
if the communists came, raise your hands
of course we all did
now it’s different
this is a sonnet
people are astonished if a poet
in America can live long & not be destroyed
it makes no sense to anyone, none of this
all of us are all wrong
– Bernadette Mayer
no algorithm
understands
late night silence
– @BashoSociety
It is always disconcerting for a young man to learn that he is enjoying the hospitality of a woman who is anxious to strangle him with her bare hands.
– P. G. Wodehouse, MONEY IN THE BANK
ST. SEBASTIAN
Who puts you in worse shape,
unfortunate St. Sebastian:
the brute who sends his arrow
against a boy under God’s eye,
or the painter who imagines
you as youth, a new Adonis,
and mixing beauty and death
wishes to see you in your martyrdom
submissive and bloody without a cry,
sickeningly exquisite?
– Jorge Guillen, (tr. Cola Franzen)
If education doesn’t
teach you to resist
injustice, it has
failed.
– John Dewey
Sakura
It is almost cherry blossom season,
The streets like cups with rims of dirty ice.
We do not believe a better pink reason
For living is coming, that this will suffice
The almost-grey promised by the novels,
Social realism, our staters in the banks.
Who was once good that in the curt hovel
Went hiding in the dark times, mountebanks
Of letters that never get their good due?
Nothing is avenged; I lay out my sleeves.
Wisteria, pampas grass, silk with a view,
White kitten claws in their wake leave
Tracks for the painters of festival scenes.
Do we have the will, the longing, the means?
– A. V. Marraccini
There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that?
– Ernest Hemingway
Don’t give a lecture to someone who needs a hug.
– unknown
I was sure that the god we had known in Palestine had left it too, and was a refugee in some place which I did not know, unable to find a solution to his own problems.
– Ghassan Kanafani
The Brothers
by Dante Di Stefano
In a family, one brother always gets the girl
while the other just sits there,
slouching and eyes askance, about to say something incoherent,
ardent, and barely audible,
in other words, about to compose a quatrain,
perhaps, or snap a picture
of the very drama he finds himself in, so that someone else
can interpret the art or ache of all this.
In my family, I was supposed to be a priest,
which is true, but when I say it,
it sounds like I was born a century
or two ago, and my brother
was supposed to be the one who would marry
and provide my parents with grandkids.
At least, I think that’s true,
but I may be confusing my life again
with the plot of a Russian novel
I read in high school instead of studying
Geometry or kissing Nicole Acevedo
behind the bleachers while skipping gym class.
And now that I think of it, maybe my brother
was the one they wanted to be a priest,
but he rebelled and became a monk cloistered
on a seaside bench, his spine curved toward
a Bethlehem buried in the Mariana Trench
while I Casanova’ed a girl with sensible shoes
and let the breakers tattoo a heart and arrow
on the bicep in a snapshot, or in a poem,
or in a poem about a snapshot scuttling along
the tidal pools inside the meter of this feeling I have,
that I want to tell my brother, whatever the case,
let us pray by cupping a seashell to the ear.
another shooting
leaves of my prayer plant
unfurl
– Barbara Sabol
Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Capital generates needs of its own; mistakenly, we perceive these needs as if they belonged to us. Capital therefore represents a new kind of transcendence, which entails a new form of subjectivation.
– Byung-chul Han
Free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.
– Flannery O’Connor
The thinker needs no one to refute him, for that he has himself.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I’m going to make the obvious point that maybe the word ‘neurotic’ means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. … People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.
– Doris Lessing
All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one… characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers.
– Henry David Thoreau
No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others.
– Haruki Murakami
White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.
– Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
My songs last about 30 years – that’s about the lifespan of a Volvo.
– Leonard Cohen
Endeavors succeed or fail because of the people involved.
– Colin Powell
In fact you are mostly water, a lake in a skin container, sloshing along with its opinions and its agendas.
– Rebecca Solnit
It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
All art is a kind of exploring. To discover and reveal is the way every artist sets about his business.
– Robert J. Flaherty
The wave feels overwhelming in the moment, yet it will disappear, while the mountain remains.
– Katsushika Hokusai
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
– Mark Twain
We must not forget that, just like flowers & detritus rely on each other to exist, our own healing & the healing of others are not deperate but interconnected.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.
– Elmore Leonard
People strive to be loved; if that fails, they want to be admired; if that fails, they want to be feared; if that fails, they want to be hated. For better to be hated than ignored.
– Hjalmar Söderberg
Art must show the world as changeable, and help to change it.
– Ernst Fischer
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.
– John Archibald Wheeler
We were bored, available, and ambitious—a dangerous combination.
– Cal Newport
It is the eyes of others and not our own eyes which ruin us.
– Benjamin Franklin
Play is the exultation of the possible.
– Martin Buber
God is a frequency. Stay tuned.
– Alan Cohen
If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.
– Joan of Arc
If you’re going to live, leave a legacy. Make a mark on the world that can’t be erased.
– Maya Angelou
Look closely: is there really a distinction between seeing and what is seen, between hearing and the sound you hear?
– Tarthang Tulku
There are basically two kinds of people: those who have empathy and care about others and those who don’t. The ones who don’t are creating most of the problems in the world.
– Laurence Overmire
A lily or a rose never pretends, and its beauty is that it is what it is.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
God is like an ocean of nectar; even a drop can make one immortal.
– Swami Vivekananda
The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development.
– Dave Mearns
To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us.
– William Hazlitt
Pretend that you are the soul inside everyone you meet.
– Tom Bliss
If the problem is seen in these terms, there is no difference between the wallet, land and revolutionary theory. These objects are all quite imaginary, mere mirrors of human illusion. Only the struggle is real.
– Alfredo M Bannano
Stick with what you think, and that’s what you’ll be stuck with.
– Bel Kaufman
There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.
– Tennessee Williams
Shutting out all external objects, fixing the gaze between the eyebrows, making the even currents of prana and apana flow within the nostrils… the sage who has conquered the senses, mind, and intellect, and who has cast away desire, fear, and anger, is ever free.
– Bhagavad Gita
What does it matter how much a man has laid up in his safe, or in his warehouse, how large are his flocks and how fat his dividends, if he covets his neighbor’s property, and reckons, not his past gains, but his hopes of gains to come?
– Seneca
Belief requires the capacity to hope, to envision a reality beyond the probable, or to commit to a vision despite uncertainty.
– Shawn Achor
To love yourself right now, just as you are, is to give yourself heaven. Don’t wait until you die. If you wait, you die now. If you love, you live now.
– Alan Cohen
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.
– Patrick Henry
Wrong. Get into trouble. Make mistakes. Fight, love, live. …
– Gascon, The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
Since rationality doesn’t exist, it’s really easy to talk about.
– Roy Casagranda
when you are much older,
remember when we sat
at midnight on the windowsill,
and had this little chat
and dream, come on and dream,
come on and dream
– Tom Waits
Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first. Nationalism is when hate for people other than your own comes first. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.
– Charles de Gaulle
This is all I have to tell you. In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.
– Annie Dillard
Will I see any clearer?
Will I heal any sooner?
Will I feel whole again?
– Arcelia
The Healing Time
by Persha Gertler
Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say
holy holy
As they say,
the incident is closed.
Love’s boat has crashed on
philistine reefs.
It would be useless making a list
of who did what to whom.
We shared weapons
and wounds.
To those who remain –
I wish happiness.
– Vladimir Mayakovsky
Fall into it. Fall any way you want to. Saving yourself is jarring.
– Buddy Wakefield
If you are now wondering where to look for consolation, where to seek a new and better God… he does not come to us from books, he lives within us… This God is in you too. He is most particularly in you, the dejected and despairing.
– Hermann Hesse
Let us look for secret things somewhere
in the world on the blue shores of silence.
– Pablo Neruda
The Body Does Not Keep the Score: Trauma, Predictive Coding, and the Restoration of Metastability By Steven Kotler, Michael Mannino, Glenn Fox, Karl Friston For nearly a decade, the idea that “the body keeps the score” has shaped public and clinical understanding of trauma. It is an enticing metaphor-implying that experience is literally inscribed in flesh, that the body bears the scars of what the mind cannot face. Yet recent advances in computational and systems neuroscience reveal that this image, while emotionally compelling, is biologically inaccurate. The body does not store trauma; the brain dynamically reenacts it through maladaptive inference. What endures after trauma is not a memory lodged in tissue but a collapse of flexibility-a loss of metastability, the brain’s ability to fluidly switch among semi-stable network states. The traumatic memory is real, but it is entrenched in deep, defensive ravines in the landscape of our beliefs and thoughts.The landscape in question is a free energy landscape where every (Bayesian) belief is equipped with a measure of its plausibility. On this view, making sense of the world and our bodies -entails a process of (Bayesian) belief updating that can be read as minimizing free energy or, in the vernacular, finding apt explanations for our sensations that are the least surprising, or the most plausible.When trauma strikes, the brain’s Bayesian mechanics, as described by the Free Energy Principle and Active Inference -the continuous anticipation and minimization of surprise-can lock into a narrow regime of threat expectation. Functional imaging studies show this concretely: in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), neural networks become hypersynchronous, dominated by recurrent loops between the amygdala, hippocampus, and medial prefrontal cortex. Signal variability drops, connectivity patterns harden, and the brain’s dynamic repertoire shrinks.In computational terms, trauma overweights the precision of danger priors: the brain assigns excessive confidence to threat predictions, constraining inference based on the prior premise of enduring and ever present danger. The result is hypervigilance, flashbacks, and avoidance-symptoms of a system caught in self-confirming predictions.
[…]
To restore mental health is therefore not to “release” stored emotion but to reestablish dynamic equilibrium-to recover the brain’s ability to move with graceful agility over a landscape of beliefs, commitments and intentions.From this view, trauma is a disorder of prediction, not storage. Predictive coding reframes perception as active inference: the brain does not passively register the world but actively predicts it, adjusting only when errors arise -or acting to resolve such errors. For example, a reflexive movement fulfils the brains predictions that our limbs should be in a particular place; thereby minimizing prediction error (and free energy). However, the brain can also resolve prediction errors by affording them less precision. A process known as sensory attenuation. In trauma, or ability to attenuate sensory precision is lost and prediction errors are mis-weighted. Internal threat expectations dominate the search for -and attention to -sensory evidence of danger; unattenuated interoceptive signals-racing heart, tight chest-are interpreted as confirmation of danger rather than imprecise noise. The “score” the body appears to keep is thus an artifact of circular inference: the brain predicts pain, senses arousal, and takes that arousal as proof that pain persists. The body participates in trauma, but as messenger, not archive. This dynamic interpretation aligns with the broader field of embodied cognition. The body and environment are extensions of the brain’s predictive loop, scaffolding thought through action. Yet embodiment is active and transient-it does not imply storage. Trauma-related somatic symptoms are better understood as mis-calibrated feedback between prediction, action, and sensation, not as remnants of the past frozen in muscle or fascia. The distinction matters. Where the storage model leads to metaphors of exorcism-finding and purging what was buried-the inference model leads to training: recalibrating precision, retraining expectations, and expanding the brain’s capacity for adaptive variability.A more compelling thesis -for how emotional maps are truly embodied -comes from Antonio Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis (SMH). The central premise of the SMH is that while the body provides the territory for emotion, the “maps” (e.g. the storage and representation of emotional experience) are constructed in the nervous system through distributed processing centers, including visceral, brainstem, and cortical networks.Mechanistically, the re-emergence of a strong feeling -central to the experience of PTSD -can be explained using Damasio’s notion of convergence-divergence zones (CDZs) (Damasio, 1989;Meyer & Damasio, 2009).
[…]
Healing, in this light, is not excavation but exploration.Understanding trauma as a dysregulation of metastability may also dissolve a longstanding paradox in mental health: why so many diverse treatments-exposure therapy, EMDR, mindfulness, exercise, psychedelics, flow-inducing pursuits-can all succeed. Each, in its own way, restores flexible coupling between large-scale networks, quiets maladaptive self-referential loops, and rebalances neuromodulation. The mechanism is not specific content but dynamic reorganization. The nervous system learns to balance oscillation and homogenization, inhibition and excitation.Framing trauma dynamically does not diminish the suffering it causes, but it grounds that suffering in mechanisms that can be directly addressed. Interventions can target network flexibility, not metaphorical scars. This perspective also guards against pathologizing normal adaptation: most humans recover because their brains retain the capacity for metastable inference. Our task is to support that process, not convince people that their bodies are indelibly marked by pain.Future research should quantify metastability as a clinical biomarker-tracking signal variability, entropy, and network switching before and after interventions. Early findings from psychotherapy and flow-based programs suggest that successful recovery coincides with restored variability in resting-state connectivity and increased cross network integration. These objective indices could unify trauma research under a single measurable principle: health equals flexibility.If the old story held that “the body keeps the score,” the emerging narrative elides somatic chauvinism, is subtler, and more hopeful. The body does not keep the score; the brain keeps predicting it. When prediction becomes too rigid, experience repeats itself, not because it is stored, but because it cannot yet be reinterpreted. Flow-and other states that expand metastability-offer the nervous system a chance to update its model of the world, to reassign precision where it belongs, and to rediscover safety in uncertainty.Healing, in the end, is not the erasure of what happened, but the return of movement within the mind, within the networks, within action, within life itself.
– van der Kolk, B. A.
Is America great again or what?
This is what happens when you put Billionaire “businessmen” in charge. They will bulldoze the last mountain, drain the last lake, cut down the last redwood, pave over the last field, frack that last clean water table, and burn the last flower for another penny of profit and stockholder value. And when all the food is gone, they’ll EAT you to the last person standing. You are nothing to them but protein, raw material to be consumed, disposable labor, less than human. They are locusts.
– Stonekettle Station
Language , the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning , itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music , not in the sense of outward audible sounds but by virtue of the power and momentum of its inward flow.
– Boris Pasternak
My house is buried in the deepest recess of the forest
Every year, ivy vines grow longer than the year before.
Undisturbed by the affairs of the world I live at ease,
Woodmen’s singing rarely reaching me through the trees.
While the sun stays in the sky, I mend my torn clothes
And facing the moon, I read holy texts aloud to myself.
Let me drop a word of advice for believers of my faith.
To enjoy life’s immensity, you do not need many things.
– Ryokan
Standing on the bare ground, a mean egoism
vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I
am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal
Being circulate through me; I am part or particle
of God.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
What’s in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.
– James Joyce
If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals … We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it’s too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us — create who we are. It is we who created the system.
– Haruki Murakami
Instead of finding someone who shares my tastes, I prefer to find someone who teaches me things I didn’t know I liked.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
People are beginning to wake up to the fact that making the technological *products* of the “free” market our only God will result in the destruction of us all.
GenAl is entirely driven by financial interests. Saying that GenAl’s ubiquity in our lives is “inevitable” is surrendering to the idea that money is the greatest and most determining force in our lives. It is buying into the greatest lie of consumerism: that what makes money is always a virtue, and that we have to get on board with superfluous monetary “progress” or be left behind, backwards, even “wrong.”
In this way, money conditions our ethical thinking, anointing monetary “progress” as a virtue and everything that disagrees with it as a vice, even as something shameful, morally erroneous. The feeling of guilt has always been that which accompanies a person’s banishment from the tribe —in ancient times, a mortal danger-and modern markets hijack that ancient fear to make us feel “bad” about not buying the collective madness.
Every “advance” in technology *requires* at least as great an advance in our self-awareness and ethical thinking.
There is absolutely no reason monetary greed has to be a stronger force in this world than love, than humanity.
That part is entirely up to us.
– Joseph Fasano
They say it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes one to give our elders the dignified last years they deserve. America no longer has a village. It has a market. And the market has decided that the confused and the frail and the slowly vanishing are, depending on your asset level, either a burden to be warehoused or a revenue stream to be optimized. The village was pillaged by the village idiots who run this Godforsaken country.
Now let me tell you what I found when I started making calls in our new continent.
In most of Latin America, caring for elders is understood as deber: duty and love made inseparable, extending beyond the immediate family into the community, to the neighbor, to the stranger who reminds you of your grandmother. In Latin America, an elder is not a problem to be solved or a cost to be managed. They are the memory of the family, and when their own memory fails, the family remembers for them.
Care for the elderly is yet one more compassion that America dismantled under the name of individualism and profit, under the delusion that empathy is a weakness rather than that which makes us whole and holy.
– Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
Reach high with language – excite the reader. Choose words for their musicality as much as their aptness.
– Nuala O’Connor
It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story tells us who we are.
– Patrick Rothfuss
Joy is very important in your practice. It’s a marker to a signpost that says awakening.
– Bhante Buddharakkhita
It is not for you to judge the journey of another’s soul. It is for you to decide who you are, not who another has been, or has failed to be.
– Neale Donald Walsch
Outside the joy is clamoring. It is almost like the worst day of your life is ordinary for everyone else.
– Ruth Awad
I lament that the majority is so caught up in minutiae of the Government’s self-serving, finger-pointing arguments that it misses the plot. The majority forgets (or ignores) that ‘[w]ith all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations.’ … Tragically, the majority also shuns this prescient warning: Even if ‘[s]uch institutions may be destined to pass away,’ ‘it is the duty of the Court to be last, not first, to give them up.’
– Justice Jackson
The origin of individual poems is mysteriously similar to the origin of living organisms. The poet’s thought receives a shock from the external world, sometimes in an unforgettably clear moment, sometimes dimly, like conception in sleep, and for a long time it is necessary to bear the fetus of the future creation, heed in the timid movements of the still weak new life. Everything affects the course of its development a beam of the horned moon, an unexpectedly heard melody, a book read, a flower’s smell. Everything determines its future fate. The ancients respected the silent poet, as one respects a woman preparing to be a mother.
– Nikolai Gumilev
Gorge after gorge, turning, turning. Caverns of sunset, falling, falling away—just a single vast gold air breathed out by beings—they must have been marvelous beings, those gold-breathers. Down. Purple-and-green islands. Cleft and groined and gigantically pocked like something left behind after all the oceans vanished one huge night: the mountains. Their hills fold and fold again, fold away, down. Folded into the dens and rocks of the hills are ghost towns. Broken streets end in them, like a sound, nowhere. Shadow is inside. We walk (oh quietly) even so—breaking lines of force, someone’s. Houses stand in their stones. Each house an empty socket. Some streaked with red inside. Words once went on in there—no. I don’t believe that. Words never went on in there.
– Anne Carson
As it fantasizes, poetry comes across nature. The real, living world is the only project of the imagination which has once succeeded and which still goes on being endlessly successful. Look at it continuing, moment after moment a success. It is still real, still deep, utterly absorbing. It is not something you are disappointed in next morning. It serves the poet as example, even more than a sitter or a model.
– Boris Pasternak
I was scared of one thing after another. I still am.
Naturally. How could it be otherwise? You can either be fearless or you can be free, you can’t be both.
– John Berger
If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves.
The recognition of illusion is also its ending.
Its survival depends on your mistaking it for reality.
– Eckhart Tolle
After every deep meditation, you will find yourself becoming freer inside.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Certain people are not meant to be understood. They’re like art. You inch closer towards their understanding, though never actually reach it.
– Nika Solé
Any thought that is passed on to the subconscious often enough and convincingly enough is finally accepted.
– Robert Collier
Children grow by observation and involvement, not by teachings and philosophies. Become the kind of person you want your child to be.
– Sadhguru
Give yourself the gift of a silent retreat every day. Even if it is only for a few moments. … When you begin to have silent time on a regular basis, you will covet it and insist on it being a part of your life, regardless of how busy you are.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
The thought of “just enjoying life” is unbearable. Every moment lived without a writing project resembles the last.
– Annie Ernaux
Trust the love that’s in your heart.
– Michael Logue
Spiritual growth means
being able to recognize within yourself
the difference between love and fear.
– Gary Zukav
You share the same life force that was in Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Mother Teresa, Mohammed, St. Francis, or any Divine being you can name. There is only one life force, one Divine power.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
Of course, it’s possible to love a human being—if you don’t know them too well.
– Charles Bukowski
But evil is not subsiding. Good and evil live side by side, they conflict, and, what is most frightening, they make peace with each other in people’s hearts.
– Mikhail Kalashnikov
I remember a huge tiredness coming over me, a kind of lethargy in the face of the tangled mess before me. It was like being given a maths problem when your brain’s exhausted, and you know there’s some far-off solution, but you can’t work up the energy even to give it a go. Something in me just gave up.
– Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
True devotion and humility is when you carelessly allow yourself to fall in love with things you consider will make you look inferior, which in essence, makes you superior.
– Michael Bassey Johnson
The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
– Don DeLillo, White Noise
After you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress.
Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little.
It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet.
In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little.
If your mind has ideas of progress, you may say, “Oh, this pace is terrible!”
But actually it is not.
When you get wet in a fog it is very difficult to dry yourself.
So there is no need to worry about progress.
– Shunryu Suzuki
If we hold on tightly to what we have, our curiosity may not be ignited. Suffering shakes us up.
– Cuong Lu
shameful!
how many canes do you lean on
old pine?
– Kobayashi Issa
The only clue to what man can do is what man has done.
– RG Collingwood
Beauty would save the world.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
– Wallace Stevens
perhaps the desire to leave
was always the desire
to finally arrive
– @BashoSociety
I don’t know anything anymore. Is that
normal? Is it normal to notice the enormity
of everything and just go blank?
– A. M. Homes
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
– Thomas Mann
The false choices offered by spectacular abundance – choices based on the juxtaposition of competing yet mutually reinforcing spectacles and of distinct yet interconnected roles (signified and embodied primarily by objects) – develop into struggles between illusory qualities designed to generate fervent allegiance to quantitative trivialities.
– Guy Debord
An individual is not smart, according to our culture. An individual is merely lucky to be part of a system that has intelligence that happens to reside in them. In other words, be humble about this always. The real intelligence isn’t the property of an individual corporation – the real intelligence is the property of the universe itself.
– John Mohawk
The only patients who really suffer are those that have the potential and intention of growth. The others persist on in a smug discontent blaming the environment for all their lack and failure.
– Masud Khan
Fear, in fact, of a room of his own. He preferred to live with others! In ten-bed rooms would be best.
– Elfriede Jelinek
I believe that there is a longing
in my soul that searches the
whole world.
– Soren Kierkegard
dragonfly
the art of being seen
and staying free
– Ogawa
If you could look far enough into the empty sky, you would be able to see the back of your own head.
– John Keel
Don’t worry there’ll still be a lot of suffering
For now you have the right to cling to the sleeve
of someone’s blunt friendship
To be happy is a duty which you neglect
A careless user of time
you send days like geese to the meadow
Don’t worry you’ll die many times
until you learn at the very end to love life
– Anna Kamieńska (tr. Grażyna Drabik & David Curzon)
To alter the universe, alter your thoughts, because the only universe you will ever know is in your mind.
– Bryant McGill
We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.
– R. D. Laing
The exaltation of suffering in much classical tragic theory is at root a device for disavowing it. What it refuses to countenance is that tragedy, so to speak, is itself tragic.
– Terry Eagleton
I speak in the present tense, it is so easy to speak in the present tense, when speaking of the past. It is the mythological present, don’t mind it.
– Samuel Beckett
The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.
– Hermann Hesse
Edgar Morin understood that the future is not built in closed certainties / brutal simplifications, but in the patient effort to connect what our era too often separates: reason & poetry, science & conscience, the nation & humanity, freedom & fraternity.
– Dominique de Villepin
Once you know that all that the mind contains is not you, all that the mind craves is not you, all that the mind is hungry for is not you, you are becoming free.
– Osho
The pursuit of philosophy is founded on the belief that knowledge is good, even if what is known is painful.
– Bertrand Russell
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good, and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
– Raymond Chandler
[Philosophy’s] goal is not to discover new truths about the world on the model of physics, let alone about possible worlds—the glories of metaphysics. […] Philosophy aims to disentangle conceptual confusions, to destroy metaphysical illusions.
– Peter Hacker on Wittgenstein
I’m almost never serious, and I’m
always too serious. Too deep, too
shallow. Too sensitive. Too cold
hearted. I’m like a collection of
paradoxes.
– Ferdinand De Saussure
not every
unanswered question
is seeking an answer
– @BashoSociety
Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
– Hannah Arendt
Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?
– Ernest Hemingway
A man is bound to make for himself in this world, that fortune which heaven had refused him at his birth.
– Alexandre Dumas
quiet horizon
the heart becoming
less crowded
– @BashoSociety
It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the “Real meaning of Things”.
– Georgia O’Keeffe
Nobody is coming to save you.
Not your insurance company. Not your doctor’s 8-minute appointment. Not the FDA.
You are the only person who eats your meals, sleeps your hours, and lives in your body.
Own it completely or suffer the consequences slowly.
– Mark Hyman, M.D.
“Depression cannot hit a moving target.”
One of the best things I’ve heard all year.
– @TheShiftJournal
The course of true love never did run smooth.
– William Shakespeare
Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.
– Lord Byron
For it all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves.
The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
– Carl Jung
The certainty of death and the uncertainty of the hour of death is a source of grief throughout our life.
– Edgar Morin
Our thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams exist on Earth because of the electrical activity inside a 1.5-kilogram blob of stuff, which hasn’t changed much since the earliest modern humans began the long journey out of Africa.
– Brian Cox
the night
still belongs
to wanderers
– @BashoSociety
People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage.
– Flannery O’Connor
But
he is day’s guardian saint
that policeman
– Frank O’Hara
If I had to identify the central pathology of Western civilization, it would be this:
It is underfathered.
– @SovereignIM
If you dream so big, it’s because that version of you already exists in the future.
– Rumi
One of the things that Tolkien did was to open up a new continent of imaginative space for many millions of readers and hundreds of writers – though he himself would have said…that it was an old continent which he was merely discovering.
– Tom Shippey
I don’t believe that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks, but I know that it’s almost impossible to force old fingers into new chords.
– @TravisDurden
Lochan nam Breac
the little loch of the trout
you have never been there
whenever you think of it
circles spread on clear water
– Thomas A Clark
the moon rises
and every old limit
forgets its name
– @BashoSociety
O to realize space!
The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds,
To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon
and flying clouds, as one with them.
– Jason R. Carroll
at sunrise
for one second
everything is forgiven
– Akari
Sometimes fear of the unknown is not as great as the fear of things staying the way they are.
– Richard Price
The urgency to fix ourselves is just as destructive as the urgency to fix others.
Urgency is a trauma response.
Breathe. Take a break from urgency.
– Dr. Bob Beare
At the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to assist you.
– Goethe
out of the blue
the sky had turned
a strange
purple
like a song about
to shift into
an entirely new
rhythm
– @wordstohold
purple sky
a beautiful refusal
to remain ordinary
– @BashoSociety
a field of pink
the earth remembering
its favorite color
– @BashoSociety
TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE
Man lives with things mainly, even exclusively—since sentiment and action in him depend upon his mental representations— as they are conveyed to him by language Through the same act by which he spins language out of himself he weaves him- self into it, and every language draws a circle around the people to which it belongs, a circle that can only be transcended in so far as one at the same time enters another one
– Wilhelm von Humboldt
Je suis au bout de l’anglais
– James Joyce
Sometimes life simply changes the packaging to see if you’ve truly learned what it was trying to teach you. A different person doesn’t equal a different experience. A new opportunity doesn’t equal a new direction. Growth isn’t just about healing. It’s about pattern recognition.
– @TheOracleReadsU
Certainly I’ll do you a good turn—
Don’t be afraid that I love you bitterly!
I’m praying to all the saints today
That we can be good friends.
For you I gave up primacy
And I ask for nothing in return,
That’s why I wear these orphan’s rags
As if they were a wedding gown.
– Anna Akhmatova, (tr. Judith Hemschemeyer)
Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
– Sir Isaac Newton
Those who love and are separated
can live in grief but this is not despair:
they know that love exists.
– Albert Camus
the moon is still that much of a living thing
– Louise Glück
A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.
– Haruki Murakami
That Christ exists – doesn’t that mean that this sickness is not unto death? And what good would it have done Lazarus to be awoken from the dead if in the end he must die anyway?
– Kierkegaard
Thus, the informal Lewis admirer may be startled to read that Lewis did not much indulge in wit, that he evidenced outbursts of hatred, and that he did not talk frequently of his military experience; but that reader should note that this Lewis was an abundantly posturing atheist in his early-to-mid-twenties.
– James Como, Remembering C.S. Lewis
The secret of my success? It is simple. It is found in the Bible: ‘In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths.’ I never try to do anything without God.
– George Washington Carver
Favorable conditions never come.
– C.S. Lewis
If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.
– C.S. Lewis
Autistic people are often criticized for reading
too much into things and catastrophizing.
People don’t want to listen despite our
predictions being pretty accurate thanks to
our pattern recognition abilities. I think the real
issue is we often highlight what others want
hidden.
– @Squeeze1i
When an adult realizes they’re autistic and/
or ADHD, they also have to process the
fact that they are disabled – they’ve been
disabled their WHOLE LIFE – and they have
most likely never had _any_ support or
understanding.
They didn’t even realize they needed any.
That’s a _lot_.
– @Squeeze1i
Has there ever been a better hour for gaiety? Who will sing a song for us, a morning song, so sunny, so light, so fledged that it will not chase away the blues but invite them instead to join in the singing and dancing?
– Nietzsche
if just being exposed to knowledge in a passive way were the point of education, all students would need would be books or online postings; why come to a university at all? but university is a profound experience for young people who learn much about living with others, making their way in a society of peers, “socializing,” interacting with one another in countless ways other than just academic courses.
young people who had to remain home during Covid in their childhood bedrooms have always felt cheated, & rightfully so.
– Joyce Carol Oates
Our view was that cities are crucibles of innovation, economic growth, platforms for opportunities so people can rise in life.
– Brian Anderson
It does no harm to the romance of the
sunset to know a little about it.
– Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan
People always say that
when you love someone,
nothing in the world matters.
But that’s not true, is it?
You know, and I know, that
when you love someone,
everything in the world matters
a little bit more.
– Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
I’m afraid that we all make mistakes. One of the things that defines our character is how we handle mistakes. If we lie about having made a mistake, then it can’t be corrected and it festers. On the other hand, if we give up just because we made a mistake, even a big mistake, none of us would get far in life.
– Terry Goodkind
Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a
HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead.
– Elizabeth Wurtzel
“…dear friend,” said Aragorn: “you still speak in riddles.”
“What? In riddles?” said Gandalf. “No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.”
– JRR Tolkien
A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedies.
– W. B. Yeats
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
– G. K. Chesterton
Literature is news that stays news.
– Ezra Pound
In this century wars will not be fought over oil, as in the past, but over water. The situation is becoming desperate. The world’s water is strained by population growth. There is no more fresh water on earth than two thousand years ago when the population was three percent of its current size.
Even without the inevitable droughts, like the current one, it will get worse as demand and pollution increase. (…and now data centers?)
Some countries will simply run out of water, sparking a global refugee crisis.
Tens of millions of people will flood across international borders. It means the collapse of fisheries, environmental destruction, conflict, lower living standards.” She paused for a moment. “As people who deal with the ocean you must see the irony. We are facing a shortage on a planet whose surface is covered two-thirds with water.”
– Clive Cussler
TOENAILS
by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. Mildred Boyer)
Soft stockings coddle them by day and nail-bossed leather shoes buttress them, but my toes refuse to pay attention. Nothing interests them but emitting toenails, horny plates, semi-transparent and elastic, to defend themselves-from whom? Stupid and mistrustful as they alone can be, they never for a moment stop readying that tenuous armament. They reject the universe and its ecstasy to keep forever elaborating sharp ends, which rude Solingen scissors snip over and over again. Ninety days along in the dawn of prenatal confinement, they establish that singular industry. When I am laid away, in an ash-colored house provided with dead flowers and amulets, they will still go on with their stubborn task, until they are moderated by decay. They-and the beard on my face.
It is literally true that you can succeed
best and quickest by helping others to
succeed.
– Oliver Napoleon Hill
Lovingkindness
dispels the illusion
of us and them.
– Sharon Salzberg
Dandelions
It is a risk, isn’t it, to give your love
so completely to the hardy yellow heads
of dandelions you can’t bring yourself
to pull up from the yard, leaving them
blazing like small stars around which unseen
worlds keep spinning. The petals arranged
in the shape of a crown so the flower can hear
bees and other pollinators as they fly near,
so it can, in those few slim instants, choose
to sweeten its nectar, making sure that
others learn of this sudden feast over which
you now hover, kneeling before the plant
some would call a weed, missing out on
these commonplace miracles dropped
like lucky pennies everywhere at our feet.
– James Crews
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me
more than the metaphysics of books.
– Walt Whitman
The wood-thrush sang on the distant shore, and the laugh of some loons, sporting in a concealed western bay, as if inspired by morning, came distinct over the lake to us, and, what was remarkable, the echo which ran round the lake was much louder than the original note; probably because, the loons being in a regularly curving bay under the mountain, we were exactly in the focus of many echoes, the sound being reflected like light from a concave mirror.
– Henry David Thoreau
First you must overcome your childishness, and after you have been a specific adult, you can become a child again.
– Jung
I remember that everybody around me was drinking tea with sage or tea with mint, and the aroma is not quite what the taste is. There is a gap. As a child, you encounter this, and you’re like, ‘What just happened?’ So a memory has created a feeling and also a disparity that you have to bridge.
– Fady Joudah
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
– Jean Cocteau
Some shifts in perspective and intention are hard to come by when we are under duress. It’s unrealistic to expect people to see things differently if they are persistently dysregulated. But when we are able to regulate our nervous systems and centre ourselves, change happens.
– Jeff Brown
The morning wind forever blows; the poem of the world is uninterrupted, but few are the ears that hear it.
– Thoreau
Dylan was able to tell you the truth about that other thing. He was able to talk about the changes that you’d go through, the bummers and stuff like that, and say it, and say it in a good way, the right way.
– Jerry Garcia
The devil is a preliminary stage of
individuation.
– Carl Jung
I think every human being
eventually has a moment
where they are standing outside in sweatpants
that have lost the will to be pants,
holding a trash bag, a divorce, a parking ticket,
or some other receipt from the universe
that says, “surprise, this too is part of it.”
And then the sky bruises purple.
And the air touches your face
like it knows your whole story.
And suddenly you realize:
all the real is actually unreal.
The dirt.
The breath.
The weird little bones in your hands.
The fact that we are here,
on a floating rock with pollen counts,
paying bills,
missing dead people,
loving living people
who say “leaving now”
while still fully naked and looking for socks.
And still,
the moon clocks in.
No applause.
No benefits.
No note from management saying,
“Great work being ancient and luminous again.”
Just the moon,
working nights
like a single mother with no applause,
packing silver lunches
for every dark thing
that still has to rise.
Tell me that isn’t holy.
Tell me there is a better word
than sacred
for the way light keeps returning
with no guarantee
we will actually stop and take note.
I know people who believe in therapy,
probiotics,
tarot,
twelve-step meetings,
manifestation journals,
and waiting exactly eleven minutes
before texting back
so they do not appear emotionally available,
even though their whole nervous system
is standing in the driveway holding flowers.
And underneath all of it,
every ritual,
every doctrine,
every smoothie with chia seeds,
the prayer is the same:
Please let me be loved.
Please let me be forgiven.
Please let this strange little life
mean something
before my lower back
submits its formal resignation.
What is going on?
For real tho—What is this place?
This unbearable tenderness
of being alive long enough
to watch steam lift from coffee in winter
like a soul practicing leaving.
To see your friend laugh so hard
they slap the table
as if joy is a mosquito
they are trying to kill.
To hear a child say “pisghetti”
and, for one shining second,
realize language
has finally been improved.
I know I already noted this in the first piece,
but the older I get,
the less use I have for certainty.
Certainty has never made me pull over
because the sunset looked like God
dropped a jar of peach jam
across the whole midwestern sky
and decided to be lazy
and not clean up.
Certainty has never made me gasp
at rain on hot pavement.
Certainty has never found me
in the cereal aisle,
holding Captain Crunch,
suddenly remembering
that everyone I have ever loved
was made from stardust,
hunger,
and a series of decisions
we probably should have slept on.
No.
It has always been awe.
Awe was the first church.
Before steeples.
Before committees.
Before men got involved
and started making rules about skirts.
Awe was there
with its wild hair
and muddy feet,
saying:
Look.
Look again.
Look until looking
becomes love.
Awe, and soup.
Awe, and someone rubbing your back
when you are sick.
Awe, and old couples at Target
arguing gently about avocados,
as if marriage is not one vow
but ten thousand errands
performed beside the person
who knows exactly
how you like the cart pushed.
Maybe gratitude
was never meant to sound elegant.
Maybe gratitude sounds like:
“Damn.
That woodpecker is trying
to beat that tree from itself.”
Maybe gratitude sounds like:
“Thank you, body,
for continuing to drag me through this world
despite the many slim jims
I have done to you
at gas stations.”
Maybe gratitude sounds like:
“Thank you to the dogs
who lose their entire minds
when we come home
as if we have returned from war
and not Walgreens.”
For me, that might be my gospel.
That joy that does not wait for us
to be impressive but only needs us
to come through the door.
Because the truth is,
this life is devastating.
And ridiculous.
One minute you are 22 and invincible,
driving too fast,
eating gas station nachos
with the confidence of a Greek god.
The next minute you are googling,
“Can sneezing cause a hamstring injury?”
and the answer is,
apparently,
“Welcome to the second half of your life.”
But even now—
even tired,
even grieving,
even emotionally held together
by iced coffee, playlists,
and one very specific wolves hoodie—
we keep finding reasons
to stay soft.
We plant tomatoes
even though grief is real.
We bake bread
even though the news is on fire.
We send photos of the sky
to people we love
with captions like,
“LOOK,”
as if beauty is an emergency
and we are all volunteer firefighters.
We keep saying,
“You have to see this,”
because wonder
is the oldest form
of resurrection.
So here’s to the believers
and the atheists
and the agnostics
and the people whose entire theology
is just trying not to cry
in the DMV line.
Here’s to the people clinging to faith.
Here’s to the people clinging to Xanax
and oat milk
and the one group chat
where nobody pretends to be okay.
Here’s to the tender-hearted weirdos.
The accidental mystics.
The ones who can contemplate mortality
for six straight hours
and then become emotionally attached
to a perfect peach.
The ones who know
despair has a mouth,
but so does laughter.
May we never stop being drop-kicked by beauty
in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.
May we never become so polished
that we forget how to stand
in the Starbucks line of existence
with our dumb, gorgeous hearts open,
feeling the enormity of it all
rattle around in our bones
like thunder
looking for somewhere to laugh.
And may we remember:
whatever else this is,
whatever mess,
whatever miracle,
whatever cosmic group project
no one was prepped for—
all’ve it is astonishing.
that we are here.
that we have loved enough to be ruined.
that the moon keeps showing up.
that bread exists.
So pass it on.
Tear off a piece
with your bare hands.
Take it in as you take it down.
And then go outside and look at that moon.
– Matt Moberg
Bodhicitta is like a seed from which the qualities of the Buddhas grow.
It’s like a field in which the goodness of all beings flourishes.
It’s like the earth, which is the foundation of the entire universe.
It’s like water because it cleanses away the stains of the defiling emotions.
It’s like fire because it burns all the grass of grasping views.
It’s like the sun because it illuminates all the efforts of beings.
It’s like a lamp because it brings the light of dharma.
It’s like eyes because it enables one to see.
– Maitreya, speaking to Sudhana
If you really pursue any spiritual path, you will discover, surprisingly, that self is other and other is self.
– Chögyam Trungpa
From there we came outside and saw the stars.
– Dante Alighieri, Inferno
The day that man allows true love to appear, those things which are well made will fall into cofusion and will overturn everything we believe to be right and true.
– Dante Alighieri
I am, we each are, the inmost of an endless series of Russian dolls; you who read are now encased within a layer I built for you, or perhaps my stories are now inside you. We live as literally as that inside each other’s thoughts and work, in this world that is being made all the time, by all of us, out of beliefs and acts, information and materials. Even in the wilderness your ideas of what is beautiful, what matters, and what constitutes pleasure shape your journey there as much as do your shoes and map also made by others.
– Rebecca Solnit
Next Day
Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,
Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise
If that is wisdom.
Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves
And the boy takes it to my station wagon,
What I’ve become
Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.
When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I’d wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I’m old, my wish
Is womanish:
That the boy putting groceries in my car
See me. It bewilders me he doesn’t see me.
For so many years
I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me
And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me,
The eyes of strangers!
And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile
Imaginings within my imagining,
I too have taken
The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog
And we start home. Now I am good.
The last mistaken,
Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind
Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm
Some soap and water –
It was so long ago, back in some Gay
Twenties, Nineties, I don’t know . . . Today I miss
My lovely daughter
Away at school, my sons away at school,
My husband away at work – I wish for them.
The dog, the maid,
And I go through the sure unvarying days
At home in them. As I look at my life,
I am afraid
Only that it will change, as I am changing:
I am afraid, this morning, of my face.
It looks at me
From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,
The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look
Of gray discovery
Repeats to me: “You’re old.” That’s all, I’m old.
And yet I’m afraid, as I was at the funeral
I went to yesterday.
My friend’s cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,
Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body
Were my face and body.
As I think of her I hear her telling me
How young I seem; I am exceptional;
I think of all I have.
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I’m anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.
– Randall Jarrell
There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Much on earth is hidden from us; but to make up for that we have been given a precious mystic sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why the philosophers say that we cannot understand the reality of things on earth. God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His garden grew up and everything came up that could come up. But what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, the heavenly growth will die away in you. Then you will be indifferent to life and even grow to hate it. That’s what I think.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armor, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells – he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realize you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self – struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence – you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenges, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself.
The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.
– Ted Hughes
In our day, we confine ourselves at the best of times to discussing the imagination. The word “imagination” is beautiful and vast, but it doesn’t hold everything.
But what is the spirit, the spiritual life? If only I were up to defining such things! Robert Musil says that the spirit synthesizes intellect and emotion. It’s a good working definition, for all its concision.
In the case of poetry, literature, it’s simpler to say - theologians know a thing or two about this - what the spirit isn’t. It’s not psychoanalytic any more than it is behavioral, sociological, or political. It is holistic, and in it are reflected, as in an astronaut’s helmet, the earth, the stars, and a human face.
These are difficult and dangerous considerations.
– Adam Zagajewski
There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We’ll dream of being blind.
– Virilio
I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.
– Emily Bronte
And this is the old myth of Narcissus. The word Narcissus means narcosis, numbness, a drug; and Narcissus was drugged into thinking that that image outside himself was somebody else. Narcissus did not fall in love with his own image, he thought it was somebody else. And the same with us, in our technology and gadgetry and gimmickry and so on, we don’t think that is merely a part of our own physical organism extended out there, we’re like Narcissus, completely numb. Now when we put out a new part of ourselves, extend a new part of ourselves by technology into the environment, we protect ourselves by numbing that area. The more I looked at this the more I had difficulty explaining why people ignored it.
– Marshall McLuhan
We have reason. It is the entire meaning and purpose of Shangri-La. It came to me in a vision long, long ago. I foresaw a time when man exalting in the technique of murder, would rage so hotly over the world, that every book, every treasure would be doomed to destruction. This vision was so vivid and so moving that I determined to gather together all things of beauty and culture that I could and preserve them here against the doom toward which the world is rushing. Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity crashing headlong against each other. The time must come, my friend, when brutality and the lust for power must perish by its own sword. For when that day comes, the world must begin to look for a new life. And it is our hope that they may find it here.
– James Hilton, Lost Horizon
The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great nerve center from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.
– D.H. Lawrence
The road to wisdom? — Well, it’s plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.
Put up in a place
where it’s easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it’s well to remember that
Things Take Time.
– Piet Hein
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
– Gaston Bachelard
The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colors, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of…
– Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
Canada is a great
country, one of the
hopes of the world
– Jack Layton
The end of the world had already occurred. How long ago was that. I don’t know. It is not a function of knowledge. It is in a special sense that the world ends. You have to keep living.
– Jorie Graham
And then there’s the time-stopping stillness of sacred moments, as when an eagle drops a feather and the pueblo elders bow their heads in prayer.
– Leila
I am a drop of gold he would say
I am molten matter returned from the core
of earth to tell you interior things.
– Anne Carson
I think I could turn and live with animals,
they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
– Walt Whitman
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:
1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True:
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3 Energy is Eternal Delight.
– William Blake
To a disciple who begged for wisdom the Master said, “Try this out: Close your eyes and see yourself and every living being thrown off the top of a precipice. Each time you cling to something to stop yourself from falling, understand that that is falling too.
The disciple tried it out and never was the same again.
– Anthony de Mello
If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living; that is, to go on living doing things you don’t like doing—which is stupid! Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.
– Alan Watts
But somehow we survive / severance, deprivation, loss.
– Dennis Brutus
One ought to turn the most extreme possibility inside oneself into the measure for one’s life, for our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry.
– Rilke, The Poet’s Guide to Life
Poetry Hates You
Hates the way
you sit staring
at her words like
they’re like some puzzle
God left here on his way out.
She’d turn away and leave you
but she knows there’s nobody
but you with your sloppy eyes
and dumb tongue
to make sense of her.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
Do not hold back your love, your joy, and your exuberance. Only what you give becomes your quality, not what you hold back.
– Sadhguru
The being one finds oneself to be is also in the end a stranger to us.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila
…How few sometimes may know, when thousands err.
– John Milton, Paradise Lost
Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.
– Joan Didion
Jung did not believe, as many sociologists do today, that symbols are social constructs. Like the Neoplatonists …he perceived symbols as ‘encountered’ or ‘discovered’, rather than generated by human activity to provide a form of social cohesion.
– Liz Greene
Only when you do not Know Yourself, do other people’s opinions become important.
– Sadhguru
The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The goal of spirituality is to bring such happiness, which nobody can take away from you.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
It is your ultimate destiny to awaken fully into Oneness and the truth of life, just like Buddha and Jesus.
– Leonard Jacobson
It is not our problems which set man against man, but our ideas about them. Problems bring us together, but ideas separate us.
– Krishnamurti
Without tradition, knowledge would be impossible. Knowledge cannot start from nothing—from a tabula rasa—nor yet from observation.
– Karl Popper
Who doesn’t feel a weight lifted at the prospect of a word?
– Nellen Dryden
Man has to fight for every atom of the truth, and has to pay for it almost everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling to. Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth is the hardest of all services.
– Nietzsche
She could always be found on the nearest sofa.
– Franz Kafka, 1913.
Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.
– James Joyce
It’s easy for the heart to turn to envy and lose access to the more expansive state of sympathetic joy. But we can intentionally cultivate this state in our practice, just as the Buddha recommended.
– Lisa Ernst
COSMOPOLITAN
Because death can pounce on you anywhere.
The deceitful love the cloak
of foreignness. Then a familiar light will fall
upon your lost steps. Perhaps
even your mother tongue will not prove
any kind of handhold. Hades will be more
than even your country was at one time.
What is needed is the darkness of mythology,
so you can encounter the incomprehensible
fog-thicket of whom you believe
that beyond the grave, like in a ballad, you can nestle
close together, two flower stalks.
But the cries for help of wickedness,
stubborn dictates will be enfolded
into prayers, the roaring of the sea. Romeos ladder
hangs there above the charred
depths. You offer oblivion,
the task of the Other,
to the pursuers. Yet the mistaken and their delusions
will be charred as one. Look at your wound.
The genuine wound. Always at the wound.
You can build your temple anywhere.
– Ágnes Gergely, (tr. Ottilie Mulzet)
The only thing people regret is
that they didn’t live boldly enough,
that they didn’t invest enough heart,
didn’t love enough.
Nothing else really counts at all.
– Ted Hughes
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
– Karl Popper
Perhaps, somewhere, someday, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
– Vladimir Nabokov
How can we organize political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?
– Karl Popper
It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all.
– Cormac McCarthy
Instinct is the most intelligent type of intelligence discovered so far.
– Nietzsche
Dive deep within yourself, deeper than you can ever imagine. Do this by giving up the external world, mentally, not physically, by not reacting to things. Observe things, watch the world go by, leave it alone. It’s neither good nor bad. It has nothing to offer you.
– Robert Adams
Only he who lives, not in time but in the present, is happy.
– Wittgenstein
A clever person solves a problem, A wise person avoids it.
– Albert Einstein
When you write, something interesting happens. All those half-formed ideas floating around in your head suddenly have to become actual words, and that process alone forces you to think more clearly than you have in weeks.
– Daniel Barada
The most insidious, divisive, and wounding power is the power used in the service of God. The number of people who “have been wounded by religion” overwhelms me. An unfriendly or judgmental word by a minister or priest, a critical remark in church about a certain lifestyle, a refusal to welcome people at the table, an absence during an illness or death, and count- less other hurts often remain longer in people’s memories than other more world-like rejections. Thousands of separated and divorced men and women, numerous gay and lesbian people, and all of the homeless people who felt unwelcome in the houses of worship of their brothers and sisters in the human family have turned away from God because they experienced the use of power when they expected an expression of love.
– Henri Nouwen
It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess.
– Walt Whitman
Forgiveness is one of the most liberating things you can ever do. Form the habit of not holding on to anything that is causing you to feel bad.
– Bob Proctor
The final proof of greatness lies in being able to endure criticism without resentment.
– Elbert Hubbard
What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which make a young world for me again? What so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling?
– Emerson
Faith is like a mother who gives birth to those good things. Without a mother, they cannot be born.
– Geshe Sopa
Develop the witness attitude and you will find in your own experience that detachment brings control. The state of witnessing is full of power; there is nothing passive about it.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
– Hannah Arendt
The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
C.S. Lewis once encouraged someone in their faith to “continue seeking with cheerful serious-ness,” knowing that unless God “wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.”
– Collected Letters of Lewis
It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.
– Arthur C. Clarke
You cannot trust your reminiscences, and yet there is no reality except the one we remember.
– Klaus Mann
every blossom
is a small argument
against despair
– @BashoSociety
The really important thing is not to live, but to live well. And to live well meant, along with more enjoyable things in life, to live according to your principles.
– Socrates
as the moon appears
all unfinished things
are forgiven
– @BashoSociety
how we climb out of our
griefs / again and again
and rise
– Lisel Mueller
The fundamental global objective of all education aspiring not only to progress but to the survival of humanity is to civilize and unify the Earth.
– Edgar Morin
When you consciously desire something outside your control, your subconscious confirms you don’t have it. That confirmation generates anxiety. The desire itself is manufacturing the suffering you’re trying to escape.
– Daniel Barada
Dream in a pragmatic way.
– Aldous Huxley
the heart
keeping company
with unreachable stars
– @BashoSociety
Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are death is not come, and when death is come, we are not.
– Epicurus
among irises
beauty and resilience
share a root
– Ogawa
The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds.
Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.
– Marcel Proust
Seek to learn on Earth those truths which will remain forever valid in Heaven.
– St. Jerome
something in beauty
always recognizes
beauty
– @BashoSociety
Our God in his deepest mystery is not a solitude but a family.
– St John Paul II on the Trinity
We are not working with nature, or within nature; we are nature working.
– Penny Livingston-Stark
certain souls
continue flowering
through many seasons
– @BashoSociety
Sunday haiku
waking in the night
a future lost to what ifs
morning makes no sense
– Eileen Carney Hulme
Buddhist monks have written for thousands of years about something they claim is beyond words.
– Erwan Le Corre
where does the wind reside?
inside every moment
that awakens
– @BashoSociety
If we don’t explain science to the public, others will fill the gap with nonsense.
– Prof. Carl Sagan
Being attacked is a sign that you are important enough to be a target.
– Robert Greene
Psychiatric drugs are typically prescribed for long-term use. Used in the way they’re prescribed, they do no good whatsoever.
– Michael Langston
You know how it is. Sometimes we plan a trip to one place, but something takes us to another.
– Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi
floating upon
the waves of a lake
summer world
– Basho
If machines can write, reason, diagnose, and persuade, then human value cannot be based on productivity. The meaning of life cannot be ‘I output more than the machine.’
– Peter H. Diamandis, MD
Yes, there is a place / where someone
loves you both before / and after they
earn what you are.
– Neil Hilborn
For someone who loved words as
much as I did, it was amazing how
often they failed me.
– M.L. Rio
birdsong
hope returns
without announcement
– @BashoSociety
God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about.
– Christopher Hitchens
You’ve entered the chapter where it all goes right.
– Rumi
Someone said “Baby Boomers did that thing where you leave a single square of toilet paper on the roll and pretend it’s not your turn to change it, but with a whole society” and now I can’t stop thinking about it.
– @JezziiB
The only way to escape the personal corruption of praise is to go on working.
– Albert Einstein
An apology given before it is genuinely felt is a social gesture. An apology given after the full weight of what occurred has landed is the beginning of actual repair.
– @weaverofwoe
Eventually the Spiritual path will lead you back to the Material world because the ultimate meaning of being Awake is to create and play in physical reality.
– @itsme_urstruly
If you spend enough time with anything, you start liking it, even sadness.
– Amish Tripathi
God grants ecstasies, revelations, wounds, but peace He rations like a miser. Dona nobis pacem, the oldest, and most repeated catholic prayer, and the least fulfilled!
– @graveair
the moon
pouring calm
into wild places
– @BashoSociety
The poet’s meditations can never be isomorphic with those of the philosopher. His imagination makes the dream that he enacts in meditating his poems.
– Isabel G. MacCaffrey
Action kills overthinking.
Do something. Anything.
– Dan Martell
light through dark clouds
nothing lost
entirely
– @BashoSociety
Optimize for your nervous system, not success.
“You can’t enjoy any of this if you don’t have peace.”
– Matthew Hussey
There is great joy in darkness. Deepen it.
– Hakim Sanai
I want stigmata. I do not want the stigmata to
disappear. I am attached to my engravings, to the
stings in my flesh and my mental parchment. I do
not fear that trauma and stigma will form an
alliance: the literature in me wants to maintain and
reanimate traces.
– Hélène Cixous
as the sky blushes
something inside
softens too
– @BashoSociety
Music is a total constant. That’s why we have
such a strong visceral connection to it, you know?
Because a song can take you back instantly to a
moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter
what else has changed in your or the world, that
one song says the same, just like that moment.
– Sarah Dessen, Just Listen
Body cells replace themselves
every month. Even at this very
moment. Most everything you
think you know about me is
nothing more than memories.
– Haruki Murakami
It will boost your memory; it will sharpen your intellect. To accomplish a task, you need a clear mind and a sharp intellect. It’s the one-pointed mind that enables you to think, analyze, and act. And it is meditation that helps you cultivate such a one-pointed mind.
– Swami Rama
Meditation doesn’t make you inert, rather it makes you active, as well as grounded.
– Swami Rama
You are not your grand plans.
You are your daily patterns.
– James Clear
The mind is a thing deeply marked. I have bound myself to this damage.
– Tom Snarsky
I and Me
are always too
deep in conversation.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
broken lock…
a love song filled
with keys
– @lafcadiopoetry
Deep rivers
run quiet.
– Haruki Murakami
It’s like you’ve got a glass and as you’re revising and revising you’re filling up the glass, and at some point it’s going to spill over, by which I mean that through revision you make discoveries.
– Charles Johnson
to love and lose
and still be kind.
– Warsan Shire
Even the colors of a chameleon are for survival not beauty.
– African Proverb
The Bhagavad Gita is the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.
– Robert Oppenheimer
The more real things get, the more like myths they become.
– Rainer Werner Fassbinder
ice cream
teaching the tongue
about now
– @BashoSociety
I wanted to write a book that was beyond what usually gets communicated in language.
– Claudia Rankine
so much of life
grows clearer with the years —
her parting words
yet grit like sand in my mouth
whenever I repeat them
– Chen-ou Liu
Let your mind wander
in the pure and simple
– Chuang Tzu
With you, it’s different.
With you, I do want to
talk about it.
– Simone de Beauvoir
But love not too well the work of thy hands and the devices of thy heart…
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Tonight I sit over memories. I admire the mean play of fate and I complain a little.
– Ivo Andrić
Half of your beauty comes from the way you speak and treat people.
– Rumi
Nonsense wins the argument by sheer persistence, by inexhaustible re-iteration, by staying at the meeting when everyone else has gone home, by monomania, by boring people into submission and indifference.
– Theodore Dalrymple
You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.
– C.S. Lewis
He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
– William Faulkner
There are silences that speak volumes just as there are words that mean nothing.”
– Edith Piaf
It is June. Let’s hope Someone is kind, just in time.
– Vanesha Pravin
Technology is not demonic; but its essence is mysterious.
– Martin Heidegger
The true purpose of Zen…
is to see things as they are…
and to let everything go as it goes.
– Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
Most people don’t have original opinions, they just repeat what they heard from someone louder, richer or more popular.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Disorder in society is the result of disorder in the family.
– St. Angela Merici
The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
– Oscar Wilde
Man is the metaxy.
– Voegelin
Psychoanalysis is about getting over yourself.
– D. Carveth
green-leafed breeze
my mind and lungs filled
with skylark song
– Chen-ou Liu
I don’t see why escapist literature shouldn’t also be a work of art.
– P. D. James
In the vastness of space
and in the immensity of time,
my joy is to share a planet
and an era with you
– Carl Sagan
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
– Simone Weil
To read is to set off, to get lost, to make encounters, to pause to reflect or dream, to set off again in jubilation, to listen to one’s heart beating, to quench one’s thirst, to steal cherries or apples, to be afraid, to desire, to marvel, to complain, to question oneself, to remember, and thus to continue, tireless traveler, to the very end of the book.
– Bernard Pivot
Creative Scotland
they kindly still list
the opportunities
though there aren’t any
– Alec Finlay
When we talk about being spaced out, we are talking about being empty hearted.
– Chögyam Trungpa
There is a goal, but no way; what we call a way is hesitation.
– Franz Kafka
How scary it might prove to conclude that I am essentially alone in this summons to personal consciousness, that I cannot continue to blame others for what has happened to me, that I am really out there on that tightrope over the abyss, making choices every day, and that I am truly, irrevocably responsible for my life.
– James Hollis
It is imperative to help each other discern: Where is the seat of our calm and what is the source of our agitation?
– Mark Nepo
Anchored in the archetypal ego, we are now in anima country, the wild place of the dreamtime. We are beyond the constructed, civilized, mental landscapes of modernity. Here we are open to the visitation of living images. We experience the world and ourselves in a different way. We do not know what is going to happen before it does. Surprise is a big part of the joy of working with living dream images. When I am tending dreams, people often ask me how I know what is going to happen next, and my answer is, simply, “I don’t.” They look puzzled and ask, “Well if you don’t, then who does?” It is the dream images themselves that know what is coming next.
– Stephen Aizenstat, Dream Tending
Within the eyes of a dream figure, we find a well of timelessness and presence. We surrender to another kind of consciousness, a subtle mode of connection, requiring finesse, patience, sensitivity and spaciousness. With extended practice of looking into the eyes of a dream image, we will occasionally make contact with other images residing in the inner realms of this awareness, such as ancestor figures and guardian animals. This can be a tremendously rewarding experience. I have found that looking gently and mindfully into the eyes of a dream figure changes people. Entering the portals of the soul opens us ever more deeply into our own soul life and to the mysteries of the dreamtime.
– Stephen Aizenstat, Dream Tending
In the end, the images of dream care for us. In the end, the images in dream have love for us. And when we share with them, our heartfelt care, our deepest appreciation and love for them, something happens that is more than can be imagined, something magical, something of the mystery, something opens and permeates the depth of our lives.
– Stephen Aizenstat
It happened as always in a dream when you leap over space and time and the laws of life and mind, and you stop only there where your heart delights.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Paradise is hidden in each one of us, it is concealed within me too, right now, and if I wish, it will come for me in reality, tomorrow even, and for the rest of my life.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Yes. It is the witch’s life, climbing the primordial climb, a dream within a dream, then sitting here holding a basket of fire.
– Anne Sexton
I am on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it, I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or foot. I know that the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would die if I let myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as certainly if I let go of the crowd. This is not an easy position to stay in, it is even very difficult to hold, for these beings are in constant motion and their movements are unpredictable and follow no rhythm. They swirl, go north, then suddenly east; none of the individuals in the crowd remains in the same place in relation to the others. So I too am in perpetual motion; all this demands a high level of tension, but it gives me a feeling of violent, almost vertiginous, happiness.” A very good schizo dream. To be fully a part of the crowd and at the same time completely outside it, removed from it: to be on the edge…
– Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari
Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselves. She crouched low down and touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones, who were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock. Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down. Out on the pale criss-crossed sand, high-stepping, fringed, gauntleted, stalked some fantastic leviathan (she was still enlarging the pool), and slipped into the vast fissures of the mountain side.
And then, letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above the pool and rest on that wavering line of sea and sky, on the tree trunks which the smoke of steamers made waver on the horizon, she became with all that power sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing, hypnotised, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever, to nothingness. So listening to the waves, crouching over the pool, she brooded.
– Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
His whole face was darkened from incessant exposure to the brutal world of dreams.
– Yukio Mishima, (tr. Sam Brett)
You now recall that your dreams always had background characters: the crowds in the restaurants, the knots of people in the malls and schoolyards, the other drivers on the road and the jaywalking pedestrians. Those actors don’t come from nowhere. We stand in the background, playing our parts, allowing the experience to feel real for the dreamer. […]
No one is very pleased about this work except for some former thespians among us.
– David Eagleman
We may judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.
– Joseph Campbell
Proust wrote in his novel that a man, during the second half of his life, might become the reverse of who he was in the first. When I first read that a few years ago I liked the line so much I wrote it down and put it into my wallet. Then I found a similar one in Simenon’s The Prison: “Alain Poitaud, at the age of thirty-two, took only a few hours, perhaps only a few minutes, to stop being the man he had been up to that time and to become another.” I decided to fill a notebook with quotes conveying that sense of the possibility of a seemingly magical personal metamorphosis, but then I didn’t come across many more.
But I did find this one by Nathaniel Hawthorne that’s like the others but with an intriguing twist: “In Wakefield, the magic of a single night has wrought a similar transformation, because, in that brief period, a great moral change has been affected. But this is a secret from himself.” Something, even overnight, has changed you for the better, but you’re not even aware of it. But can’t it be something that has been building for years and that finally gathers enough weight, even from one day to the next, to tip over from bad into better or even into good? How will you know? Because someone will love you who wouldn’t have yesterday.
– Francisco Goldman
Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
– Mark Twain
The real American exceptionalism is the shrinking of a protected class into an infinitesimal slice of the population, who lecture and swindle the rest of us from their gilded retreats.
– Sarah Kendzior
It is entertainment, and then it is autocracy, and then it is too late.
– Sarah Kendzior
The universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny. The world globes itself in a drop of dew.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The strange thing about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost; one feels transposed into infinity, more or less alone, no longer in hope or fear, only observing.
– Albert Einstein
Once more let me remind you what fascism is. Fascism beings the first moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.
– Tommy Douglas
In fascism, feeling is first. Fascists of the 1920s and 1930s wanted to undo the enlightenment and appeal to people as members of a tribe, race or species. What mattered was a story of us and them that could begin a politics of conflict and combat. Fascists proposed that the world was run by conspirators whose mysterious hold must be broken by violence. This could be achieved by a leader (führer, duce) who spoke directly to and for the people, without laws and institutions. Totalitarianism meant domination of the whole self, without respect for private and public.
– Timothy Snyder
Loneliness creates an appetite for deeper love, and the entire predicament deepens. And as a result of suffering, your capacity to love deeply increases.
– Leonard Cohen
The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love is not the last room: there are others after it, the whole length of the corridor that has no end.
– Yehuda Amichai
We seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
– Henri Bergson
An age in rapid transition is one which exists on the frontier between two cultures and between conflicting technologies. Every moment of its consciousness is an act of translation of each of these cultures into the other. Today we live on the frontier between five centuries of mechanism and the new electronics, between the homogeneous and the simultaneous. It is painful but fruitful. The sixteenth century Renaissance was an age on the frontier between two thousand years of alphabetic and manuscript culture, on the one hand, and the new mechanism of repeatability and quantification, on the other.
– Marshall McLuhan
It is always an accident that saves us.
It is someone we have never seen.
– James Salter
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
– Richard Dawkins
Silence is only frightening to people
who are compulsively verbalizing.
– William S. Burroughs
As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is the resetting of a body of broken bones. Even saints cannot live with saints on this earth without some anguish. There are two things which men can do about the pain of disunion with other men. They can love or they can hate.
– Thomas Merton
Creation is a series of accidents to which one tries to give a meaning.
– Pierre Boulez
Reality is not composed of things or processes; it is not composed of atoms or quarks; it is not composed of wholes nor does it have any parts. Rather, it is composed of whole/parts, or holons.
– Ken Wilber
Books make homes feel intentional.
– Joan Didion
A home library is a steady comfort.
– Wendell Berry
In our times She and Her multivalent dimensions have rarely been understood, and frequently Her triplicity has been re-configured as three sages or kings; and in some religions She has been replaced with an all-male trinity. Yet many continued to seek Her.
– Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.
The greatest challenge in becoming a Dreamer is that you have to come back, again and again. Nostos, the homecoming, is always the hardest part of the soul’s odyssey. For a Dreamer, it is not a single story, with a thousand faces in different tellings. It is a thousand nights when you must find your way to a home in a body that is far from the home of the spirits.
– Robert Moss
Development can manifest through any center of intelligence. Cognitive complexity isn’t the only marker of advancement. Artists may weave paradigms visually, mystics through the heart, dancers through somatic intelligence. Father Thomas Keating’s luminous heart-presence demonstrates how the deepest structures can express through love rather than language, presence rather than philosophy.
– Alexander Love and Keith Martin-Smith
The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.
– Ray Bradbury
Only women have the
guts to give birth to men.
– Buddy Wakefield
The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
– Henry Beston
Internalized Oppression
What we miss when we call it ‘inner criticism’
by David Bedrick
There is something political embedded in the very language we use – and most of us never notice it.
When psychology identified and named “inner criticism,” it made an unspoken and consequential choice. It located the problem inside the person. It separated what lives in someone’s head from where that voice came from, who trained it, whose interests it serves, what caste driven system was being enforced. And in doing so, it did something that dominant cultures always do to the people they marginalize – it erased the source.
Internalized oppression is not inner criticism with a political footnote.
It is a different phenomenon, with different roots, different stakes, and a different kind of injury and healing arc. When we collapse it into the language of “the inner critic,” we don’t just miss something. We repeat the original injury – protect the perpetrator.
Most inner criticism is not the product of one event, one parent, one wound. For most people – and especially for people living in bodies or identities that the culture has targeted – what lives inside is an internalization of something much larger.
Think about it concretely. A father says to his son, “Don’t be such a baby. I’ll give you something to cry about.” Another father, different family, different city, delivers the same message in nearly the same tone. Different fathers. Same messaging.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s a culture. The father was a delivery system for something he himself received, from his father, from the men around him, from a world that had very specific ideas about what a boy was allowed to feel and say and be. The criticism that now lives inside the son is not only his. It belongs to a lineage of enforcement. And it’s carried by a wave of greater proportion and length.
W.E.B. Du Bois elucidates this a century ago in The Souls of Black Folk. He called it double consciousness – the experience of living with two ways of seeing yourself: one that is somewhat your own, and one that sees you through the lens of a culture that has decided you are less. He was never going to theorize about why that second consciousness might be protective or useful. He was watching children die on the vine because of it. He named it for what it was: the outer world’s violence, now living inside. Internalized racism.
That voice that says you’re not beautiful, not powerful, not worthy – it did not originate with you. It is the outer world wearing your own vocal cords, making you think it’s you, it’s true.
When we work with someone and ask only “what does your inner critic say?” without asking “what world did you grow up in?” – we are, without knowing it, practicing a kind of psychology that assumes a default. A white, Western, mainstream default. A psychology that developed in particular spaces, by people of particular backgrounds, theorizing about people they mostly knew.
A woman of color is not going to come up with a theory that says internalized oppression is protective. A person who has been heavily marginalized by a culture is not going to say that the voice that tells them they are disgusting and should disappear is trying to help them.
That theory could only emerge from a position of enough privilege to have never fully inhabited what that voice costs.
And when we employ that theory with someone whose inner violence has generations behind it, we gaslight them. Not from cruelty. From blindness.
The right question, every time, is: How does this voice function with an Iranian woman? As a Black person? As someone trans? As an Native American? As a person from a country that survived fascism? You will get educated. The person will understand something about the violence happening to them that they couldn’t see when the frame was “something is wrong with me” or simply “you have a huge inner critic.”
But here is what I want to say that I haven’t said clearly before. Because this is where it gets the healing implications grow large.
When we work with internalized oppression – when we really work with it, not just reframe it or soothe it, but genuinely unshame what was shamed into silence – the person does not become more comfortable in the culture.
They individuate. They become more themselves.
And these are not the same thing.
The inner policing – the voice that told them to be smaller, quieter, less threatening, more palatable, more assimilated – was doing the culture’s work from the inside. Once that voice loosens its grip, the person begins to express ways of thinking, feeling, and being that do not fit neatly into normative culture. They become, in the old sense of the word, disturbing. Not destructive. But disturbing to the status quo.
The policing does not stop. It moves. What was happening internally now begins to happen externally. The culture that once used the person’s own voice against them will start using other mechanisms: social friction, professional pressure, relational pushback, the slow exclusion of those who don’t conform, including the pathologizing by psychological thinking itself.
This is what I mean when I say that working with internalized oppression is a revolutionary act. I mean it literally. The person who comes out the other side is not more adjusted. They are more free. And freedom, in a culture that requires conformity, is not comfortable. It is costly. And it is necessary.
This changes what our work is for.
If we think we are helping someone become quieter or peaceful inside, so they can function better in the world as it is – that is one kind of therapy. It has its place.
But if we understand that the voice attacking them from the inside is the culture’s voice – rooted not just in their family but in generations of enforced belonging, of assimilation as survival – then we have to prepare them for what happens when that voice quiets. We have to say: as you stop being policed from the inside, you may start being policed from the outside. That is not a sign that the work failed. It may be the clearest sign that it is working.
You can’t read body positivity books and turn this off. These ideas have been embedded and rooted across generations, reinforced by families, educational systems, psychology itself, and the culture at large. The respect for the enormity of what people are up against — that is not pessimism. That is accuracy. And it is where the real unshaming work begins.
Not so you can fit in. So you can, as the poet Nikki Giovanni wrote, “turn yourself into yourself.”
A Glimpse
by Walt Whitman
A glimpse through an interstice caught,
Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room
around the stove late of a winter night,
and I unremark’d seated in a corner,
Of a youth who loves me and whom I love,
silently approaching and seating himself near,
that he may hold me by the hand,
A long while amid the noises of coming and going,
of drinking and oath and smutty jest,
There we two, content, happy in being together,
speaking little, perhaps not a word.
Everything is a footprint of Buddha, anything that goes on, whether we regard it as sublime or ridiculous.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Talk of mysteries! -Think of our life in nature,
-daily to be shown matter, to come in contact
with it, -rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks!
the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense!
Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?
– Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods
You were the one for skylights. I opposed
Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove
Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed,
Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof
Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling,
The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling.
Under there, it was all hutch and hatch.
The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.
But when the slates came off, extravagant
Sky entered and held surprise wide open.
For days I felt like an inhabitant
Of that house where the man sick of the palsy
Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven,
Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.
– Seamus Heaney, The Skylight
Center of your heart is the center of the Universe. Go to that center and radiate positive vibration for the well-being of the humanity.
– Amit Ray
What a degraded cosmos. What a case of something starting out nice and going bad.
– George Saunders
Accidents ambush the unsuspecting … just like love.
– Andrew Davidson
Therefore am I still / A lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains; and of all that we behold / From this green earth; of all the mighty world / Of eye and ear, both what they half create / And what perceive; well pleased to recognize / In nature and the language of the sense, / The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse/ The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being.
– William Wordsworth
At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique human being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is ever be put together a second time. He knows this, but hides it like an evil conscience—and why? From fear of his neighbor, who looks for the latest conventionalities in him, and is wrapped up
in them himself.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
“You know,” my aunt says, “I once had a terribly difficult period that lasted twenty-four years.” Wait. Twenty-four years? “And it was so important to realize that I didn’t know what was on the other side of the darkness. Every so often there was a sliver of light that shot the whole world through with mystery and wonder, and reminded me: I didn’t have all the information.”
– Dani Shapiro
Love isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.
– Erich Fromm
Our ability to sense what is happening to another person, an ability I have described as empathy, is based on the fact that our bodies resonate with other living bodies. If we don’t resonate with others, it is because we don’t resonate within ourselves.
– Alexander Lowen
How frequently has melancholy and even misanthropy taken possession of me, when the world has disgusted me, and friends have proven unkind. I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind.
– Mary Wollstonecraft
Progress is for the mind
and not for the Self.
The Self is ever perfect.
– Ramana Maharshi
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
– Erich Fromm
To understand that our real nature HAS NO NEEDS, is the only true renunciation.
– Ramesh Balsekar
Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
– Erich Fromm
Where there is silence,
one finds the anchor
of the universe.
– Lao Tzu
The real cause of alcoholism is the complete baffling sterility of existence as sold to you.
– Malcolm Lowry
A culture is strong
when people work
with each other,
for each other.
A culture is weak
when people work
against each other,
for themselves.
– Simon Sinek
The future, the worry, the regret, the anxiety – these are all mental events that do not have to be part of the difficulty of life; these can be transcended here and now.
– Eckhart Tolle
For anyone who wants to promote truth and enlightenment it is a necessity and even a duty to train himself in the art of expressing things clearly and unambiguously–even if this means giving up certain niceties of metaphor and clever double meanings.
– Karl Popper
Focus on loving the life you have now in the body you’ve got!
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
There will always be enemies. Time to stop being your own.
– Larry Kramer
I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent.
– Samuel Beckett
Civilization is a hopeless race
to discover remedies
for the evils it
produces.
– Rousseau
I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding.
– Epicurus
Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at anytime. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself.
– Carl Jung
Fire feeds on obstacles. A small fire is soon extinguished; a great fire consumes whatever is thrown into it and burns higher.
– Marcus Aurelius
A dying organism is often observed to be capable of extraordinary endurance and strength. … When any living organism is attacked, its whole function seems to aim toward reproduction.
– John Steinbeck
But my whole life has been a matter of fighting for one simple hour to do what I want to do. There was always something getting in the way of my getting to myself.
– Charles Bukowski
The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Concord, solidarity, and mutual help are the most important means of enabling animal species to survive.
– Christian Lous Lange
Always expecting this and expecting that. May I recommend serenity to you? A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment. Learn to be one with the joy of the moment.
– Douglas Adams
Meditation is an excellent way to overcome warfare in the world; our own warfare as well as greater warfare.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The summer before I started graduate school, my parents invited me to vacation with them to the Yucatan. I’m talking a long time ago. I’m sixty-seven now, and this was back in 1976, when I was all of twenty-one, too old to travel with parents, I thought. But out of nostalgia for our trips to Mexico as a child, I had said yes.
We traveled along the Mayan coast when it was still simply two-story hotels along virgin beaches. At a little beach stand of hammocks called Akumal, we stopped for a rest. My parents disappeared, but I was lured to the water’s edge. I’ve always been afraid of the ocean, yet here the shoreline was sheltered by a curve of land and palm trees, shallow enough for me to feel safe. I waded in and lay down on my back, the ridges on the ocean floor adjusting and accommodating the curves of my body, the waves barely lapping at my ear lobes. I shut my eyes.
Then something shifted. All at once I was no longer myself inside my own body. I knew I was connected to everything around me, and everything was connected to me. I was the waves, the ocean, the palm trees above me, the sky, everything little and large in the universe; we were all woven together as if created from one giant textile. For the first time, I had no fear of dying. I don’t know how long I was held in this state of joy, but it snapped like a bubble the moment my father shouted my name.
– Sandra Cisneros
The modern world has far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn. People forgot that the human soul can enjoy a thing most when there is time to think about it and be thankful for it. And by crowding things together they lost the sense of surprise; and surprise is the secret of joy.
– G.K. Chesterton
The truth of the world is exhausting.
– Don DeLillo
Future generations will look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad.
– Kurt Vonnegut
What relation has the poetry of joy, proclamation, affirmation, to politics?
I would answer: A poetry of anguish, a poetry of anger, of rage, a poetry that, from literal or deeply imagined experience, depicts and denounces perennial injustice and cruelty in their cur- rent forms, and in our peculiar time warns of the unprecedented perils that confront us, can be truly a high poetry, as well wrought as any other. It has the obvious functions of raising consciousness and articulating emotions for people who have not the gift of expression. But we need also the poetry of praise, of love for the world, the vision of the potential for good even in our species which has so messed up the rest of creation, so fouled its own nest. If we lose the sense of contrast, of the opposites to all the grime and gore, the torture, the banality of the computerized apocalypse, we lose the reason for trying to work for redemptive change. Not as an escape-not instead of but as well as developing our consciousness of what Man is doing to the world and how we as individuals are implicated—we need more than ever before to contemplate daily (and to make, if we are so fortunate as to be capable of it works of praise, works that by power of imagination put us in mind-re- mind us—of all that makes the earth’s survival, and our own lives, worth struggling for. To imagine goodness and beauty, to point them out as we perceive them in art, nature, or our fellows, and to create works that celebrate them—are essential incentives to finding a route out of our apparent impasse. A passionate love of life must be quickened if we are to find the energy to stop the accelerating tumble (like a fallen man rolling over and over down a mountain) towards annihilation. To sing awe-to breathe out praise and celebration-is as fundamental an impulse as to lament.
– Denise Levertov
We have said that the world is darkening. The essential episodes of this darkening are: the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the standardization of man, the pre-eminence of the mediocre
– Martin Heidegger
Challenges are here to awaken you and even if you’re awakening, life continuously gives you challenges and then the awakening accelerates and deepens.
– Eckhart Tolle
Loneliness will sit over our roofs with brooding wings.
– Bram Stoker
What the Hell is Love?
Does love radiate,
Bring us together,
Teach us why we live?
Does it tell the child
Why she must grow
And become the mother
She hates?
Does it tell the world
Why hunger and war
Are always here
Waiting like dogs
To eat our lives?
– john zbigniew guzlowski
It wasn’t that I wanted to be a writer; I just didn’t want to be stupid.
– David Carr
It is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.
– D.W. Winnicott
…there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.
– G.K. Chesterton
There is much that a man should not see, should not know, and if he should see it, it is better for him to die.
– Varlam Shalamov
The only way to build a new world is to do things completely different. That starts and ends with how you’re living.
– Nika Solé
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
When the old world has cracked completely open and no one knows what to do, many will be looking towards the leaders of the new.
– Nika Solé
Some seasons look like everything is coming crumbling down, when really that’s the divine removing what cannot sustain you in the form you’re stepping into.
– Nika Solé
Play, like dreams, serves the function of self-realization.
– Donald Woods Winnicott
Everyone is God speaking. Why not be polite and listen to Him?
– Hafiz
If tenderness approaches, run to it.
– Henri Cole
The way in which a poet draws from their past work the new intuitions of their consciousness resembles the way Münchhausen reached the moon: by cutting the rope beneath him in order to lengthen it above him.
– Cristina Campo
Our thoughts can have a profound effect in how we see life, show up in life, how we respond to others etc.
– Di Riseborough
I am not a spiritual teacher.
The spiritual teacher is not my identity.
My identity is consciousness.
I am consciousness.
– Eckhart Tolle
Let’s never forget: we solve most problems by not looking at them. But, rather, by opening ourselves to intuitions that have a far stronger laser than our minds.
– Pico Iyer
The antidote to the fear of losing the world is to let go of it. The antidote of loneliness is to embrace loneliness.
– James Hollis
Nothing even surprises or shocks me anymore. | am becoming very hard on the outside and even softer on the inside. I have to get through this. All of this and my own life, too.
– Keith Haring
…the effects of the Ring on Frodo are the most profound and powerful representation of addiction that has ever been written.
– Michael Drout
The capacity to still feel wonder is essential to the creative process.
– Donald Woods Winnicott
As to Poetry, I have altogether abandoned it, being convinced that I never had the essentials of poetic Genius, and that I mistook a strong desire for original power.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Everyone on earth feels a little tickling at the heels, the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike.
– Kafka
Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us?
– Audre Lorde
I wasn’t looking for a dream girl. I just wanted a woman who wasn’t a nightmare.
– Charles Bukowski
We need to find a good enough community, which is one where you can be dirty potatoes in a barrel.
– Koshin Paley Ellison
For the person who has learned to let go and let be, nothing can ever get in the way again.
– Meister Eckhart
everything
becomes beautiful
by becoming itself.
– @BashoSociety
Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
– Thomas Hardy
your hand pressing all that
riotous black sleep into
the quiet form of daylight
– Frank O’Hara
I don’t care how good your good old days was for you. They’re not good enough for me.
– Woody Guthrie
Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.
– Vaclav Havel
Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights.
– John Wooden
We meet no Stranger, but Ourself.
– Emily Dickinson
Plots, true or false, are necessary things, To raise up commonwealths and ruin kings.
– John Dryden
I wish I could forget everything, fall asleep, then wake up and start a new life.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Willingness to learn is important, but willingness to act on what you learn is critical.
– Kevin Kelly
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.
– Samuel Johnson
If you want to lead the orchestra…you have to turn away from the crowd.
– Sir Sedilla
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone.
– Thomas Hardy
Inner peace can be reached only when we practice forgiveness. Forgiveness is letting go of the past, and is therefore the means for correcting our misperceptions.
– Gerald Jampolsky
Anger could start a thing, but it took endurance and forbearance and patience to finish it.
– Nghi Vo
The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.
– Thomas Hardy
The Soul selects her own Society.
– Emily Dickinson
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.
– Vita Sackville-West
Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.
– Tom Robbins
Reality for us is a little like the ground for trapeze artists, who work with a net without knowing that beneath it the ground has disappeared. In this way, screens allowed the real to slip away. In this way, icons allowed God to slip quietly away.
– Jean Baudrillard
The world is a distraction. The Self is the only attraction worth following.
– Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are
An Atheist knows that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist knows that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated.
– Madelyn Murray O’Hair
A parasite is someone who has not wanted to love, but rather to live off love.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
– Albert Camus
Religions are psychotherapeutic systems in the truest sense of the word and on the grandest scale. They express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; From this universal foundation no human soul is cut off.
– CG Jung
I don’t write well when I’m really confident. I write best when I’m worried. Luckily, I have a reserve of doubt I can pull from.
– Andrew Sean Greer
… we invent our own beauty and our own paths and our own crooked, weird ways of doing things, but that they’re not nothing and they matter, too.
– Lidia Yuknavitch
The quality of our lives depends heavily on whether we assume a world of scarcity or a world of abundance. By embracing the scarcity assumption, we create the very scarcities we fear. We create scarcity by competing with others for resources as if we were stranded on the Sahara at the last oasis.
In the human world, abundance does not happen automatically. It is created when we have the sense to choose community, to come together to celebrate and share our common story. Whether the “scarce resource” is money or love or power or words, the true law of life is that we generate more of whatever seems scarce by trusting its supply and passing it around.
– Parker Palmer
People often say that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared to look, including inside ourselves.
– Salma Hayek
Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home — not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.
– Ellen Meloy
A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possible, and as cautiously, because it knows its girth and the tight confines of the china shop it’s blundering into. And it knows that no matter how well prepared it is — no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny — the place it is headed for is going to very different from the place it imagined. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one’s intent, equals the evil one will do.
– George Saunders
I look out into the water and up deep into the stars. I beg the sparkling lanterns of light to cure me of myself — my past and the kaleidoscope of mistakes, failures and wrong turns that have stacked unbearable regret upon my shoulders.
– Jennifer Elisabeth
The modern world gives proof at every point that it is far easier to destroy institutions than to create them.
– Roger Scruton
Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not – in his mind – undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.
– Herbert Marcuse
Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.
– Jean-Francois Lyotard
Not ’till June can the grass be said to be waving in the fields. When the frogs dream, and the grass waves, and the buttercups toss their heads, and the heat disposes to bathe in the ponds and streams, then is summer begun.
– Henry David Thoreau
In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.
– John Steinbeck
And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days.
– John Keats
Most of the young men of talent whom I have met in this country give one the impression of being somewhat demented. Why shouldn’t they? They are living amidst spiritual gorillas, living with food and drink maniacs, success-mongers, gadget innovators, publicity hounds.
God, if I were a young man today, if I were faced with a world such as we have created, I would blow my brains out.
– Henry Miller
Who are you? How many selves have you? And which of those selves do you
want to be?
Is Yale College going to educate the self that is in the dark of you, or Harvard
College?
The ideal self! Oh, but I have a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf or a coyote under the ideal windows. See his own red eyes in the dark? This is the self who is coming into his own.
– D.H. Lawrence
Be the love you never received. Be the acknowledgment you never got. Be the listener you always needed. Look at the younger versions of yourself within you and give yourself what it is you always needed. That is the first step of healing.
– Vienna Pharaon
If you want others to see you, you must see yourself.
– Vienna Pharaon
Projections change the world into the replica of one’s unknown face.
– Carl G. Jung
The more you believe in your thoughts as being true, the more you will become absorbed into the illusory world of the mind.
– Leonard Jacobson
[Grace] is unearned love—the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you.
– Anne Lamott
What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.
– Albert Pike
As humanity awakens, so too will our power to create true change on our planet.
– Eckhart Tolle
What the world needs more of, are the gentlemen. Men who take care. Who are intentional. Who move from the heart. We’ve heard enough from the harsh masculine. Turn up those who lead with love.
– Nika Solé
Most neurotic disturbances resist even the most strenuous efforts at control. Conscious efforts simply do not avail against a depression, against a deeply ingrained inhibition to work, or against consuming daydreams.
– Karen Horney
The universe
keeps erasing names,
yet memory
writes them back
in starlight.
– @BashoSociety
every horizon
was once a thought
taken seriously
– @BashoSociety
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.
– Harlan Ellison
the heart keeps
a secret garden
for dreams too beautiful to explain
– Aiko
some losses
never stop blooming;
all that remains
is love
in another form
– @BashoSociety
A writer should think ahead of his readers, but not for them.
– J. G. Fichte
Pippi represents my own childish longing to meet a person who has power but does not abuse it.
– Astrid Lindgren, Creator of Pippi Longstocking
At any moment countless thoughts, emotions, and reactions can run through your mind. If they don’t also run from your mouth, you are truly a wise person.
– Sakya Pandita
The future depends on ourselves, and we do not depend on any historical necessity.
– Karl Popper
Yes, we know [love] makes many readers uncomfortable. Some squirm in their seats with embarrassment and others smirk with superiority.
– Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth
We think too much. We just think too much. We think by thinking we’re going to solve any situation, we’re going to come to a resolution when we become enlightened. Not by thoughts, not by thinking, not by words, but by emptying yourself out completely.
– Robert Adams
There is one realization all men of good will share: in the end our works make us feel ashamed, we have to start out again, and each time the sacrifice has to be made anew.
– Hermann Hesse
love is courage
with flowers in its hair
– @BashoSociety
There is no good and no evil. In every concrete situation there is only the necessary and the unnecessary. The needful is right, the needless is wrong.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
I want to rest. I want to
breathe quietly again.
– Tennessee Williams
There is a wonderful peace in not publishing. It is peaceful. Quiet. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write only for myself and for my own pleasure.
– J.D. Salinger
We need only drop the effort to secure and solidify ourselves, and the awakened state is possible.
– Chögyam Trungpa
There’s a version of musical success almost nobody on the internet talks about anymore, and it’s the most common one in human history. You make music with your friends. You record your songs. You play the local bar on Friday and the church on Sunday and the festival in the park in July. You teach a kid down the street how to hold a guitar. You write something that gets sung at a wedding. You die having made beauty for the people who shared your life. That is success. That has always been success. Most musicians who have ever lived have lived exactly that life, and most of them were not unhappy about it.
– Joshua Heath Scott
I had long been running through the darkness, this way and that, guided by nothing but a vague yearning.
– Franz Kafka
On the piano, play mainly the things that you enjoy, even if your teacher doesn’t assign them to you. You learn so much from things you enjoy that you don’t even notice that time is passing.
– Albert Einstein
Everything is perfect, but there is a lot of room for improvement.
– Shunryu Suzuki
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void….
– Denise Levertov, Primary Wonder
Think often of how swiftly all things pass away and are no more – the works of Nature and the works of man. The substance of the Universe, matter, is like unto a river that flows on forever. All things are not only in a constant state of change, but they are the cause of constant and infinite change in other things.
Upon a narrow ledge thou standest! Behind thee, the bottomless abyss of the Past! In front of thee, the Future that will swallow up all things that are now! Over what things, then, in this present life wilt thou, O foolish man, be disquieted or exalted – making thyself wretched; seeing that they can vex thee only for a time – a brief, brief time!
– Marcus Aurelius
Good poets create a climate, or an environment, through their way of thinking and their experience of how they relate with the cosmos. It is a holistic situation. Poems are not just pieces of entertainment or something that would be good to read in the New York poetry recital. Those are incidental. The point is how a particular work of art is going to serve humanity and sentient beings who can read poetry and understand language.
– Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they’ve learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?
– Margaret Atwood
I am not light reading.
There is no pause button.
Absorb what you can.
Add it up later.
– Buddy Wakefield
Nobody likes anguish. But the idea that there’s some other way across the bridge from unreality to reality besides going across it is really an illusion.
- Charlotte Joko Beck
Writing is only one word at a time. It’s not a whole bunch of things happening at once. Various things can present themselves, but when you face the page, it’s a couple of words, and then a couple more words, and, if you’re lucky, a sentence or a paragraph.
– Jane Smiley
If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, l am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.
– Marjane Satrapi
There is a wonderful
thing that happens
when you stop caring
about working through
all your issues. You relax,
and some of them
quietly resolve
themselves.
– jeff brown
Don’t be impressed by what impresses. Instead pay attention to what will never be again.
The color of the sky from outside a downtown bar on a summer evening after saying goodbye to your own ghost. Or, that liquid sky, while working on a ship thousands of miles from land, thirty foot ocean waves hallucinating into nausea with the salt and the hot wind.
Be impressed by what is also close by but always different. The forever hills making you sweat going up, returning your breath as you go down. And those memories that you can not shake of times at the end of the days of labor, basil and tomatoes with garlic, crushed and sizzling in oil, in an old iron pan.
– steve s. saroff
You cannot go on for the rest of your life in the same old way. You must be willing to branch out into something new.
– Eileen Caddy
If you’re quiet long enough,
the whole of a life fits in a coconut
and you can whittle out the slivers
of its immaculate inner meat.
– Idra Novey
Poetry, comes from a place that no one commands and no one conquers.
– Leonard Cohen
may I be I is the only prayer—
not may I be great or good
or beautiful or wise or strong.
– E. E. Cummings
[Words] are a bridge that, paradoxically, breaks isolation and loneliness without eradicating it. It is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: “Oh, somebody else is lonely, too!”
It is the most fragile relationship in the world. Colette calls a poem “that secret, that dried rose, that scar, that sin.”
James Tate uses as an epigraph for one of his books a line by James Salter: “Here then, faintly discolored and liable to come apart if you touch it, is the corsage that I kept from the dance.”
In Hindu poetics, “a poem is recognised as such by those who have a heart.” If you do not have a heart, you cannot recognize a poem.
The heart is a small closed space, a symbol or souvenir of the inner life, the secret life, the silent life. It is liable to come apart if you touch it.
– Mary Ruefle
Treating differences as a threat enables one society to dehumanize the “other.” It allows them to rationalize using violence against the other and destroying their culture. It can create what some anthropologists call a “culture of conquest.” Sometimes a culture of conquest moves against people within its own society, and sometimes it moves against other nations.
– Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
When he thought of his youth he could scarcely believe that his memories had anything at all to do with the absurd life he was now living, an observation, he knew, that was far from original. Somehow, he had thought that his old age would miraculously produce finer, subtler notions of — what? — life? But he was no better, no cleverer, no more insightful than any shuffling old bastard in the street, absurdly bundled against the slightest breeze.
– Gilbert Sorrentino
Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.
– Rollo May
Zen deals with reality—the universe—as it is, and not as it is thought about and described. The heart of Zen is not an idea but an experience, and when that experience happens—and happens is just the right word—you are set free from ideas altogether. Certainly, you can still use them, but you no longer take them seriously.
– Alan Watts
It is possible that one day I will no longer love you, and this possibility cannot be taken away from love – it belongs to it. It is against this possibility, but also with it, that the promise is made.
– Jean Luc Nancy
The achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently from the world, and so we must live within it, with whatever compromises that might entail.
– Paul Murray
Depression is the inability to construct a future.
– Rollo May
It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.
– Rollo May
If your mind is happy then you are happy anywhere you go. When wisdom awakens within you, you will see Truth wherever you look. Truth is all there is. It’s like when you learned how to read, you can then read anywhere you go.
– Ajahn Chah
Meditation means
Remaining unrelated with your thought process.
Utterly unrelated, cool, calm.
Watching whatsoever is passing.
– Osho
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
– Rollo May
Leave the world alone, mentally. Physically you will gravitate to where you’re supposed to be and go through the experiences that you’re supposed to go through. Yet do not react to them, leave everything alone.
– Robert Adams
‘Friend,’ said the Spirit. ‘Could you, only for a moment, fix your mind on something not yourself?’
– C.S. Lewis
Now this modern refusal to undo what has been done is not only an intellectual fault; it is a moral fault also. It is not merely our mental inability to understand the mistake we have made. It is also our spiritual refusal to admit that we have made a mistake.
– G.K. Chesterton
Have you ever had a witch bloom like a highway on your mouth? and turn your breathing to her fancy? like a little car with blue headlights passing forever in a dream?
– Richard Brautigan
I knew that I was dying.
something in me said,
go ahead, die, sleep, become as
them, accept.
then something else in me said, no,
save the tiniest bit.
it needn’t be much,
just a spark.
a spark can set a whole forest on fire.
just a spark.
save it.
– Charles Bukowski
The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics.
– Lawrence M. Krauss
Logic on its death bed gave birth to mad riches.
– Georges Bataille, (tr. Robert Hurley)
One of the last great realizations is that life will not be what you dreamed.
– James Salter
I see you everywhere, in the stars,
in the river, to me you’re everything
that exists.
– Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little do what you can.
– Sydney Smith
Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.
– Francis Bacon
I learned to always take on things I’d never done before. Growth and comfort do not coexist.
– Virginia Rometty
…beauty is that quality which, next to money, is generally the most attractive to the worst kinds of men; and, therefore, it is likely to entail a great deal of trouble on the possessor.
– Anne Brontë
Pattern recognition, foresight, spiritual intelligence, and an integrated intuition are all qualities of a visionary.
– Nika Solé
Without self-realization you will be consumed by desires and fears, repeating themselves meaninglessly in endless suffering. Most of the people do not know that there can be an end to pain …
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
The world problems were created by numberless people like you, each full of his own desires and fears. Who can free you of your past, personal and social, except yourself? And how will you do it unless you see the urgent need of your being first free of cravings born of illusion?
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
A Christianity without empathy is nothing but an empty religion. The heart of the Gospel is to love your neighbor as yourself, to rejoice with those who rejoice, and to weep with those who weep.
– Henri Nouwen
—but never fear(my own, my beautiful
my blossoming)for also then’s until
luminous tendril of celestial wish
– E. E. Cummings
The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
first summer moon
nothing to prove
to the flowers
– @BashoSociety
Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.
– Ernest Hemingway
You are not the body nor the mind, not even their witness, but altogether beyond.
– Nisargadatta
When we meditate, we seem to have two selves. One is the flowing river of thoughts and feelings, and the other is the sun of awareness that shines on them.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
I have always had a thing about old photographs. The older pictures have an uncanny ability of suggesting that there is another world where the departed are. A black and white photograph is a document of an absence, and is almost curiously metaphysical. I have always hoarded them. They represent a sense of otherness. The figures in photographs have been muted, and they stare out at you as if they are asking for a chance to say something.
– W.G. Sebald
Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Thus since the advent of man, a new habitat has been opened up to evolving life, a habitat of thought: for this I shall use Teilhard de Chardin’s term, the noosphere, until someone invents something better. This covering of the earth’s sphericity with a thinking envelope, whose components are interacting with a steadily rising intensity, is now generating a powerful psycho-social pressure favoring a solution of least effort, by way of integration in a unitary organization of ideas and beliefs. But this will not happen automatically: it can only be achieved by a large-scale co-operative exercise of human reason and imagination.
– Julian Huxley
And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.
– Laini Taylor
The practice of writing is consoling. The sense that I have this one tool, this one weapon. I have this one thing on my side.
– C.D. Wright
I begin to understand that silence does not come because I seek to become silent. It comes when the mind sees the process of thought and its conditioning by the known. For this it must observe as one watches a beloved child, without comparing or condemning. One observes in order to understand. It is only when I know this conditioning that silence and tranquillity are sought not for security but for the freedom to receive the unknown, the truth. Then the mind becomes very quiet. This opens the door to a state that is reality, with immense possibilities. The mind is no longer an observer of the unknown. It is the unknown itself.
– Jeanne de Salzmann
The mind which is created quick to love, is responsive to everything that is pleasing, soon as by pleasure it is awakened into activity. Your apprehensive faculty draws an impression from a real object, and unfolds it within you, so that it makes the mind turn thereto. And if, being turned, it inclines towards it, that inclination is love; that is nature, which through pleasure is bound anew within you.
– Dante Alighieri
Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life. Happy was she who was in the room, who had the freedom of the city in everything that she touched or came in contact with, a fish swimming downstream, a leaf on a tree, a cloud in the sky, an image in a poem.
– Julio Cortazar
The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death.
– Benjamín Labatut
All of this that is happening to me, and happening to others about me, is it reality or is it fiction? May not all of it perhaps be a dream of God, or of whomever it may be, which will vanish as soon as He wakes? And therefore when we pray to Him, and cause canticles and hymns to rise to Him, is it not that we may lull Him to sleep, rocking the cradle of His dreams? Is not the whole liturgy, of all religions, only a way perhaps of soothing God in His dreams, so that He shall not wake and cease to dream us?
– Miguel de Unamuno
People do not realize that when they work, conscious forces come to their aid… Conscious forces are trying to help you. You are not alone.
– Christopher Fremantle
It is my belief that every one of us is a vessel that contains a very great energy which goes unattended. Right now as we sit here, there is something in us that is waiting to be called. And if we attend to it, if we acknowledge it, we will then be in touch with a force that can illuminate. It can transform and shape each one of us and can help to change the world. When one is still and one listens, then one begins to be in touch with this mysterious element which is within each one of us.
– William Segal
The bedrock of autocracy is laid with the abdication of vigilance.
– Sarah Kendzior
We have no right to tell our children how to build their future, since we have proved unfit to build our own…We cannot hope to build independent human characters if education is in the hands of politicians.
– Wilhelm Reich
The important thing about despair is never to give up, never wrap up and put away a sterile life, but somehow keep it open. Because you never can know what’s coming; never. That’s the great thing about life, the crucial thing to remember. You may beat your fists on a stone wall for years and years, and every consideration of common sense will say it’s hopeless, forget it, spare yourself; and then one day your bleeding hand will go through as if the wall were theatrical gauze; you’ll be in another realm where birds are singing and love is possible, and you’d have missed it if you’d given up, because it might be only that one day the wall was not stone.
– Allen Wheelis
As the creators of sophisticated technologies, we have made ourselves increasingly machine-like; robotic servants of institutional systems we have been conditioned to revere, whose purposes we neither understand nor control, and of which we are afraid to ask questions.
Our corporate-state world plunders, enslaves, controls and destroys us, all in the name of advancing our liberty and material well-being. Most of us are dominated by an unfocused fear of uncertainty, a longing for the security of emptiness.
– Butler Shaffer
A man who lives never asks what is living and he has no theories about living. It is only the half-alive who talk about the purpose of life.
– Krishnamurti
Has it ever occurred to you
that you are seeking God
with His eyes?
– Adyashanti
Science can suggest to the outer part of man what religion and philosophy can convey to his inner life.
– Manly P. Hall
For me, literature (like life) is always in dramatic beginning, it is not melancholic and closed in on itself, but tragic and open.
– Antonio Moresco
Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self-regard.
– Sigmund Freud
I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
– Hermann Hesse
We’re searching for permanent satisfaction with an impermanent mind in an impermanent world.
– @naval
Freedom is relative—the more you move away from your relatives, the more freedom you have!
– Oscar Wilde
The poet sees for a certainty how one not a great artist may be just as sacred and perfect as the greatest artist. . . . The power to destroy or remold is freely used by him but never the power of attack. . . . The presence of the greatest poet conquers.
– Walt Whitman
What’s true never leaves, what’s true either stays or returns in greater alignment.
– Carl Jung
There will come a day, if you persist, when your pen will move nimbly and you will feel elated, and exclaim to yourself: Now I know that I can write.
– Arnold Bennett
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.
– Aldous Huxley
Most parents don’t shape children. They accidentally clone their own unresolved pain.
– Gabor Maté
Find the mirror before the image has appeared: the potential to reflect is a kind of shining.
– Tarthang Tulku
We live in a world where everyone is aware of everything yet does nothing, where everyone appears to be in solidarity with everything yet doesn’t even budge from their place.
– Jean Baudrillard
broken wings
still knows the
old prayer of flight
– @BashoSociety
Spend the afternoon [or morning].
You can’t take it with you.
– Annie Dillard
morning light
the path appearing
as needed
– @BashoSociety
What you really want is a challenge at the edge of your capability.
– @naval
The only spiritual life you need is not to react.
– Robert Adams
a message waiting
for someone fluent
enough to read it softly
– @BashoSociety
Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it’s not much use.
– Ernest Hemingway
summer clouds
the sky making room
for wonder
– @BashoSociety
Anything in life that we don’t accept will simply make trouble for us until we make peace with it.
– Shakti Gawain
wild garden
nothing is arranged
yet all belongs
– @BashoSociety
We live in a world where we don’t see the ramifications of what we do to others because we don’t live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off. If we could see one another’s pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first
place.
– Trevor Noah
Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.
– Greg Mckeown
Still early.
Still blooming.
Still possible.
– @BashoSociety
One of the most wicked destructive forces, psychologically speaking, is unused creative power. If somebody has a creative gift and out of laziness, or for some other reason, doesn’t use it, that psychic energy turns into sheer poison. That’s why we often diagnose neuroses and psychotic diseases as not-lived higher possibilities.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
The defining characteristic of agnosticism is thus the divorce between Thought and Being and the consequent dominion of impersonal Knowledge.
– Tom Cheetham
This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!
This kindness is both senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind. When Christianity clothed it in the teachings of the Church Fathers, it began to fade; its kernel became a husk. It remains potent only while it is dumb and senseless, hidden in the living darkness of the human heart – before it becomes a tool or commodity in the hands of preachers, before its crude ore is forged into the gilt coins of holiness. It is as simple as life itself. Even the teachings of Jesus deprived it of its strength. But, as I lost faith in good, I began to lose faith even in kindness. It seemed as beautiful and powerless as dew. What use was it if it was not contagious?
How can one make a power of it without losing it, without turning it into a husk as the Church did? Kindness is powerful only while it is powerless. If Man tries to give it power, it dims, fades away, loses itself, vanishes.
Today I can see the true power of evil. The heavens are empty. Man is alone on Earth. How can the flame of evil be put out? With small drops of living dew, with human kind- ness? No, not even the waters of all the clouds and seas can extinguish that flame – let alone a handful of dew gathered.
– Vasily Grossman
Reality draws us to an unknown that we can
never really approach.
– Marcel Proust (tr. Justin O’Brien)
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
– T.S. Eliot
the heart
makes an altar
out of what remains
– @BashoSociety
The doctrine of fallibility should not be regarded as part of a pessimistic epistemology. This doctrine implies that we may seek for truth, for objective truth, though more often than not we may miss it by a wide margin.
And it implies that if we respect truth, we must search for it by persistently searching for our errors: by indefatigable rational criticism, and self-criticism.
– Karl Popper
Psycho-analytic treatment is a kind of after-education.
– Freud
What may be called the method of science consists in learning from our mistakes systematically first, by taking risks, by daring to make mistakes – that is, by boldly proposing new theories, and secondly, by searching systematically for the mistakes we have made – that is, by the critical discussion and the critical examination of our theories.
– Karl Popper
It seems to me that what is essential to “creative” or “inventive” thinking is a combination of intense interest in some problem (and thus a readiness to try again and again) with highly critical thinking; with a readiness to attack even those presuppositions which for less critical thought determine the limits of the range from which trials (conjectures) are selected; with an imaginative freedom that allows us to see so far unsuspected sources of error: possible prejudices in need of critical examination.
– Karl Popper
Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. But a great artist—a master—can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is…and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be…and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart…no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her.
– Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
I fear I will stand at her funeral / before anyone stands at mine.
– Shahd Alnaouq
If it’s not one of the best books you’ve ever read, don’t read it.
– @naval
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
The purpose of all knowledge, metaphysical as well as scientific, is to achieve what Epicurus called ataraxia, freedom from irrational fears and anxieties of all sorts—in brief, peace of mind.
– Epicurus
To love good and hate evil is the common feeling of all under heaven, yet people often lose this correctness. For the mind has things to which it is bound, and then cannot overcome itself.
– You Zuo
You do not belong to any caste like Brahmana, nor do you belong to any station in life. You are not the object of any sense. Unattached and formless, you are the witness of the entire universe. Know this, and be happy.
– Ashtavakra Gita
Practices are ineffective in dissipating the illusion
because all practices take place within the illusion.
– Wu Hsin
The more a theory forbids, the more it tells us.
– Karl Popper
The greatest enjoyment is experienced when there is no concern for its duration.
– Wu Hsin
The digitization of our known world grossly skews perception, reducing minds to mere digits. We truly are “just a number” to the faceless machine – and now even to ourselves. Any human statistic should first be imagined as individuals standing within a physical space. Such visualization poetically grounds us in reality, restoring scale to what engineered abstraction has habitually obscured.
– @buridansridge
You are in no way different from me, only you do not know it. You do not know what you are and therefore you imagine your self to be what you are not.
– Nisargadatta
If you live badly, no one will touch you; but if you begin to live well, there will immediately be afflictions & temptations.
– St Barsanuphius of Optima
If you have two religions in your land, the two will cut each other’s throats; but if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace.
– Voltaire
summer wind
lifting the feet
into the blue
– @BashoSociety
Most wisdom is embarrassingly simple.
Sleep more.
Move your body.
Tell the truth.
Leave what poisons you.
– Erin Perise
sepia evening
soft as the past
we forgive
– Akari
And so it may be said of man in general
that, befooled by hope, he dances into
the arms of death.
– Schopenhauer
If I say, therefore, that Shakespeare is the greatest of Intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare’s intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it than he himself is aware of. Novalis beautifully remarks of him, that those Dramas of his are Products of Nature too, deep as Nature herself. I find a great truth in this saying. Shakespeare’s Art is not Artifice; the noblest worth of it is not there by plan or pre-contrivance. It grows up from the deeps of Nature, through this noble sincere soul, who is a voice of Nature. The latest generations of men will find new meanings in Shakespeare, new elucidations of their own human being; ‘new harmonies with the infinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man.’ This well deserves meditating. It is Nature’s highest reward to a true simple great soul, that he get thus to be a part of herself. Such a man’s works, whatsoever he with utmost conscious exertion and forethought shall accomplish, grow up withal unconsciously, from the unknown deeps in him;—as the oak-tree grows from the Earth’s bosom, as the mountains and waters shape themselves; with a symmetry grounded on Nature’s own laws, conformable to all Truth whatsoever. How much in Shakespeare lies hid; his sorrows, his silent struggles known to himself; much that was not known at all, not speakable at all: like roots, like sap and forces working underground! Speech is great; but Silence is greater.
– Thomas Carlyle
I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakespeare’s faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet and arms. That is a capital error. Then again, we hear of a man’s ‘intellectual nature,’ and of his ‘moral nature,’ as if these again were divisible, and existed apart. Necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such forms of utterance; we must speak, I am aware, in that way, if we are to speak at all. But words ought not to harden into things for us. It seems to me, our apprehension of this matter is, for most part, radically falsified thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep forever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but names; that man’s spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know all of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what is this but another side of the one vital Force whereby he is and works? All that a man does is physiognomical of him. You may see how a man would fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, or want of courage, is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he has formed, no less than in the stroke he strikes. He is one; and preaches the same Self abroad in all these ways.
– Thomas Carlyle
Man…is a tame or civilized animal; never the less, he requires proper instruction and a fortunate nature, and then of all animals he becomes the most divine and most civilized; but if he be insufficiently or ill- educated he is the most savage of earthly creatures.
– Plato
For the sensitive poet, conscious of negations, nothing is more difficult than the affirmations of nobility and yet there is nothing that he requires of himself more persistently, since in them and in their kind, alone, are to be found those sanctions that are the reasons for his being and for that occasional ecstasy, or ecstatic freedom of the mind, which is his special privilege.
– Wallace Stevens
My friend…care for your psyche…know thyself, for once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves.
– Socrates
Properly speaking, the impulse to bury yourself in someone else’s life is not normal. The first time, there is perhaps an excuse. Afterward, you could be expected to know better.
– Stacy Schiff
bathed in light
we look to the moon
and become sky
– @BashoSociety
Life is not just eating, drinking, television, and cinema. The human mind must be creative, must be active.
– Lee Kuan Yew
Take care, when a democracy is ill, fascism comes to its bedside but it is not to inquire after its health.
– Albert Camus
I spoke yesterday in Paris about how socialist policy can enable us to overcome social deprivation and ecological crisis, by aligning investment and production with democratically determined objectives.
I noticed that some people assume socialism necessarily means 100% public ownership, but this is not the case. Yes, for many important reasons, we need public ownership of public services, utilities and the commanding heights, and yes we need a public finance system, industrial policy and credit guidance…
But there’s no reason we cannot have private firms producing consumer goods like watches, beer, etc – the key is that they should be democratically owned and managed, by workers or communities empowered to determine the objectives of investment and production.
We know that when people have democratic control over production they are more likely to align it with social and ecological needs.
Socialism is ultimately about economic democracy: extending the principle of democracy into the realm of production. Cooperatives are an important step in this direction.
– Jason Hickel
There are many lines that a thousand years of erudition have not succeeded in elucidating.
– William Hung, On The Translations of Tu Fu
summer rain
one lantern
holding the road
– Basho
Where’s my life going, and who’s taking it there? Why do I always do what I didn’t want to do? What destiny in me keeps on marching in the darkness? What part of me that I don’t know is my guide?
– Fernando Pessoa
For a long time, I have been sleeping.
Doing nothing, thinking nothing,
The world of the mind’s inaction
Was vividly serene, like the height
of cherry blossoms in full bloom.
– Ōte Takuji, Byōkanroku
I have found an endless
comfort in hiding.
– Sarah Jean Alexander
The worst thing that can happen to you is to cut yourself loose from people. And the best thing is to sort of vaccinate yourself right into the … big streams and blood of the people.
To feel like you know the best and the worst of folks that you see everywhere and never to feel weak, or lost, or even lonesome anywhere.
There is just one thing that can cut you to drifting from the people, and that’s any brand or style of greed.
There is just one way to save yourself, and that’s to get together and work and fight for everyone.
– Woody Guthrie
… ich lausche, ganz beseeltes Ohr, wieder auf die Melodien, die in mir sind, und mein beschwingtes Auge träumt wieder seine Bilder, die schöner sind als alle Wirklichkeit! Ich bin bei mir, bin meine Welt! Meine ganze, schöne Welt, voll unendlichen Wohllauts.
… I listen, with a soul full of soul, again to the melodies that are in me, and my sparkling eye again dreams its pictures, which are more beautiful than all reality!” I am with myself, my world, my whole, beautiful World, full of infinite goodness.
or
… I listen, very animated ear, back to the melodies that are in me, and my lively eye dreams again his pictures, which are more beautiful than all reality! I’m with me, I’m my world! My whole, beautiful world, full of infinite well-being.
– Georg Trakl
home isn’t the place
out there
a harbor of safety
in a raw and broken world
home is the place
in here
where hearth fires
are kindled by
wild inclusion
for every outlawed
part of self
every failure, every wound
and all the unclaimed genius
are knocking at the door
let them in
there is no homecoming
like a heart and a body
who have decided to be whole
– Angi Sullins
How vast the world
becomes when we listen
to each other.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged. One group can change their lot only by changing the system; the other hopes to be rewarded within the system.
– bell hooks
Life is so interwoven, so deeply unified, that there are no solitary, isolated events.
– Howard Thurman
Anyone who says ‘no one is doing anything’ is demonstrating they are not
where people are doing things.
– Rebecca Solnit
The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark.
– James Salter
we emptied the rivers
to hydrate data centers
while humanity died of thirst
– Karim Wafa-Al Hussaini
As the sun needs an eye in order to shine, and music an ear in order to sound, so the worth of every masterpiece in art and science is conditioned by the mind related and equal to it to which it speaks. Only such a mind possesses the incantation to arouse the spirits imprisoned in such a work and make them show themselves. The commonplace head stands before it as before a magic casket he cannot open, or before an instrument he cannot play and from which he can therefore summon only inchoate noises, however much he would like to deceive himself in the matter. A beautiful work requires a sensitive mind, a speculative work a thinking mind, in order really to exist and to live.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Now live forever and be a mirror of truth in your spirit.
– Hildegard Von Bingen
It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.
– John Green
Poetry seeks out the melody of nature amid the tumult of the dictionary.
– Boris Pasternak
Sometimes, she said, she could recognize a place just by the quality of the light. In Lisbon, the light at the end of spring leans madly over the houses, white and humid, and just a little bit salty. In Rio de Janeiro, in the season that the locals instinctively call ‘autumn’, and that the Europeans insist disdainfully is just a figment of their imagination, the light becomes gentler, like a shimmer of silk, sometimes accompanied by a humid grayness, which hangs over the streets, and then sinks down gently into the squares and gardens.
In the drenched land of the Pantanal in Mato Grosso, really early in the morning, the blue parrots cross the sky and they shake a clear, slow light from their wings, a light that little by little settles on the waters, grows and spreads and seems to sing.
In the forests of Taman Negara in Malaysia, the light is like a liquid, which sticks to your skin, and has a taste and a smell. It’s noisy in Goa, and harsh. In Berlin the sun is always laughing, at least during those moments when it manages to break through the clouds, like in those ecological stickers against nuclear power. Even in the most unlikely skies, Ângela Lúcia is able to discern shines that mustn’t be forgotten; until she visited Scandinavia she’d believed that in that part of the world during the winter months light was nothing but the figment of people’s imagination. But no, the clouds would occasionally light up with great flashes of hope. She said this, and stood up, adopting a dramatic pose: ‘And Egypt? In Cairo? Have you ever been to Cairo?… To the pyramids of Giza?…’ She lifted her hands and declaimed: ‘The light, majestic, falls; so potent, so alive, that it seems to settle on everything like a sort of luminous mist.
– José Eduardo Agualusa
Language signifies when instead of copying thought it lets itself be taken apart and put together again by thought. Language bears the sense of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body. The empirical use of already established language should be distinguished from its creative use. Empirical language can only be the result of creative language. Speech in the sense of empirical language – that is, the opportune recollection of a preestablished sign – is not speech in respect to an authentic language. It is… the worn coin placed silently in my hand.
True speech, on the contrary – speech which signifies, which finally renders ‘l’absente de tous’ present and frees the sense captive in the thing – is only silence in respect to empirical usage, for it does not go so far as to become a common noun. Language is oblique and autonomous, and if it sometimes signifies a thought or a thing directly, that is only a secondary power derived from its inner life. Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument… The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.
– John Berger
Words are a bridge that, paradoxically, breaks isolation and loneliness without eradicating it. It is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: “Oh, somebody else is lonely, too!”
It is the most fragile relationship in the world. Colette calls a poem “that secret, that dried rose, that scar, that sin.”
James Tate uses as an epigraph for one of his books a line by James Salter: “Here then, faintly discolored and liable to come apart if you touch it, is the corsage that I kept from the dance.”
In Hindu poetics, “a poem is recognized as such by those who have a heart.” If you do not have a heart, you cannot recognize a poem.
The heart is a small closed space, a symbol or souvenir of the inner life, the secret life, the silent life. It is liable to come apart if you touch it.”
– Mary Ruefle
Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.
– Guy Debord
The task of critical reflection is not merely to understand the various facts in their historical development… but also to see through the notion of fact itself, in its development and therefore in its relativity.
– Max Horkheimer
Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.
– Marshall McLuhan
I settled down to long sweet sleeps, day-long meditations in the house, writing, and long walks around beloved old Manhattan a half hour subway ride away. I roamed the streets, the bridges, Times Square, cafeterias, the waterfront, I looked up all my poet beatnik friends and roamed with them, I had love affairs with girls in the Village, I did everything with that great mad joy you get when you return to New York City.
– Jack Kerouac
The covers of this book are too far apart.
– Ambrose Bierce
Anyway, I am unfitted to hold down a job anywhere unless they were to pay me for getting angry at the world.
– Joseph Roth
You can’t rage against the machine
through rebellious consumption.
– David McRaney
I am now alone on earth, no longer having any brother, neighbor, friend, or society other than myself.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Wherever you go you will find a teaching…
– Shunryu Suzuki
The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.
– Martin Heidegger
All the brains in the world are
powerless against the sort of
stupidity that is in fashion.
– Jean de La Fontaine
We should not speak so that it is possible
for the audience to understand us, but
so that it is impossible for them to
misunderstand us.
– Quintilian
…the majority of men are suggestible, half-awake children, willing to surrender their will to anyone who speaks with a voice that is threatening or sweet enough to sway them. Indeed, he who has a conviction strong enough to withstand the opposition of the crowd is the exception rather than the rule, an exception often admired centuries later, mostly laughed at by his contemporaries.
– Erich Fromm
Assembled in a crowd, people lose
their powers of reasoning and their
capacity for moral choice.
– Aldous Huxley
I think of that feeling when you’re really full, or life is full and you can’t think of anything else that could fit in it, but then even more sky comes and more days and there is so much to remember and swallow.
– Ada Limón, Someplace like Montana
I want to live in a world
created by art, not just
decorated with it.
– BANKSY
‘The sea is never pregnant,’ a Wolof proverb goes: You can never predict when it will deliver. You can never predict what it will take, either. The immensity of the ocean has room for every variable – God, genie, climate change, tides – but it bestows and withholds its wealth, shelters and destroys at whim unfathomable to man. To live off the sea is to submit to its vagaries, to endure constantly the tension between desire and defeat.
– Anna Badkhen
Waking the Sleepers
Woe to the coward that ever he was born;
That did not draw the sword before he blew the horn
– Traditional Scots Rhyme
There are many stories concerning giants (or King Arthur and his knights) sleeping under a hill. The sleepers are really guardians who should not be woken until there is a great and national need. A fool-hardy man discovers their sleeping place, usually when seeking buried treasure that is supposed to be lying with the sleepers. Greed takes him in, but at sight of the awesome warriors and their gear, confusion grips him. He blows the horn to wake them but fails to draw the sword that lies nearby to indicate the real urgency of his need.
The sleepers stir and ask, “Is it time?”
The foolish man has nothing to say for himself, and is indicted with the rhyme above. He is never able to find the cavern again. In every country, there is a similar tale of sleepers whose purpose is to be the vanguard of defense in national crisis – ancestral or otherworldly sleepers who are contracted to be guardians and protectors of the land. They should not be woken unless we really need them.
Those who invoke the sleepers out of greed or curiosity get neither gold nor knowledge. This applies also to those whose spiritual practice is entirely self-serving, who undergo a kind of metaphysical assault course wherein all traditions are ransacked for their spiritual treasures in order to provide soul-credits at the finish line.
There are many aspects of ancient traditions that are in a period of sleep, retreat, or transformation – aspects that are best left sleeping now. Not only atavistic and barbarous practices that are no longer a part of our world, but also deep and abiding truths that will one day awaken and come to aid of those in centuries yet to dawn.
Who are the abiding sleepers in your tradition?
Meditate upon the purpose of their sleep.
– Caitlin Matthews
I want you to do this with me for one month. One month. Write 10 observations a week and by the end of four weeks, you will have an answer. Because when someone writes about the rustic gutter and the water pouring through it onto the muddy grass, the real pours into the room. And it’s thrilling. We’re all enlivened by it. We don’t have to find more than the rustic gutter and the muddy grass and the pouring cold water.
– Marie Howe
In surrendering our mass storytelling function to entities whose first priority is profit, we make a dangerous concession. “Tell us,” we say in effect, “as much truth as you can, while still making money.” This is not the same as asking: “Tell us the truth.” A culture’s ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.
– George Saunders
The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.
– Tobias Wolff
It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters your mind. It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid internalizing every feeling that enters your heart.
– Adam M. Grant
The ancient world was settled so sparsely that nature was not yet eclipsed by man. Nature hit you in the eye so plainly and grabbed you so fiercely and so tangibly by the scruff of the neck that perhaps it really was still full of gods.
– Boris Pasternak
No matter what happens in space, space can never be harmed or destroyed. Likewise, no matter what arises in the mind, no matter how violent or deluded it is, the nature of mind has always and will always be pure.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche
All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
– Jack Kerouac
“A weapon based on Time . . .” mused Viktor Mulciber. “Well, why not? The one force no one knows how to defeat, resist, or reverse. It kills all forms of life sooner or later. With a Time-weapon you could become the most feared person in history.”
“I’d rather be loved,” said Root.
Mulciber shrugged. “You’re young.”
– Thomas Pynchon
I think it’s very dangerous not to have hope. And if you can’t have hope, I think we need a little awe, or a little wonder, or at least a little curiosity.
– Ada Limón
I think you have to hope, and hope in this sense is not a prize or a gift, but something you earn through study, through resisting the ease of despair, and through digging tunnels, cutting windows, opening doors, or finding the people who do these things.
– Rebecca Solnit
But it’s important to emphasize that hope is only a beginning; it’s not a substitute for action, only a basis for it. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” said James Baldwin. Hope gets you there; work gets you through.
– Rebecca Solnit
We shall inflict hope
We shall inflict life
– Paul Eluard
In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.
We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.
What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul.
Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.
The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these – to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.
Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.
There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.
The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours. They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Everything in the world is transient, subject to the law of change. Therefore it cannot be real. What is real must be permanent, and that resides within you.
– Robert Adams
Capitalism is not freedom. Free is not having your life depend on money.
We are not free
We can’t afford housing
We can’t afford food
We can’t afford healthcare
We can’t afford childcare
We can’t afford senior care
Free is not being charged to survive.
– unknown
The first storm uproots you
Upon the invisible work
Under the earth
All springs.
– Óndra Łysohorsky (tr. Hugh McKinley)
Your mind is in every cell of your body.
– Candace Pert, Ph.D.
Being clever was, after all, my primary source of self-esteem. I’m a very sad person, in all senses of the word, but at least I was going to get into university.
– Alice Oseman
You pity me in exile? Well, then pity if you must,
but live – before your dear identity is lost in dust.
– Moondog (Louis Thomas Hardin)
Instead of resisting change, surrender. Let life be with you, not against you. If you think ‘My life will be upside down’ don’t worry. How do you know down is not better than upside?
– Shams of Tabrizi
He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
‘But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.’
– Virginia Woolf, The Waves
There are no uninterpreted ‘data’; there is nothing simply ‘given’ to us uninterpreted; nothing to be taken as a basis.
All our knowledge is interpretation in the light of our expectations, our theories, and is therefore hypothetical in some way or other.
– Karl Popper
I’ve always hated being asked if I’m OK. The available answers are either to lie and say I’m fine, or to massively and embarrassingly overshare.
– Alice Oseman
We’re so much wiser than our thoughts, if only we could find the way to see it.
– Pico Iyer
Oh, how we mortals wait and hope in vain!
At first how sweet the promise, then bitterly
it vanishes in shadow, smoke, and dream.
– Miguel de Cervantes
In the center of your divine self, all is good.
– Michael Logue
blue has a way
of making loneliness
look expansive
– @BashoSociety
Many people working their way up the ladder today have brilliant, perceptive, analytical minds, but because they enjoy criticizing others, they bring themselves perilously close to death.
– Confucius
The soul thrives
on questions,
not answers
– john zbigniew guzlowski
Your home is not only your safe haven, it is a reflection of your consciousness. Whatever is going on in your mind will be reflected in the conditions of your home. To achieve balance and clarity in your life, you must have a solid, clean foundation.
– Iyanla Vanzant
Don’t lose compassion to cynicism.
Falling into cynicism or victim-mentality is very hard to crawl out of.
Not falling into cynicism, life becomes much more playful naturally.
– Dungse Jampal Norbu
My doubts stand in a circle around every word.
– Kafka
God is really the Self. But in order to contact that Self, you have to have a lot of humility. To feel God’s grace means you have to surrender completely. You have to have the attitude, ‘I know nothing, you are everything.’ This kind of attitude will set you free.
– Robert Adams
Many people believe that material development is the real meaning of human life, but we can see that no matter how much material development there is in the world it never reduces human suffering and problems.
– Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
– Eckhart Tolle
If you knew then what you know now, you would have handled things differently. But you didn’t know then what you know now, so you did the best you could.
– Eleanor Brownn
Poem
I don’t want to be a seer
And fly through the universe
I just want to be a man
And stay here
And let my time be open
To your time as yours is
Open to mine
And the children grow up
Inside our lives
And the house goes through
Its karma
And friends and neighbors
Successes and failures
Birds and learning
All intertwine within
The daylight and the nighttime
And I look out to see
The same tree
Differently each time
– Aram Saroyan
He who has not given a poem the power of the inexpressible has not truly written a poem.
– Paul Celan
An ancient adept has said: “If the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.”…Everything depends on the man and little or nothing on the method. The method is merely the path, the direction taken by a man…
– CG Jung
Don’t judge the way other people
connect to God;
to each his own way his own prayer.
God doesn’t take us at our word.
He looks deep into our Hearts.
It’s not the ceremonies or rituals that
make a difference, but whether our
Hearts are sufficiently pure or not.
– Shams Tabrizi
Words are the syrup
We spill on the pancakes
Of our lives
– john zbigniew guzlowski
Ramana Maharshi said to me, “The only spiritual life you need is not to react.” To be calm is the greatest asset in the world. When you are perfectly calm, time stops. There is no time, karma stops, samskaras stop. Everything becomes null and void.
– Robert Adams
the mind analyses & remembers, the body experiences & feels, the soul observes & knows.
– Neale Donald Walsch
Monday, Wednesday and Friday
I’m an atheist.
Tuesday , Thursday, and Saturday
I’m an agnostic.
Sunday is my day of rest.
– Vladimir Konieczny
Poetry will examine the laws governing exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to language.
– Laura Kerr
Have you noticed? The stars
do not spell suffering;
there’s no prophecy in that disorder
of infinite dark, no script.
Misery is not your inheritance.
Your hurt in time will soften
– Leila Chatti
True!
Not everything lost
was ever held and
still, it aches.
– @BashoSociety
He was soon to have done with the calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him.
– Willa Cather
Sometimes peace
doesn’t arrive loudly.
It gathers at the horizon.
– @BashoSociety
Transcend the words, have the experience for yourself, and then there will be nothing to say. There is a time to read, but there is a time to stop, too. There’s a time to put the books aside and to intensely practice, giving your life over to the practice.
– Robert Adams
Alcohol is more of an introvert’s drug than people give it credit for. Basically every other drug requires access to dense and relatively insular social networks. Booze? Just go to the store man.
– @hellspatisserie
It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
On bodhisattva path, there is joy in bearing the burden of the commitment to liberate all beings.
– Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyal
Poets are possibility engines.
– Laura Kerr
to be misread by someone who once knew you well is its own kind of burial.
– @artemisgrl
rain in the trees
the whole sky
learning to whisper
– @BashoSociety
To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Controlling the mind doesn’t
Take one to freedom.
Controlling the mind
Adds another link
To one’s shackles.
– Wu Hsin
The fact is this: the lonely man, who is also the tragic man, is invariably the man who loves life dearly-which is to say, the joyful man. In these statements there is no paradox whatever. The one condition implies the other, and makes it necessary. The essence of human tragedy is in loneliness, not in conflict, no matter what the arguments of the theater may assert.
– Thomas Wolfe
Naysayers who gripe that poets are “doing it wrong” cannot admit to a divergent plurality of aesthetic attitudes (testable by posterity itself); instead, such naysayers insist that poets must “do it right—or else” (readying threats to the existence of such poets).
– Christian Bok
Nirvana is how we experience life when we know what we are. This knowing is not an ordinary knowing. It is not a conceptual knowing.
– Ken McLeod
There is no deepening;
you are deep enough already.
There is no completing;
you are already complete.
There is no freeing from;
you are already free.
You don’t have to try to be what you already are.
– Wu Hsin
Ignoring the mind is a beautiful sadhana (practice). This is what many of the sages did. They ignored the mind out of existence. It loses its influence and its potency when it is ignored.
– Mooji
“It’s not that man chooses the gods that he worships,” the young Leonard Cohen, only thirty-one, observed. “It’s the gods who choose him.”
– Pico Iyer
The one thing our unconscious will not tolerate is evasion of responsibility. The unconscious pushes us into one suffering after another until we are finally willing to wake up, see that it is we who are choosing these impossible paths and take responsibility.
– Robert A. Johnson
the One remains, the many change and pass.
– percy bysshe shelley
Every day God asks, Cruelty again?
– Nora Hikari
You’re a defiant act of creation. You’re a
whole solar system pretending to be
a person.
– Elisabeth Hewer
Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld,
mine is by writing.
– Franz Kafka
Some light
doesn’t arrive.
It returns.
– @BashoSociety
Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.
– Haruki Murakami
I am both worse and better than
your thought.
– Sylvia Plath
The saddest people I’ve ever met in life are
the ones who don’t care deeply about
anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go
hand in hand, and without them, any
happiness is only temporary, because there’s
nothing to make it last.
– Nicholas Sparks
Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You
have no security unless you can live bravely,
excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a
challenge instead of competence.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
And when I turned to
face grief, I saw that it
was just love in a heavy
coat.
– Shannon Barry
I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.
– Arthur Miller
Out of love for you, I
have forgiven the world.
– Alexandre Dumas
There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.
– Thomas Jefferson
sometimes the heart
keeps watering
plastic flowers
– @BashoSociety
coffee first
then courage
then the world
– Akari
And you,
you scare people
because you are whole
all by yourself.
– Lauren Alex Hooper
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
– James Baldwin
May today give you
small wonders, quiet light,
and no reason to rush.
– @BashoSociety
Yes! Joy is not a rescue, it is a decision.
– @BashoSociety
You’re not a moron. You’re only a case of arrested development.
– Ernest Hemingway
When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
– Hannah Arendt
I found that I was a failure as an atheist, too, for I could not cure myself of praying to a God I no longer believed in.
– Joanna Macy
And the writing is still: to you, with you, about you, because of you and for you.
– Nizar Qabbani
Worries: a mental illness characteristic of the age of capitalism. Spiritual (not material) hopelessness in poverty and in vagrant, mendicant monkhood… ‘Worries’ are the index of the sense of guilt induced by a despair that is communal, not individual and material, in origin.
– Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion
It’s quiet, it’s quiet, it’s quiet And silent I stand in a dream There’s no you, ever, anywhere… lonely, silent star gleam.
– Penyo Penev, (tr. Christopher Buxton)
what mental illness is it when you get something you really love & then are compelled by a terrifying force to get five more in every version & color?
– dr. alicia andrzejewski
May Day
I can’t understand
how to outfit myself in the gloaming
and go around acting
unaltered by air
over the mountain the spreading
comes and the drought
may I be made brave
by those who are braver
the dead and the young
no longer and not yet
– Alli Warren
Good God, how old I have become! Everything bores me, I don’t feel anything, even about myself. . . I am prepared, within the limits of my powers, to bear this sad burden of existence.
– Leo Tolstoy
If you hate a specific exercise, you are attributing too much importance to it.
Why would you connect emotion to motion?
This is important because it determines not the WHY or the WHAT but the HOW.
Which will always influence the quality of the pattern you work on.
– @moveorperish
stars appeared
like secrets
returning home
– Aiko
What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is?
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Pan, who and what art thou?” he cried huskily.
“I’m youth, I’m joy,” Peter answered at a venture, “I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.”
– J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
I always have such need to merely talk to you. Even when I have nothing to talk about – with you I just seem to go right ahead and sort of invent it. I invent
it for you.
– Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville West
even wisdom
gets misquoted
– @BashoSociety
To be able to care about the world as it will be when we are dead is one of the signs of a civilized mind.
– Bertrand Russell
I’m simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
– Emil Cioran
also i’ve realized that you should take maximum one or two things completely, insanely seriously and be lighthearted about everything else, let things roll off your back.
– @shesarealperson
I am the poet of the poor, because I was poor when I loved; since I could not give gifts, I gave words.
– Ovid
And yet, one summer, we were
queens – but you – were crowned in June
– Emily Dickinson
You don’t necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they’re poets.
– Bob Dylan
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
– Albert Einstein
summer noon
one dragonfly
rules the pond
– Akari
election crisis—
the chess king hides behind
the pawns
– Ibrahim Nureni
After a while you could get used to anything.
– Albert Camus
With everything I write, there’s a feeling of having finally told the world what I really think, when I’d been hoping never to do that.
– Jamaica Kincaid
After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning, it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
– Mark Twain, The Diaries of Adam & Eve
To think is to confine yourself to a
single thought that one day stands
still like a star in the world’s sky.
– Martin Heidegger
UNTITLED
The essence of human being is trying
something not knowing
if it’s going to work. Go
viral, glass careful, names
filling up the hat. My whisper
has a stunt double that’s more
of a scream. I accrue
belief like a life
boat taking on water
– Tom Snarsky
True philosophy must spring from the intuitive perception of the world. However much the head must stay supreme, it must not proceed so cold-bloodedly that in the end the whole person, with heart and head, is not moved to action and shaken to the core.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Religions are true for ordinary people, false for intellectuals, and useful for those in power.
– Seneca
Everybody is identical in their unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
– David Foster Wallace
We spent decades turning literature into sociology and now we’re shocked that students prefer activism to reading.
– Liza Libes
Don’t think, but look!
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Hurt people hurt others, but luckily, healed people heal others. Safe people, shelter others. Free spirits, free others. Enlightened people, illuminate others.
– unknown
To save the West from relativism, we need to go back to the exact Enlightenment values that the ancien régime denounced as woke.
– Jonathan Fine
We simply do not know what will be required by the job market in the coming decades. What matters most is the capacity to remain flexible, and to have a wide range of skills – intellectual, physical and social.
– Yuval Noah Harari
Books are not garbage.
I wonder why the world
Throws them away.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
A lot of people think that omniscience is like knowing everything that’s in the Encyclopædia Britannica. That’s not omniscience, that’s intellectual elephantiasis.
– Alan Watts
If you meditate for a few minutes every day and live in harmony, you will carry your own portable paradise within you wherever you go.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
There is no better synonym for “rational” than “critical”. (Belief, of course, is never rational: it is rational to suspend belief.)
– Karl Popper
Silence is the great portal
The doorless door
That opens into everything
The deeper into silence you go
The more all boundaries dissolve
Until there is nothing left
Which is everything.
– @KavijiPoet
Things were somehow so good
that they were in danger of
becoming very bad because
what is fully mature is very
close to rotting.
– Clarice Lispector
What a glorious gift is not imagination, and what pleasure it is capable of granting!
– Thomas Mann
Bring a divine, sensual, infinite woman into it and it’s gonna increase every time. Whatever it is.
– Nika Solé
Abandon all hindrances, and give up your time to attaining a sound mind.
– Seneca
Being a writer doesn’t just mean writing. It means finishing.
– Andrew Peterson
Sunset
by Eric Colburn
The sky above the soccer game
transcended all of us.
The heavens were aflood with flame.
But later, on the bus,
in the window of the bus,
we saw, not sky, not flame,
but only a reflection —us,
in a different game.
A privacy of glorious light is thine;
Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine;
Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!
– William Wordsworth, To the Skylark
Limitless are the practices of the bodhisattva; but first of all you should engage in the practice of purifying the mind.
– Shantideva
The fictitious beyond, created by thought out of fear, is really the demand for more of the same in modified form. This demand for repetition of the same thing over and over again is the demand for permanence.
– U.G. Krishnamurti
We’re living in the darkest moment that I’ve experienced on this planet. Whoever thought America could turn like this? Whoever thought that a maniac like this would be President of the United States … How is this even possible? Because we went to sleep.
– Richard Gere
The view was grand.
So was the choice
to stand inside it.
– @BashoSociety
CROSSING THE BORDER
Senescence begins
And middle age ends
The day your descendants
Outnumber your friends.
– Ogden Nash
OLD MEN People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when …
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.
– Ogden Nash
The study of consciousness and culture is vastly superior to the mundane and banal “facts” of history.
– Paul Krause
A calm and cheerful temperament, which comes from perfect health and an excellent constitution, a clear, lively, and penetrating intellect, a moderate and gentle will, and therefore a good conscience—these are privileges which no rank or wealth can make up for.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Society would be better off without modern mental health system. Just eliminating DSM classifications & drug treatments would decrease prevalence of mental illness.
– Dr. Roger McFillin
If you keep your hands off them, your characters are bound to demonstrate the workings of the world in ways that take you by surprise.
– Deborah Eisenberg
People will judge you because your whole life does not wrap around money, and you’re just gonna have to let them do that while you remain free.
– Nika Solé
Perhaps grief was the recognition of having run out of illusions.
– Yiyun Li
Boomers are the first generation with a shit ton of life experience & no wisdom at all.
– Tim Dillon
black coffee
white sugar
I stir the world into oneness
– Adjei Agyei-Baah
By making art in the face of chaos and uncertainty, we’re saying, art still matters. And we’re helping sustain a world where art does still matter.
– Allison K Williams
When the eye is unobstructed, the result is sight. When the ear is unobstructed, the result is hearing. When the mind is unobstructed the result is truth. When the heart is unobstructed, the result is joy and love.
– Anthony DeMello
Read a real book.
Social media rots your brain and spoils your writing.
So do most self-help and business books.
Pick up a classic novel instead.
You’ll write better.
– James Carran
It doesn’t take much to convince yourself that you’re doing okay, just some discretionary income and a regularity to your days.
– Ling Ma, Bliss Montage
Those obstinate in deeds are in greater danger than those obstinate in words, for there is greater risk in doing than in saying.
– Baltasar Gracián
It is easy to give in to your fear but it takes eternal endurance to develop your faith.
– Lailah Gifty Akita
Luckily, I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse because I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.
– Leonora Carrington
Once, years ago, I emerged from the woods in the early morning at the end of a walk and – it was the most casual of moments – as I stepped from under the trees into the mild, pouring-down sunlight I experienced a sudden impact, a seizure of happiness. It was not the drowning sort of happiness, rather the floating sort.
I made no struggle toward it; it was given. Time seemed to vanish. Urgency vanished. Any important difference between myself and all other things vanished. I knew that I belonged to the world, and felt comfortably my own containment in the totality.
I did not feel that I understood any mystery, not at all; rather that I could be happy and feel blessed within the perplexity – the summer morning, its gentleness, the sense of the great work being done through the grass where I stood.
As I say, it was the most casual of moments, not mystical as the word is usually meant, for there was no vision, or anything extraordinary at all, but only a sudden awareness of the citizenry of all things within one world: leaves, dust, thrushes and finches, men and women. And yet it was a moment I have never forgotten, and upon which I have based many decisions in the years since.
– Mary Oliver
…there is cloud on blue ground up there, & wind which the eye loves so deeply it would spill itself out and liquefy to pay for it—
– Jorie Graham
the grace that I feel at the center of my palms as if my hands were leaves and light were coursing through some hole in their grasp, the machine of time coming in, as chlorophyll could—I was not yet so tired of believing— I was still in the very beginning of being human, accompanied by my prayer that you be spared from anything at all, from everything, and of course also its opposite, that everything happen to you in large sheets of experience as I tug back the chain-ends and push you out.
– Jorie Graham
The inner world can only be experienced, not described.
– Franz Kafka
Wend your way through the corridors of time,
not as passengers on a free ride
watching the seasons pass;
Rather, steady mindfulness quickens
the spirit, awakens the soul,
and opens the Inner Gate that leads
to the great Work so needed in these times.
Discover the joy of helping humanity
to reverence all Creation,
of offering your healing hands
in the restoration of planet Earth.
Discernment and discipline will cut through
impediments to action.
– Nan Merrill
The universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny. The world globes itself in a drop of dew.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life in our universe is a flash in the pan, a few moments in the vast unfolding of time and space in the cosmos…A realization of the scarcity of life makes me feel some ineffable connection to other living things.
– Alan Lightman
Intuition appears to be something that, while inevitably fallible, is often more reliable, much quicker, and capable of taking into account many more factors, than explicit reasoning, including factors of which we may not even be consciously aware. It also underlies motor, cognitive and social skills, and is the ground of the excellence of the expert. The attempt to replace it with rules and procedures is a typical left hemisphere response to something it does not understand – a response that is, alas, powerfully destructive. We inhabit a world in which reason is needed more than ever before, yet in which reason is so narrowly conceived that it drives out true understanding. For that we would have had to learn respect for the power of intuition, not as opposed to reason, but as both grounding it, and the means for it to fulfill its potential in making judgments in life.
– Iain McGilchrist
The body is itself a kind of place – not a solid object – but a terrain through which things pass, and in which they sometimes settle and sediment.
Sometimes they are transformed by the passage. And sometimes they reshape the doorway itself.
– David Abram
But during the longest period of the human past nothing was more terrible than to feel that one stood by oneself. To be alone, to experience things by oneself, neither to obey nor to rule, to be an individual – that was not a pleasure but a punishment; one was sentenced to ‘individuality.’ Freedom of thought was considered discomfort itself. While we experience law and submission as compulsion and loss, it was egoism that was formerly experienced as something painful and as real misery.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
When we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.
– Audre Lorde
There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self. Uniform development exists, at most, at the beginning; later, everything points toward the center.
– C.G. Jung
The highest quality of an individual is to be human. The phrase “to be human” means to follow life wherever it may lead, up and down, down and up, from the bottom of the world to the top, from darkness into light, through each degree of good and evil. As the circle of knowledge widens, life grows more beautiful and heroic. We are part of everything—men, books, cities, railroads—all made from the same atoms and molecules, all living together and dying together, joined into one imperishable unity that can never be divided.
– George Whitman
In surrendering our mass storytelling function to entities whose first priority is profit, we make a dangerous concession. “Tell us,” we say in effect, “as much truth as you can, while still making money.” This is not the same as asking: “Tell us the truth.” A culture’s ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.
– George Saunders
To move / cleanly. / Needing to be / nowhere else.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that were once in books. The same things could be in the ‘parlour families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
– Ray Bradbury
Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: “Things must change — no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.” Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behavior. They learn whom to kill and how to kill and how to do it together. This is the much talked about Gleichschaltung — the coordination process. You are coordinated not with the powers that be, but with your neighbor — coordinated with the majority. But instead of communicating with the other you are now glued to him. And you feel of course marvelous. Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another.
– Hannah Arendt
I like unformed characters. This may be because, no matter how old I get, I am still unformed myself.
– Akira Kurosawa
I suppose all of my films have a common theme. If I think about it, though, the only theme I can think of is really a question: Why can’t people be happier together?
– Akira Kurosawa
Thus human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.
– Bill McKibben
Keep the doors open,
See how nature makes you smile,
Certainly winds would enter,
Into your heart will bestow pleasure
– Saddik Ahmed
No matter what I say,
what I believe, and what I do,
I am bankrupt without love.
– Corinthians 13.3b
…the worst of all possible misunderstandings would occur if psychology should be influenced to model itself after a physics which is not there any more, which has been quite outdated.
– J. Robert Oppenheimer
Being fully in the stillness was not about self-isolation or self-help but about standing in radical relationship with all that stillness holds—all the grief, all the loss, all the loneliness—and standing with it, rather than rushing to reason it away, arrest it, or lock it in a box.
– Jasmine Syedullah
Once you start to speak of things that are precious, you are immediately anxious about how people will react to what you have said, and you want to protect these things, to defend them against incomprehension.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
It can feel foolish to pause to marvel at the stars when the world is burning. Or to find the world beautiful when you’ve known it to betray you.
But wonder is a liberation practice. A reminder that we contain more than tragedy. Beauty is our origin and our anchor.
– Cole Arthur Reilly
If we had no egoism, then we should be like Angels, who are not capable of transformation. They can’t be transformed because there is no denying principle. It is the same way with suffering. Without suffering there is no possibility of transformation. But the way in which suffering serves us is not just by giving us something to overcome, to be patient with, to be good about. The real thing about suffering is that it enables an action to proceed in the depths in us, it enables us to get below the surface, to get below even the ordinary depths, to find the place where there is no suffering. In everyone there is the place that is free from suffering. This place we have to find.
The way to it is through learning how to suffer and accept the action of suffering in ourselves; accepting it to the point where it is complete when the breakthrough comes, and we arrive at that place in us which is free. So it says ‘If you knew how to suffer, then you would know how not to suffer’. Not-suffering does not mean being without any enemies or harmful actions. Not-suffering means to have entered into a particular place which is the sacred place inside us where there is no suffering, because it is a place of God. To find a way to that place is one of the great things. It is there that we come to the threshold of unity. So that saying is a good saying.
– JG Bennett
Hildegard says that no warmth is lost in the Universe. My phrase is that no beauty is lost in the Universe. If I get it right, Einstein is saying that no energy is lost in the Universe. So I think the gathering up of our awe and wonder and suffering and creativity and compassion, all this gathering up, this volcano, this spewing out, goes out there just like the nutrients do in a volcano. Spiritual nutrients. They are not material so they can go very far. In this context we are beyond space and time where our prayers gather the beauty, the warmth, the compassion, the suffering, the awe, and the creativity of our ancestors. And they fertilize that which is to come.
– Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake
Ram Dass once said, “I’ve been asked many times whether this is the aquarian age and it’s all just beginning, or if this is armageddon and this is the end, and I have to admit I don’t know”. He went on to say, “Whichever way it goes, my work is the same. My work is to quiet my mind and open my heart and relieve suffering wherever I find it”.
You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It’s invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.
– Louise Erdrich
Nothing I force myself to write about ever turns out well, and so I’ve learned to wait for the voice, the incident, the image that reverberates.
– Louise Erdrich
I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Science is magic that works.
– Kurt Vonnegut
I do not think I have it in me
anymore to struggle and fight and
suffer, I want to be quiet and happy.
– Martha Gellhorn
All history should be, I suggest, a history of problem situations.
– Karl Popper
And I do love you. And you are
awfully interesting. And I want
to protect you from all pains and terrors.
– Iris Murdoch, The Philosopher’s Pupil
If in life we are surrounded by death, then in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Criticism, I said, is an attempt to find the weak spots in a theory.
– Karl Popper
Hell itself may be contained within the compass of a spark.
– HD Thoreau
The first archetypal figure we meet, according to Jung, is no shining angel of light, but the shadow. The paradox of Jung’s psychology is that to get to the source of light, the Self, we have to go via the darkness of the unconscious with its repressed instincts and drives.
– David Tacey
What you’re chasing is a mirror of what you already are. Want more love? Be love. Want peace? Be still. The Universe responds to your energy, not your longing.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
A good phrase seems to me to have an independent existence. Yet I think it is likely that the best are made in solitude.
– Virginia Woolf
The pen waits softly,
like rain behind the morning,
ready to become.
– @BashoSociety
What, through you, wants to exist?
– Marina Tsvetaeva
I ask for tears
Do not send me moon-hard madness
– Jonathan Kariara
The economy has ceased hiding itself behind mystifying words like God, devil, fatality, grace, damnation, nature, progress, duty, and necessity, with which, over the years, it gave itself an inescapable credibility. It no longer troubles itself with the frilly liberals, it is no longer bothered by the leninists in blue jeans — it laughs at the idea of taking any great leaps while wearing fascist jackboots or socialist bootees. It’s so simple and obvious it stands naked, and its omnipresence makes it familiar and familial.
Reduced to the final necessity of survival, the economy brings together all its past lies; the lie that there is no hope for humanity’s survival outside of the economy.
– Raoul Vaneigem
The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms.
– Bruno Latour
I am smitten by a relentlessly exacting idea: that ‘the body’ – yours, mine, material bodies of all kinds – is undecided, unfinished, and ultimately speculative. It is not that the body is not yet fully known or that it is merely awaiting the intrepid and totalizing sweep of the morphological glance to finally map out its strange geography. It is that the body is not simply mysterious, progressively mappable, or subject to the logics of discovery.
When Spinoza asked the question, “what can a body do?”, he was not begging for more data about the body. He was disrupting the disciplinary gestures that firmly locate the body as already known. He was releasing the body from its fixity. From the passivity of being the inert recipient of visual commitments to clarity.
Over the years, I have come to think of clarity as no less burdened by the political than other forms of engagement with the world. Clarity does not bring us closer to the world. Clarity makes worlds. And every making is an obscuration and obviation of other worlds. My autistic son, Kyah, teaches me to perform something I call “looking-away-at”, which is a vital poetics of thinking bodies as lines instead of dots. As speculative instead of as clear and final.
As such, I think that – in these moments of pandemics and surveillance technologies and wellness tracking and identitarian shibboleths and health crises and traumas and genocides that vex and maim and taint and mark and name bodies everywhere – we must take material bodies seriously. But to take the body seriously, we cannot afford to look squarely at it. We must look beside it. Not merely at the morphological but at the paramorphological.
I name “paramorphology” as the practice of tracing the somatic choreography of bodies as material speculation. Something about seeing the body as a dance, as movement, as speculation, as lines not dots, allows the most beautiful field of art forms and responsibilities to blossom at the end of the world.
– Báyò Akomolafe
You need to feel that there is room for sacredness, for further evolution, in spite of your little ego.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground,
bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found
people simple enough to believe him, was the real
founder of civil society.
– JJ Rousseau
I sometimes forget
that I was created for Joy
My mind is too busy
My heart, too heavy
For me to remember
That I have been called to dance
The sacred dance of life
I was created to smile
To love
To be lifted up
And to lift others up
O’ Sacred One
Untangle my feet
From all that ensnares
Free my soul
That we might
Dance
And that our dancing
Might be contagious…
– Hafiz
Were you listening to me, Neo? Or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?
– The Matrix
Silence is an attribute of pure existence. This is why meditation is effortless.
– John Butler
Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness.
– Heinrich von Kleist
There is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate monument – a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card.
– G.K. Chesterton
The older I get, the clearer it becomes: people don’t disappear into gardening, baking, books, and long walks because life got boring. They do it because peace became priceless.
– Mike Bales
Because I feel that,
in the Heavens above,
The angels,
whispering to one another,
Can find, among their burning
terms of love, None so
devotional as that of Mother.
– Edgar Allan Poe
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
No time to stand beneath the boughs And
stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass No
time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full
of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance, And
watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can Enrich
that smile her eyes began.
A poor life it, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
– W. H. Davies, Leisure
There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, nαked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don’t expect you to save the world, I do think it’s not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary, and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair, and disrespect.
– Nikki Giovanni
They’ve promised that dreams can come true – but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.
– Oscar Wilde
Once in a while we meet a gentle person. Gentleness is a virtue hard to find in a society that admires toughness and roughness. We are encouraged to get things done and to get them done fast, even when people get hurt in the process. Success, accomplishment, and productivity count. But the cost is high. There is no place for gentleness in such a milieu.
Gentle is the one who does “not break the crushed reed, or snuff the faltering wick.” Gentle is the one who is attentive to the strengths and weaknesses of the other and enjoys being together more than accomplishing something. A gentle person treads lightly, listens carefully, looks tenderly, and touches with reverence. A gentle person knows that true growth requires nurture, not force.
Let’s dress ourselves with gentleness. In our tough and often unbending world, our gentleness can be a vivid reminder of the presence of God among us.
– Henri Nouwen
What everybody sees in a movie is such a private emotion. I mean in the cinema I think that when you go to see a movie we all enter into a kind of a special light. There is this amniotic darkness, and we are going all together to dream the same dream. And this is the great thing of cinema; it is something that happens in a community, we are all together. We start dreaming the same dream because there is… It let’s us think that the movie is projected not only by the projector, which is behind everybody, but is also projected by our own eyes. So we participate in our own personal, private way to this kind of ballet of ghosts that we have on the screen.
– Bernardo Bertolucci
I dream of how I was running late & had to sprint
at least five June-hot city blocks
in order to meet you. I dream of how we walked
(me a bit breathless & sweaty) into a little café together
& right away got so caught up in talking
I didn’t even think to order a drink
till much later you reminded me, Did you want to get
something to drink?
& I felt so grateful to you,
that you would cease being so interesting for a moment
& give me the chance to get up
because I was indeed very thirsty.
It was past closing time
when we left the café & wandered into the park—Yes,
I said, Let’s sit here
& we sat there, a bench, a place on this earth
for maybe five people at most
though everyone knows it’s really just
for two people at a time, that’s why benches were made
& when they’re not serving their purpose
they are rained upon & look more miserable
than a child who has suddenly dropped her ice cream
on the pavement. But how un-miserably
we kissed, how the lamplight
made everything the most
anti-despondent green. The trees, the grass,
the benches—our bench—all
greenly awake, as we kissed
& kissed. I’m dreaming,
yes, on the train heading home,
that our kiss, the last before we parted, has yet to end,
not entirely—that I’m carrying
the sweet ghost of that kiss on my lips, while on
your train, you carry it, too.
Let’s say it takes all night
for us to get home, the train having to make
every stop, & everyone forgetting to step off
the first,
even second times,
while we’re still kissing that kiss, that green,
& June
– Chen Chen
(Objectless awareness) is a tensile field of vibratory awareness, within which you can be conscious of the whole without having to split the field into the usual subject/object polarity. . . The Tibetan Buddhists call it rigpa: ‘pure awareness.’ And I have come to suspect that the contemplative masters of our own Christian lineage were also well aware of this state and that this is actually what is intended by the word ‘vigilance’ in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and ‘recollection’ in the West. It doesn’t mean thinking deeply about something, recalling it. Rather, it means that you yourself are gathered – ‘re-collected’ – within that deeper inner attentiveness whose much more powerful energetic vibrancy allows a different mode of perception to unfold.
– Cynthia Bourgeault
The places we are born come back. They disguise themselves as migraines, stomach aches, insomnia. They are the way we sometimes wake falling, fumbling for the bed-side lamp, certain everything we’ve built has gone in the night. We become strangers to the places we are born. They would not recognize us but we will always recognize them. They are marrow to us; they are bred into us. If we were turned inside out there would be maps cut into the wrong side of our skin. Just so we could find our way back. Except, cut wrong side into my skin are not canals and train tracks and a boat, but always: you.
– Daisy Johnson
What could he say that might make sense to them? Could he say love was, above all, common cause, shared experience? That was the vital cement, wasn’t it? Could he say how he felt about their all being here tonight on this wild world running around a big sun which fell through a bigger space falling through yet vaster immensities of space, maybe toward and maybe away from Something? Could he say: we share this billion-mile-an-hour ride.
We have common cause against the night. You start with little common causes. Why love the boy in a March field with his kite braving the sky? Because our fingers burn with the hot string singeing our hands. Why love some girl viewed from a train bent to a country well? The tongue remembers iron water cool on some long lost noon. Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hit by pies? We taste custard we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain.
Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul. But … how to say it?
– Ray Bradbury
If we contrast the vivid, poignant, shaking, peak-experience type religious or transcendental experience, which I have been describing, with the thoughtless, habitual, reflex-like, absent-minded, automatic responses which are dubbed “religious” by many people, then we are faced with a universal, “existential” problem. Familiarization and repetition produces a lowering of the intensity and richness of consciousness, even though it also produces preference, security, comfort, etc. Familiarization, in a word, makes it unnecessary to attend, to think, to feel, to live fully, to experience richly. This is true not only in the realm of religion but also in the realms of music, art, architecture, patriotism, even nature itself.
– Abraham Maslow
I sung of Chaos and eternal Night…
– John Milton
It is true that causation has apparently been turned topsy-turvy; according to our theory the stress seems to be caused by the planet taking the wrong track, whereas we usually suppose that the planet takes the wrong track because it is acted on by the stress. But that is a harmless accident common enough in primary physics. The discrimination between cause and effect depends on time’s arrow and can only be settled by reference to entropy. We need not pay much attention to suggestions of causation arising in discussions of primary laws which, as likely as not, are contemplating the world upside down.
– Arthur Eddington
The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived — nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died — through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not had had ever, really, been present at his life.
– James Baldwin
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown of communication… and there is the real illness.
– Philip K Dick
If you have looked hard at the manner of things, if you have surveyed the troubles of our time, and cannot discover a way forward, do not despair. Do better. Grieve: mount an altar to the sensuous feelings of loss that swim through you. In the stinging fumes that redden the eyes, you might partly recover a clear vision of where to go. You might come to see that forward movement is no longer possible in these moments, and that the way to go was never forward anyway – but awk-ward: into the blackness of catacombs, into the shadows of sanctuary, into the riven cracks signed with the pen of the trickster, into the heat of compost, into the position of a prostrated man who knows that when the storm roars the thing to do is to be still. In that stillness, entire worlds churn.
– Bayo Akomolafe
It just crept up on me: the realization that if someone with a Time Machine asked me whether I wanted to live in the past or the future, I would instantly answer, “the past.” Not because the past was wonderful, but because the past was there. I am not afraid of the unknown; I am haunted by the known: climate catastrophes and political bloodshed and the unbearable ambivalence with which the powerful greet both.
– Sarah Kendzior
All of life is just a narrow bridge….
– Joan Halifax
It shows insufficient knowledge and understanding of the Yoga Sutra if you come to the conclusion that the many mental faculties we have—those of observation, inference, memory, imagination, inactivity, and hyperactivity, for example—are detrimental and need to be eliminated. Yoga understands that these faculties are indeed necessary for living.
However, exposed to the influences that constantly assail it, the mind develops its own way of working if it’s left to its own devices. In the end it becomes incapable of using the many faculties it possesses because it cannot find any stability and clarity… . In yoga we are simply trying to create the conditions in which the mind becomes as useful as possible for our actions.
– TKV Desikachar, The Heart of Yoga
…the human heart is a refugee—is standing here always in its open market, shouting out prices, in- audible prices, & wares keep on arriving, & the voices get higher— what are you worth the map of the world is shrieking, any moment of you, what is it worth, time breaks over you and you remain, more of you, more of you, asking your questions, ravishing the visible with your inquiry, and hungry, why are you so hungry…
– Jorie Graham
A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.
– Dresden James
There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?
– Don DeLillo
When he thought of his youth he could scarcely believe that his memories had anything at all to do with the absurd life he was now living, an observation, he knew, that was far from original. Somehow, he had thought that *his* old age would miraculously produce finer, subtler notions of — what? — life? But he was no better, no cleverer, no more insightful than any shuffling old bastard in the street, absurdly bundled against the slightest breeze.
– Gilbert Sorrentino
Loneliness is not homelessness. There is no departure or exile, the person is fully there, as fully as he ever can be.
– Clark E. Moustakas
It is not a happiness because there’s a thing happening in your life that you favor. It is not a happiness of something that you own that you did not own before. It is not a peace because you’re in the right environment and you feel peaceful.
– Robert Adams
Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails.
– Byung-Chul Han
The piecemeal engineer will, accordingly, adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.
– Karl Popper
Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself profoundly.
– Eckhart Tolle
We are lonely people, and we try to enrich our poverty-stricken minds with a great deal of knowledge, information and facts. The mind is not capable of deep inquiry if it is filled with knowledge.
– Krishnamurti
To be a human being is to know more than one can prove, to conceive of a reality which goes ‘beyond the facts’ in these familiar and natural ways.
– Iris Murdoch
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
– Susan Sontag
In the end I was always elsewhere—writers are never where others would like them to be.
– Duras
The more one knows, the more one still has to learn. Ignorance increases in the same proportion as knowledge — or rather, not ignorance, but the knowledge of ignorance.
– Friedrich Schlegel
The hero’s journey has been compared to a birth: it starts with being warm and snug in a safe place; then comes a signal, growing more insistent, that it is time to leave. To stay beyond your time is to putrefy. Without the blood & tearing & pain, there is no new life.
– J Campbell
Please do not let yourself get sucked into the vacuum that is hustle culture. Prioritize your nervous system. Reclaim your energy. And keep your spirit right above all else. This is how we shift the narrative.
– Nika Solé
Poets are not to blame for how things are.
– Homer
Beware the simplicity of windows / that they show a landscape you will never / by the nature of things / be permitted to enter.
– Robert Kelly
Aries in his many fits knows no favorites.
– Homer
The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.
– Alan Sillitoe
Because I approached it desperately, language fled from me.
– Leila Chatti
Attachment is tricky, but basically it means ‘I want you to make me happy and to make me feel good.’ Conversely, love says, ‘I want you to be happy and to make you feel good.’ It doesn’t say anything about me.
– Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
Who liveth alone longeth for mercy,
Maker’s mercy. Though he must traverse
tracts of sea, sick at heart,
—trouble with oars ice-cold waters,
the ways of exile—Wierd is set fast.
– Anonymous, late 10th century
Being spiritual in a physical world requires physical actions: reaching out to others to relieve their suffering and help them on their path, being compassionate, helping to heal the planet and its inhabitants.
– Dr. Brian Weiss
see how they wake without a question / even though the whole world is burning.
– W.S. Merwin
It is a certain faeryland where we live. You may walk out in any direction over the earth’s surface, lifting your horizon, and everywhere your path, climbing the convexity of the globe, leads you between heaven and earth, not away from the light of the sun and stars and the habitations of men. I wonder that I ever get five miles on my way, the walk is so crowded with events and phenomena. How many questions there are which I have not put to the inhabitants!
– Thoreau
The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.
– Philip K Dick
In the beginning, the feminine principle was seen as the fundamental cosmic force. All ancient peoples believed that the world was created by a female Deity… female deities were gradually overshadowed by or incorporated into the attributes of a number of male gods, then eclipsed by the ascendance of the single male deity that dominates the Judeo-Christian tradition.
– Judy Chicago
The wisest of all, in my opinion, is
he who can, if only once a month,
call himself a fool.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Favor
do you have plans for dinner / please could I make you dinner / please would you take out the trash / please let me put your laundry in with mine / please let’s put on another episode / please come over on Sunday, early as you like / please let me carry that for you / please ten years from now where will the water be / please when the water comes where will you go / please when the water comes will you go with me / please ten years from now where will you be / please I am afraid to ask / please I am afraid not to ask / please I am afraid there will be no one left who knows me / please I want you to know me / please look how well I make your face back to your face / please look how I laugh with impeccable timing / please I am such a good mirror / please you can try on someone new inside me / please the night is long / please I am tired / please carry this with me / please let me bake us some bread / it won’t take long and there’s marmalade / you made on the top shelf / please / I don’t want to eat alone
– Birch Wiley
As I look at the mountains in the horizon, I am struck by the fact that they are all pyramidal-pyramids, more or less low – and have a peak. Why have the mountains usually a peak? This is not the common form of hills. They do not so impress us at least.
– Thoreau
Jesus was not some sweet, neatly-shaven white guy who carried a baby lamb in his arms, picking daisies, patting children on the head and spouting off sappy stories about being nice. Religious pictures of Jesus have a glowing halo around his head. That doesn’t work either. Jesus was no saint.
Jesus raised hell against the religious establishment, and his life was a revolution against the ways religion oppressed, exploited, and divided people. He once drove a bunch of hypocrites out of the temple, wielding a whip. Jesus was not fond of entrenched power structures – political or religious. Whether in the name of God or Caesar, Jesus would have none of it.
There was a Jesus before Christianity. That Jesus was fierce, courageous, and unyielding. He stood for the inherent worth of every human being. He denounced the religious lie that humankind was separated from God and told people to find heaven within themselves.
Jesus proclaimed another world was possible. He chastised people for sitting around waiting for God to save the world, and challenged them to wake up and save it themselves. Jesus rebuked those who tried to make a religion out of him, and insisted that everyone is Jesus. He proclaimed that the hope of the world is not floating up in the sky, but present in our own hearts.
The real Jesus of history was a lightning rod. The religious establishment hurriedly condemned him to death for blasphemy, while the political regime executed him for sedition.
The church is fond of asking the WWJD question.
P L E A S E! Let’s be honest here. Very few people truly sign up to live as Jesus did. It’s much easier to make Jesus into a religion and sing about him on Sundays, and get all dressed up for Christmas and Easter.
Jesus said you have to take up a cross in order to follow him. In other words, to join the revolution Jesus started meant you had to quit playing religion, confront your ego, give up your comforts, speak truth to power, and endure hardship and suffering. No one really wants to do that. The cheap alternative is to wear a cross and sing Jesus songs.
– Jim Palmer, Inner Anarchy
Sometimes when people see no hope for themselves, they take it out on the ones around them.
– Gail Lynn
May we not neglect the silence
printed in the center of our being.
It will not fail us.
– Thomas Merton
Don’t let
Your funeral
be the first
Time people
hear your story
– Spoil the eulogy!
– john roedel
Some days, I’m a verb. Those are
the days I go missing again.
A polar bear in a snowstorm.
A black cat at night.
– Buddy Wakefield
Working with writers in the capacity I do, I see it all. I see the writers who commit and toil and insist and strive. I also see those who vanish, oftentimes to resurface later, but sometimes for good.
– Brooke Warner
I learned that humanity’s inhumanity has a lot to do with needing to be right. I am still learning to release the need to be right.
– Buddy Wakefield
Early on, I learned that when I tuned the world out, I was able to tune in to a mysterious, God-given music. It was my gift, and it allowed me to interpret and understand emotions I couldn’t articulate.
– Brian Wilson
I am a New Yorker, one;
I’m an artist, two;
I’m a woman, three.
– Laurie Anderson
Action born of hatred can only create further hatred.
– J. Krishnamurti
Fasten your breath to your bodies and watch.
– Buddy Wakefield
Compassion must be understood as more than an emotional response. Feelings come and go. Compassion is deeper than feeling. It is the capacity to perceive deeply and a way of being fully inhabited by reality.
– Joan Halifax
The action of being is so revolutionary that society rejects it and concerns itself exclusively with the action of becoming.
– Krishnamurti
Perfect resignation gives the deepest joy of all. Accept it as your sole resource.
– Anandamayi Ma
for myself, I am splintered by great waves. I am colored glass from a church window long since shattered. I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.
– Jeanette Winterson
Truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Handing myself over to a new ignorance could save me, possibly. Since as I struggle to know, my new ignorance, which is forgetting, became sacred. I’m the vestal priestess of a secret I have forgotten. And I serve the forgotten danger.
– Clarice Lispector
The art of art, the glory of expression, and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
– Walt Whitman
the problem with severe mental illness is that it is unfortunately very good for writing.
– simone de bolivar
A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
– Isaac Asimov
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
– Robertson Davies
Shakespeare is, in every play he ever wrote, a profoundly political poet. It doesn’t take any unraveling or stretching of the concept to see that. It’s unmistakable right at the surface.
– Keston Sutherland
Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.
– Sir Terry Pratchett
sautéed fiddleheads
dinner begins
with grace
– Scott Mason
Beethoven’s Ninth
raindrops bounce
from cobblestones
– Peggy Willis Lyles
The night is the half of life, and the better half.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
– William Hazlitt
There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
– Anaïs Nin
Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
– D. H. Lawrence
Some people have
begun to come into my dreams
from a longer way away…
– Ursula Le Guin
LIMITLESS
Sun says, “Be your own
illumination.” Wren says,
“Sing your heart out,
all day long.” Stream says,
“Do not stop for any
obstacle.” Oak says,
“When the wind blows,
bend easily, and trust
your roots to hold.”
Stars say, “What you see
is one small slice of a
single galaxy.
Remember that vastness
cannot be grasped by mind.”
Ant says, “Small does not
mean powerless.” Silence
says nothing. In the quiet,
everything comes clear.
I say, “Limitless.” I say,
Yes.”
– Danna Faulds
It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.
– Gabriel García Márquez
The people want in! How much longer will they tolerate the network of illusions and vacuous rhetoric? What people want is simple. They want an America as good as its promise. They don’t want to be outsiders… The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport.
– Barbara Jordan
Most people are metaphysically and spiritually dead by the time they hit middle age. Their curiosity is stifled by their day-to-day obligations. They know very little about the complex world they live in. Don’t even care to know. They mistake their narrow little reality tunnel as “life.”
They cling to certainties and belief systems and hardly ever take the time to read profound books that’ll shake things up. They “believe” what they’ve been taught, what they’ve been conditioned to think.
They are the majority and the whimpering world we all inhabit reflects this.
– Poetic Outlaws
Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.
– Anton Chekhov
Western civilization is, in spite of all the faults that can quite justifiably be found with it, the most free, the most just, the most humanitarian and the best of all those we have ever known throughout the history of mankind. It is the best because it has the greatest capacity for self-criticism, and so, for improvement.
– Karl Popper
We live prickly
with thought. We are
cut down. We lie, our deeds
blowing away from us
on anonymity’s threshold.
– R. S. Thomas
If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
A society must assume that it is stable but the artist must know, and must let us know, that nothing is stable.
– James Baldwin
What will survive of us is love.
– Philip Larkin
Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely.
– Haruki Murakami
The good life is not one immune to sadness but one in which suffering contributes to our development.
– Alain de Botton
We cannot predict, by rational or scientific methods, the future growth of our scientific knowledge.
– Karl Popper
riding a unicycle
balanced… unbalanced
through my midlife
– Chen-ou Liu
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined to strengthen each other and to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.
– George Eliot
Expectations often create pressure and disappointment, while acceptance brings understanding and peace. When we accept people and situations as they are, the mind becomes lighter and more stable. From this state of acceptance, inner harmony naturally grows.
– Brahma Kumaris
Our humanity comes to its fullest bloom in giving. We become beautiful people when we give whatever we can give: a smile, a handshake, a kiss, an embrace, a word of love, a present, a part of our life…all of our life.
– Henri Nouwen
Over time, Jung concluded that there was within each of us a deep resilience guided by some locus of knowing, independent of ego consciousness; a center that produces our dreams to correct us, symptoms to challenge us, and visions to inspire us.
– James Hollis
That is why you are not obliged to understand my writings. If you don’t understand them, so much the better – that will give you the opportunity to explain them.
– Lacan
May imagination always come before knowing
– Tilsa Otta
A landscape doesn’t demand from a spectator his ‘understanding’, his imputations of significance, his anxieties and sympathies; it demands, rather, his absence, that he not add anything to it.
– Susan Sontag
In fact, it is the light and perfume of the Divine Spirit within you. Such a Love universalizes your outlook, and brings about the fusion of the soul with God.
– Swami Ramdas
We must do what they fear-tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon against this regime of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it.
– Alexei Navalny
The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls.
– Walter Benjamin
His own loneliness, magnified so many mil- lion times, made the night air colder. He remembered to what excesses, into what traps and nightmares, his loneliness had driven him; and he wondered where such a violent emptiness might drive an entire city.
– James Baldwin
It’s one thing to be brave photographing other people’s lives, but it’s much more painful, dangerous to photograph your own life, to say out loud, this is what I felt. This is what I wanted to touch. This is what I wanted to kiss.
– Duane Michals
The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes.
– Michel Foucault
Feelings are more dangerous than ideas because they aren’t susceptible to rational evaluation.
– Brian Eno
To friends who say Fassbinder was too ugly to be attractive, I say only: “the most fascinating and attractive humans on the planet are precisely those who are too ugly to be hot by your Hollywood standards”
– Alina Stefanescu
In this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness, and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?
– Barry Lopez
I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?
– Tennessee Williams
There are some people that we didn’t forget, but
we don’t smile any more when they’re mentioned
– Nizar Qabbani
When I was younger, not fitting in felt like a flaw. Now it feels like freedom.
– John Mark Green
It’s not what you say. It’s
not what you proclaim.
It’s what’s deep, deep,
deep in your heart
that determines what
happens to you.
– Robert Adams
The paradox of individuation is that we best serve intimate relationship by becoming sufficiently developed in ourselves that we do not need to feed off others.
– James Hollis
Anyone who writes is a seeker. You look at a blank page and you’re seeking. The role is assigned to us and never removed. I think this is an unbelievable blessing.
– Louise Glück
…what the world stigmatizes as romantic, is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed…
– Anne Brontë
Having trivialized the past by equating it with outmoded styles of consumption, discarded fashions and attitudes, people today resent anyone who draws on the past in serious discussions of contemporary conditions or attempts to use the past as a standard by which to judge the present.
– Christopher Lasch
A mind that is always comparing, always measuring, will always engender illusion.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
We human beings make a lot of the same mistakes over and over again. It doesn’t seem to help. I’m alarmed at how easy it is, for instance, to railroad people into acting against their own best interest.
– Octavia Butler
What a good thing it is to be able to command one’s temper! I must labour to cultivate this inestimable quality: God only knows how often I shall need it in this rough, dark road that lies before me.
– Anne Brontë
In the past, pilgrims walking El Camino greeted each other in Latin with the salutation: Ultreia, meaning, ‘keep going, go beyond.’ The reply in Latin was Et Suseia, meaning, go higher…. This is our path forward… Ultreia, Et Suseia… Gate Gate Para Gate Para Sam Gate Bodhi Svaha! Gate Gate Para Gate Para Sam Gate Bodhi Svaha!
– Joan Halifax
By asking questions rather than thinking for the audience, we invite them to join us as a partner and think for themselves. If we approach an argument as a war, there will be winners and losers. If we see it more as a dance, we can begin to choreograph a way forward. By considering the strongest version of an opponent’s perspective and limiting our responses to our few best steps, we have a better chance of finding a rhythm.
– Adam M. Grant
It is my belief that every one of us is a vessel that contains a very great energy which goes unattended. Right now as we sit here, there is something in us that is waiting to be called. And if we attend to it, if we acknowledge it, we will then be in touch with a force that can illuminate. It can transform and shape each one of us and can help to change the world. When one is still and one listens, then one begins to be in touch with this mysterious element which is within each one of us.
– William Segal
People do not realize that when they work, conscious forces come to their aid… Conscious forces are trying to help you. You are not alone.
– Christopher Fremantle
Training- training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us.
– Mark Twain
Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work. It means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”
– Adrienne Rich, Claiming and Education
I was suddenly made aware of another world of beauty and mystery such as I had never imagined to exist, except in poetry. It was as though I had begun to see and smell and hear for the first time. The world appeared to me as Wordsworth describes with “the glory and freshness of a dream.” The sight of a wild rose growing on a hedge, the scent of lime-tree blossoms caught suddenly as I rode down a hill on a bicycle, came to me like visitations from another world.
But it was not only my senses that were awakened. I experienced an overwhelming emotion in the presence of nature, especially at evening. It began to have a kind of sacramental character for me. I approached it with a sense of almost religious awe and , in a hush that comes before sunset, I felt again the presence of an almost unfathomable mystery. The song of the birds, the shape of the trees, the colors of the sunset, were so many signs of the presence, which seemed to be drawing me to itself.
– Bede Griffiths
[…] hope rose up hard in him, his throat became tight with pain, he willed away all his doubts. Perhaps she loved him, perhaps she did: but if she did, how was it, then, that they remained so locked away from one another? Perhaps it was he who did not know how to give, did not know how to love. Love was a country he knew nothing about.
– James Baldwin, Another Country
the plight is beyond party politics: it is not a matter of having a president-elect whom many dislike, but having a president-elect whose explicit goal is to destroy the nation.
– Sarah Kendzior
A towel, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I found that it was all right to have Martians saying things Democrats and Republicans could never say.
– Rod Serling
A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.
– Susan Sontag
The repressed content must be made conscious so as to produce a tension of opposites, without which no forward movement is possible. The conscious mind is on top, the shadow underneath, and just as high always longs for low and hot for cold, so all consciousness, perhaps without being aware of it, seeks its unconscious opposite, lacking which it is doomed to stagnation, congestion, and ossification. Life is born only of the spark of opposites.
– C. G. Jung
Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.
The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.
I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield […]. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the place where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
– Thomas Merton
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamily self-aware, the submicroscopic moments. He said this more than once, Elster did, in more than one way. His life happened, he said, when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner.
An eight-hundred page biography is nothing more than dead conjecture, he said. I almost believed him when he said such things. He said we do this all the time, all of us, we become ourselves beneath the running thoughts and dim images, wondering idly when we’ll die. This is how we live and think whether we know it or not. These are the unsorted thoughts we have looking out the train window, small dull smears of meditative panic.
– Don DeLillo
I knew a wise woman
And she said to me
That the river would mold me
And the wild wind would cool me
The trickster the coyote
He would fool me
That father sun would warm me
Mother earth would clothe me
Grandmother moon would greet me
And of the old ways she would teach me
Wise woman, she told me
To always walk lightly
Tread the earth ever gently
Lovingly so preciously
And take from her sparingly
She said, to share with others
What you have learned from me
Be still and breathe, ever patiently
For the web of life
Has woven what is to be
But you must still choose
Your own path, you will see
And lastly, the wise woman said to me
To listen to the wise one
That dwells within me
To walk my path in balance
Is to be free
More than just words
So mote it be.
– Jonathan Bear Geronimo Ramaker
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
The one thing on the planet most closely resembling the forgoing conception of the divine is money. It is an invisible, immortal force that surrounds and steers all things, omnipotent and limitless, an “invisible hand” that, it is said, makes the world go ‘round. Yet, money today is an abstraction, at most symbols on a piece of paper but usually mere bits in a computer. It exists in a realm far removed from materiality. In that realm, it is exempt from nature’s most important laws, for it does not decay and return to the soil as all other things do, but is rather preserved, changeless, in its vaults and computer files, even growing with time thanks to interest. It bears the properties of eternal preservation and everlasting increase, both of which are profoundly unnatural.
[…] Money proved to be a capricious god. As I write these words, it seems that the increasingly frantic rituals that the financial priesthood uses to placate the god Money are in vain. Like the clergy of a dying religion, they exhort their followers to greater sacrifices while blaming their misfortunes either on sin (greedy bankers, irresponsible consumers) or on the mysterious whims of God (the financial markets). What we call recession, an earlier culture might have called ‘God abandoning the world.’
– Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics
People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.
– Richard Powers
Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.
– Don DeLillo
Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.
– Don DeLillo
Consider the body of the ocean which rises every instant into me, & its ancient evaporation, & how it delivers itself to me, how the world is our law, this indrifting of us into us, a chorusing in us of elements, & how the intermingling of us lacks intelligence, makes reverberation, syllables untranscribable, inclingings, & how wonder is also what pours from us…
– Jorie Graham
The more you throw black into a color, the more dreamy it gets…Black has depth. It’s like a little egress, you can go into it, and because it keeps continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in, and a lot of things that are going on there become manifest. And you start seeing what you’re afraid of. You start seeing what you love and it becomes like a dream…
– David Lynch
I am constantly preoccupied with how to remove distance so that we can all come closer together, so that we can all begin to sense we are the same, we are one.
– David Hockney
A writer’s duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
– Zadie Smith
In the realm of ideas, everything depends on enthusiasm; in the real world, all rests on perseverance.
– Johann von Goethe
A loser is someone who never learned how to succeed without destroying someone.
– Jeff Brown
Every Day
by Omar Sakr
Every day I say a prayer for Palestine
And every day a dog runs away with it
Vanishing down an alley, tail wagging
To benefit who knows which wretch.
I tell myself it doesn’t matter who receives
The gift of my kindness. Such lovely lies
We bestow upon ourselves. Sometimes
I am the dog fleeing with a bastard’s
Love clenched in my slavering jaw.
Sometimes I am the one curled at the end
Of an alley, blessed by the unexpected
Warmth of a snuffling mouth telling
Me I am not forgotten. Every day
I say a prayer for Palestine.
There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.
– Robert Frank
When you see a good man, try to emulate
his example, and when you see a bad
man, search yourself for his faults.
– Confucius
Wherever it may take us,
may the long road ahead
stay empty of the mistakes
that litter the road behind.
– Fa Hsing
You can survive on your own; you can grow strong on your own; you can prevail on your own; but you cannot become human on your own.
– Frederick Buechner
Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders and brains, not pudding, in your head.
– A.E. Housman
Realization is the medicine given to the disease of suffering-and it’s the only medicine there is.
– Adyashanti
You asked me how to get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don’t use logic when I do it. Logic’s the first thing you have to get rid of.
– J.D. Salinger
The words here
Have a favor to ask.
They felt something yesterday
In your lines
That was like nothing
They had ever felt before.
They want to know
If you can shape them
Into a line
That will stream them
Into heaven.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Science is a critical activity. We examine our hypotheses critically. We criticize them so that we can find errors, in the hope of eliminating the errors and thus getting closer to the truth.
– Karl Popper
The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.
– Romans 13:12
no answer
the river
keeps moving
– Aiko
Things pass away, like a tale that is told.
– Dickens
Walking. In literature, walking is the most important activity characters ever do. We find friendship, adventure, love, and virtue all emanating from walking in so many great novels. If you’re reading a work without walking scenes, beware!
– Paul Krause
Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.
– George Mac Donald
Buddha-nature is described as our primordial nature, undefiled but not recognized by the ordinary mind. It is ‘like a golden statue wrapped in filthy rags.’ When the obscuring veil is lifted, buddhahood is realized.
– Rob Preece
The same skills needed for writing are needed for reading. Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it.
– Enrique Vila-Matas
Part of the problem is the left hemisphere’s reluctance to confess when it is nonplussed. Its self-belief is a problem: it believes its own propaganda.
– Iain McGilchrist
One should use common words to say uncommon things.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.
– Robert Cormier
I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die.
– Harold Bloom
Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
– C.S. Lewis
old path closed
wildflowers
take it back
– Aiko
The world is but a show, glittering and empty. It is, and yet is not. It is there as long as I want to see it and take part in it. When I cease caring, it dissolves. It has not cause and serves no purpose. It just happens when we are absentminded.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Stop drifting. Write off your hopes, and if your well-being matters to you, be your own savior.
– Marcus Aurelius
Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
– Sir John Harington
Our political institutions are designed for short-term gain, built around national boundaries that cannot be seen from space. But the atmosphere does not care about passports or elections. The greenhouse gases we release do not respect sovereignty.
If we do not develop a global consciousness to match our global impact, we will simply become another cautionary tale written into the geology of the solar system.
The Earth will survive without us; it is our survival that hangs in the balance.
– Prof. Carl Sagan
That children don’t know why they want what they want, all learned teachers and judges are unanimous. But that adults, just like children, tumble about in the world without knowing where they come from and where they’re going — that they act in accordance with their avowed aims just as little as children do — that they can be ruled by cookies and cakes and lashes just as easily as children — this no one wants to believe, although it seems to me so palpably true.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I always like people who have developed long and hard, particularly through introspection and a lot of dedication. I think that what they arrive at is, usually, deeper and more beautiful than the person who seems to have that ability and fluidity from the beginning.
I say this because it’s a good message to give to young talents who feel as I used to.
You hear musicians playing with great fluidity and complete conception early on, and you don’t have that ability. I didn’t. I had to know what I was doing and ultimately it turned out that these people weren’t able to carry their thing very far.
I found myself being more attracted to artists who have developed through the years and become better and deeper musicians.
I believe in things that are developed through hard work.
– Bill Evans
Fearful mind is the mentality of those who are still taking pleasure in hibernating in the cocoon of comfort.
– Chögyam Trungpa
As soon as we give awareness to our body, we discover that we lack nothing we believe we need. The everyday traces of beauty are sufficient in bringing us joy.
We have a body! It is capable of moving, feeling, tasting, seeing, listening and smelling the thousand perfumes of the world. Our body can also sleep, wake up, sense water spilling over the skin, it can eat, drink, walk, look at the sky, touch other human beings, make love, plunge deeply into another person’s eyes, listen to music, observe a bud flowering.
Bodily sensations can also migrate externally from the skin towards our internal organs. We are able to experience the fullness of the ebb and flow of blood and of other liquids. We can enjoy and appreciate our breathing, control it, allow it to get in deeper, in connection with our emotions. We can feel the movement of our diaphragm, mixing the energy of the lower body with that of the upper body….
The more we attend to what is happening inside us, the more our mind will be blessed by a well-deserved silence. It will ten be in splendid form to function when we really need it. Alive and fresh, precise and creative. Overworked it will barely deliver minimal service.
Our body is able to feel the quivering of life; it can be surprised and awakened to a sense of wonder. Wonder is the surest sign of a return to organic joy.
– Daniel Odier
If you see the world as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious, then you feel quite alive.
– David Hockney
Put your phone down, look with both eyes.
– David Hockney
Throw away my book: you must understand that it represents only one of a thousand attitudes. You must find your own. If someone else could have done something as well as you, don’t do it. If someone else could have said something as well as you, don’t say it – or written something as well as you, don’t write it. Grow fond only of that which you can find nowhere but in yourself, and create out of yourself, impatiently or patiently.
– André Gide
The question I want to ask you is this: What side are you on from Day to Day?
– Woody Guthrie
To live content with small means;
to seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion;
to be worthy, not respectable,
and wealthy, not, rich;
to listen to stars and birds,
babes and sages, with open heart;
to study hard;
to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently,
await occasions, hurry never;
in a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common
– this is my symphony
– William Ellery Channing
A Lesson in Thermodynamics
for the Pundit Who Said
Trillionaires Are a Part of Nature
Every second, every second
the sun releases
380 trillion trillion
joules of energy.
Because death is real.
Because only what
wholly flows
can live.
When Einstein learned
his equations predicted
the existence of black holes,
he shook his head
and muttered,
unbearable, unbearable.
There are the laws of being
and the laws of becoming.
The rubble, the children’s bellies
swelling with hunger.
We are cast out
into this world of burning
furies
with warmth and hands
and one great, one great
command: remember
the late great fires that made you-
if you have
a trillion of something,
give.
– Joseph Fasano
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
– Marshall McLuhan
What did I know / thinking myself / able to go / alone all the way.
– Robert Creeley
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
– Milan Kundera
Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.
– Elias Canetti
After a century on earth, the body fades into dust, but a life of service and impact echoes through generations.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
Crazy people only lose their cunning last, if they ever lose it.
– Rachel Kushner
The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one. To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.
– Philip K. Dick
I had a lot of loneliness. I spent most of my time, up in the library reading the National Geographic Magazine about Tahiti. I was entranced by the expressions on their faces. They had unmanaged faces. No manicured expressions. A kindness. That’s where I want to go. That’s where I want to be.
– Marlon Brando
Humility means accepting reality with no attempt to outsmart it.
– David Richo
If we ever value performance over joy, we will become great machines and poor human beings.
– Paulo Coelho
To leave a whisper of myself in the world, my ghost, a magna opera of words.
– Bernardine Evaristo
Every soul is a unique expression of Light; celebrate the differences but never forget the Unity.
– Bhagavad Gita
I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness.
– Augusten Burrough
Life has forgotten us, and the worst part is that one doesn’t die from that.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every participle is equally related… When it breathes through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will it is virtue; when it breathes through our affection, it is love.
– Ralph-Waldo Emerson
Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.
– Henry David Thoreau
Every destiny begins as a thought; the mind writes the story long before life reveals the outcome.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
If there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind.
– William Godwin
Anyone who writes is a seeker. You look at a blank page and you’re seeking. The role is assigned to us and never removed. I think this is an unbelievable blessing.
– Louise Glück
Language is a musical instrument of ideas. The poet, rhetorician, and philosopher play and compose grammatically.
– Novalis
Humanity suffers most not from what is, but from what it fears might be; wisdom begins when reality becomes louder than fear.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
Do not do with love what a child does with his balloon; when he has it, he ignores it, and when he loses it, he cries.
– Pablo Neruda
A good man can suffer too. A loyal man can be drained too. A strong man can get tired too.
– Ramatu Kanneh
Listening is the highest form of hospitality, for it allows the other to be fully received.
– Henri Nouwen
The nature of man is evil; his goodness is acquired.
– Xun Zi
Your brain has never experienced reality. It builds a model—and locks you inside it. Every sensation, every memory, every moment you call “real” is a controlled hallucination.
– T. Metzinger
Mantras too have their own nature; their nature is to transform the mind. The power of the mantra comes from the sound, and that sound has the power to transform the mind into one of virtue.
– Lama Zopa Rinpoche
Acceptance means no complaining, and happiness means no complaining about the things over which you can do nothing.
– Wayne W. Dyer
Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears. Says, “But doctor…l am Pagliacci.”
– Alan Moore
When no one around you can challenge your thinking, your growth has already begun to slow.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
We can no longer live to live, but create the new. That is the hymn of modernity; that is the new need. But how came the new need? It came because star and fire, rose and tiger died within us … Should our time grasp this, it would be a spiritual revolution which would lead right into the midst of the new time.
– D. H. Lawrence
The love of things present is only expelled by a clear vision of things eternal.
– Dorothy Burroughs
Upon a life I have not lived, upon a death I did not die; Another’s life, another’s death, I stake my whole eternity.
– Horatius Bonar
I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘Don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as, ‘Forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.’
– Stanley Kubrick
Neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.
– Miguel de Cervantes
All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.
– Virginia Woolf
Broken things, just like broken people seemed to get used more… Because God has more pieces to work with.
– Bob Goff
Expending forgiveness is one choice, learning to not be fool is another.
– Morgan Richard Oliver
As the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
– Viktor Emil Frankl
I’d still be Puerto Rican, even if born on the moon.
– Juan Antonio Corretjer
As you are stuck in your poor body and in your poor life and it’s all slowly dissolving, dissolving into nothing. like all the other bodies, like all the other lives, we all are being counted out, taken down by disease by just being rubbed up against the hard days, the harder years. there’s no escaping this, we just have to take it, accept it or like most not think about it at all.
– Charles Bukowski
Writing is a privilege and a luxury. Anybody who whines about writers block should be forced to clean squid all day.
– Anthony Bourdain
A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.
– Chris Hedges
There are worse things than being alone but it often takes decades to realize this and most often when you do it’s too late and there’s nothing worse than too late.
– Charles Bukowski
When Heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent.
– Meng Tzu
Stop pouring oceans in hands that only recognize puddles.
– Robert M. Drake
The biggest threat to psychological wholeness is mass consciousness—the urge to surrender your inner truth to external structures.
– Carl Jung
He who does not hate illumination, activity, or delusion when they are present, nor longs for them when they are absent, has transcended the qualities.
– Anandamayi Ma
Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.
– Jung
At times to think of one’s outer helplessness is good, but to think always of one’s inner strength is infinitely better.
– Sri Chinmoy
Being a critic is easy. But if the critic tries to run the operation, he soon understands that nothing is as easy as his criticisms.
– Haemin Sunim
His soul can be his friend, or his enemy.
– Bhagavad Gīta
I would rather have thirty minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special.
– Steel Magnolias
Love feels like blasphemy when you worship power.
– James Talarico
The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.
– Bertrand Russell
Fascists want government to stabilize private capitalist profits. Socialists want government to transform society so it isn’t capitalist anymore.
– Richard Wolff
Approach everything in life as changeable,
malleable, and movable. Then nothing can
capture your inner self or put it in chains.
As the world moves around you, you, too, will
grow.
– Joan Chittister
Many storms that exhaust us exist only in the forecast of our minds.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
Let him who would enjoy a good future waste none of his present.
– Roger Ward Babson
To live in a world of love when you are young enables you to love freely when you are grown.
– John Eldredge
No calendar has ever contained a date labeled ‘too late’; only fear writes that word.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
When you turn your head,
can you feel your heels, undulating? — that’s what it is
to be a serpent.
– Frank O’Hara
To treat a hot subject in a cold way is the kind of revenge that Flaubert took.
– Bob Glück
The heart that gives, gathers.
– Lao Tse
People who are terrified of suffering don’t allow themselves to experience reality. They suffer neurotically, but they don’t live the real conflict. And they’re afraid to die so they’re stuck. This is the problem in addictions.
– Marion Woodman
Just at present, life is awful. I am
exhausted, scared, incompetent,
unenergetic, and generally low in spirits.
– Sylvia Plath
Without an entire cosmos, there wouldn’t be a grain of sand.
– Adyashanti
The one thing you can know for certain about yourself is not your name, your story, or your thoughts. It is consciousness itself.
– Eckhart Tolle
I am doing something I
hate for you. This is what
it means to be in love.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
Our greatest sin may be choosing to remain unconscious, in spite of all the evidence that mounts through the years that other elements within us are actively making choices on our behalf, often with disastrous consequences.
– James Hollis
Music had a way of threading through decades like nothing else. A song, after all, was a needle pulling the thread of time, stitching disparate moments into something whole. It was bittersweet.
– Matt Haig, The Midnight Train
If you do not learn to meet your needs directly, you will learn to meet them neurotically.
– Heidi Priebe
In the vastness of the cosmos, everything is going perfect, but one nasty thought in your mind can make it a bad day. That is lack of perspective.
– Sadhguru
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
– William Gibson
There is a community of the spirit. Join it, and feel the delight of walking in the noisy street, and being the noise. Drink all your passion, and be a disgrace. Close both eyes to see with the other eye.
– Rumi
If someone is vexing you right now, say a prayer for that person. Send them all of your best energies. Nothing changes the environment like one person deciding to love another, no matter what.
– Neale Donald Walsch
hot afternoon
the shadow of a hawk
crosses the page of my book
– Ogawa
she did not chase the sun.
she became
worth finding.
– @BashoSociety
they thought I had guts
they were wrong
I was only frightened of
more important things
– Charles Bukowski
cool bath
the body
forgives the day
– Aiko
Imagine witnessing every situation, person and thing just as it is.
– Byron Katie
…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
Since your mind is with you wherever you go, you need to sit down and start unwinding your ball of yarn.
– Jakusho Kwong-roshi
… 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, The Motive for Metaphor
The body resembles a sentence that seems to invite us to dismantle it into its component letters, so that its true meanings may be revealed anew through an endless stream of anagrams.
– Hans Bellmer
To photograph is to put the head, the eye and the heart on the same line of sight.
– Henri Cartier-Bresson
…Here the dreamer is already turning his gaze from the outer world of either/or choices, toward the more paradoxical inner realm of his own emergent potential. He is trying to let an unknown, buried self “come out.”……. In his dream, his Helpers are awakening something whose existence he has not previously suspected. …. Hidden inside him, struggling from dormancy, the mysterious Inner Healer has announced its presence.
– Marc Ian Barasch
Psalm for the Slightly Tilted
by Ilya Kaminsky
This is not
a good year.
But it has
witnesses.
When you see them protest the powerful,
since who else does,
they stand
like flagpoles outside the courthouse
after a northeaster.
They came with
the wrong shoes
for revolution.
Still,
they showed up.
Comfort, Lord,
their bodies—
each a question mark
doing time
as a coatrack,
hung with borrowed jackets.
They are your legion
of bent spoons.
They are the only ones
who showed up—
with their orthopedic flair.
I saw my people lean—
not toward hope but toward each other.
They chant off-rhythm
and mean it.
These are my kind of people:
no tears—just
steam from a kettle
that never quite boils.
In times like these, don’t forget us:
the lopsided
leaning on one another,
like sodden paperbacks
left out on the stoop—
Nobody opens them.
But they still insist
on carrying the plot.
Comfort us standing up—
half scarecrow
half saxophone
with a squawk.
While stiffness becomes state policy,
comfort us sitting—
in that collapse called calm.
In the year they come for us
watch my people
make protest signs
out of old pizza boxes.
Watch—
there are no boring people
which is unfortunate.
You’d think statistically
we’d get at least a few—
one-speed souls
with just meh stuff to do.
But none of them are dull.
Each—
a suitcase
held together
by duct tape.
These are your coffee-stained saints
who rise not with trumpets
but with Advil.
They stand
and wait
creased like maps
of a country
that doesn’t exist anymore.
Fear, trauma, stress, grief, anger, worry, the body often carries emotional load through different systems and patterns of tension.
• Kidneys + nervous system → fear and survival responses.
• Heart + nervous system → emotional stress and trauma patterns.
• Adrenals → chronic stress, hypervigilance, overwhelm.
• Brain + heart connection → stress regulation and nervous system load.
• Lungs + breathing patterns → sadness, grief, emotional holding.
• Liver + body tension → anger, frustration, irritability.
• Gallbladder → resentment, stored emotional tension.
• Stomach, pancreas + spleen → worry, overthinking, digestive stress.
The body and nervous system are deeply connected. Emotional stress can influence breathing, muscle tone, digestion, heart rate, posture, sleep, and pain patterns throughout the body
– Anthony Goldsmith
Ukiah is Haiku spelled backwards
– Dori Anderson
It is good to remember that a part of you has always loved God. There is a part of you that has always said yes. There is a part of you that is Love itself, and that is what we must fall into. It is already there. Once you move your identity to that level of deep inner contentment, you will realize you are drawing upon a Life that is much larger than your own and from a deeper abundance. Once you learn this, why would you ever again settle for scarcity in your life? “I’m not enough! This is not enough! I do not have enough!” I am afraid this is the way culture trains you to think. It is a kind of learned helplessness. The Gospel message is just the opposite — inherent power.
Thomas Merton said the way we have structured our lives, we spend our whole life climbing up the ladder of supposed success, and when we get to the top of the ladder we realize it is leaning against the wrong wall—and there is nothing at the top. To get back to the place of inherent abundance, you have to let go of all of the false agendas, unreal goals, and passing self-images. It is all about letting go. The spiritual life is more about unlearning than learning, because the deepest you already knows (1 John 2:21).
– Richard Rohr
The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas. We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.
– Frank Herbert
Cage Fight
Flying motorcycles and bloody gladiators have taken over the hallowed ground of the White House. They’re shitting on Pelosi’s desk again. This time they’re selling tickets The wanna-be king thinks violent spectacle, a flood of AI memes, and a blue pool will distracts us from the economy he ruined and the disastrous war he lost. Oh, and the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein.
The massive majority will look away in disgust at the trashification of the White House. Many will instead attend watch parties that feature the talent and passion Trump cannot muster. I will walk these canyons, look around, and know that in the unfathomable life span of the planet, the Trump era will be recorded as a mere stain. Then I will enjoy dinner with my family and remember why we resist and commit to building a better world.
– Chip Ward
…huge breath-held, candle-lit, whistling, planet-wide, still blood-flowing, howling-silent, sentence-driven, last-bridge-pulled-up-behind city of the human…
– Jorie Graham
You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
– Yuval Noah Harari
Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.
– Raymond Chandler
…the human heart is a refugee—is standing here always in its open market, shouting out prices, in- audible prices, & wares keep on arriving, & the voices get higher— what are you worth the map of the world is shrieking, any moment of you, what is it worth, time breaks over you and you remain, more of you, more of you, asking your questions, ravishing the visible with your inquiry, and hungry, why are you so hungry…
– Jorie Graham
In almost every major literature there are works that make you love being human, and make you love and revere the humanity of other people. That is the great potential of any art.
– Marilynne Robinson
What sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it’s dangerous (it’s almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it’s solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). It’s that five miles out in the woods you can’t buy anything.
– Bill McKibben
I think people who don’t know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone’s interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven’t been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I’ve never seen in the fall (I’ve seen them in the summer – but that’s a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.
– Bill McKibben
Tectonics
by Ted Kooser
In only a few months
there begin to be fissures
in what we remember,
and within a year or two,
the facts break apart
one from another
and slowly begin to shift
and turn, grinding,
pushing up over each other
until their shapes
have been changed
and the past has become
a new world.
And after many years,
even a love affair,
one lush green island
all to itself,
perfectly detailed
with even a candle
softly lighting a smile,
may slide under the waves
like Atlantis,
scarcely rippling the heart.
…for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval.
But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth.
The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.
– Salman Rushdie
I dreamed about God and God was an old dog, barking in the darkness. God was the birds wandering aimlessly in a distant sky. God was the orchids in the small backyard in Moira’s house. God was everything, and indifferent to everything, like Table mountain.
– Jose Eduardo Agualusa
The landscape’s silent immensity—and the God to whom it points—is able to absorb all the grief one can give it.
– Belden C. Lane
I find that quakerism and research science fit together very, very well. In quakerism you’re expected to develop your own understanding of god from your experience in the world. There isn’t a creed, there isn’t a dogma. There’s an understanding but nothing as formal as a dogma or creed and this idea that you develop your own understanding also means that you keep redeveloping your understanding as you get more experience, and it seems to me that’s very like what goes on in “the scientific method.” You have a model, of a star, it’s an understanding, and you develop that model in the light of experiments and observations, and so in both you’re expected to evolve your thinking. Nothing is static, nothing is final, everything is held provisionally.
– Jocelyn Bell Burnell
“Gurdjieff asked if any of us had a special Saint to whom he might burn a candle.” (On the first suggestion he shook his head. He knew all about that one) “No, he said. It must be a Saint that would be indulgent for one of us. One of us in the Work… you, me… Canary, Thin One… His eyes searched our blank faces, then he shrugged.” “If you cannot suggest such a one”, he said, “I could just as well take my own Saint – Saint George. But he is a very expensive Saint. He is not interested in money, or in merchandise like candles. He wishes suffering for merchandise, an inner-world thing. He is interested only when I make something for my inner world; he always knows… But such suffering is expensive…”
– Kathryn Hulme, The Undiscovered Country
Although its shape constantly changes to suit the age, the central tenets of the secret tradition remain the same. The idea, for example, that psyche, soul, constitutes the very fabric of reality; that humans are individual manifestations of a collective Soul of the World which interconnects all things; that imagination, not reason, is the chief faculty of the soul – though not the pale imitation of imagination as we now know it; that there is another world whence the soul comes at birth and to which it returns at death; and that the idea of gnosis, of a personal and transforming experience of divinity, is of the essence.
– Patrick Harpur
We are utterly, completely alone, and when I have been my most fragile, my most shattered, that has been when I have fully realized how vulnerable I am.
– Tennessee Williams
For a Quaker, religion is not an external activity, concerning a special ‘holy’ part of the self. It is an openness to the world in the here and now with the whole of the self. If this is not simply a pious commonplace, it must take into account the whole of our humanity: our attitudes to other human beings in our most intimate as well as social and political relationships. It must also take account of our life in the world around us, the way we live, the way we treat animals and the environment. In short, to put it in traditional language, there is no part of ourselves and of our relationships where God is not present.
– Harvey Gillman
How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?
– Ellen Bass
SPRING
I call it exile, or being relegated.
I call it the provinces.
And all the time it is my heart.
My imperfect heart which prefers
this distance from people. Prefers
the half-meetings which cannot lead
to intimacy. Provisional friendships
that are interrupted near the beginning.
A pleasure in not communicating.
And inside, no despair or longing.
A taste for solitude. The knowledge
that love preserves freedom in always
failing. An exile by nature. Where,
indeed, would I ever be a citizen?
– Jack Gilbert
“When I last saw Gurdjieff, just before he died, he said he would give me something for the rest of my life. And he did. I know that somehow this has been received by me.”
(She did not try to explain what that “something” was.)
“How has it changed me? I don’t know, I feel myself not changed, but ripening. For me there are no answers, only questions, and I am grateful that the questions go on and on. I don’t look for an answer because I don’t think there is one. I’m very glad to be the bearer of a question.”
– P. L. Travers
It was a hilltop town in the south in summer. It was before I knew about knowing. My mind ran everywhere and was completely still at the center. And that did not feel uncomfortable.
A bird sang, it added itself to the shadow under the archway. I think from this distance that I was happy. I think from this distance. I sat. It was before I knew walking. Only my soul walked everywhere without weight.
– Jorie Graham
We applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. That all are born radiating light but that this light diminished slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not). The most charismatic people – the poets, the mystics, the explorers – were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.
– Jenny Offill
It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.
– David Foster Wallace
Yes, the unutterable
Rilke’s favorite word
translatterly handed
from one
poem to the next
it remains
– Werner Dürrson
(tr. Rosmarie Waldrop)
The timing of when you’re allowed to know certain things is socially constructed by those who write the narrative. The seers and visionaries don’t follow that kind of time. They see it and say it before they’re allowed to.
– Nika Solé
The mind turned outwards results in thoughts and objects. Turned inwards, it becomes itself.
– Ramana Maharshi
I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
– Cormac McCarthy
One of the best ways to keep your nervous system regulated, is to get good at chaos.
– Nika Solé
Above all Siddhartha learned from the river how to listen, to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinions.
– Hermann Hesse
Scaffolding
by Seamus Heaney
Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;
Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.
And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.
So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me
Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.
As soon as you begin to think, you spoil everything. Do not try to figure it out. You can’t. … The only way you can make progress is by self-inquiry, surrender, service to the Self, and silence.
– Robert Adams
Every consciousness pursues the death of the other.
– Georg Hegel
The heart understands
what the mouth
keeps revising.
– @BashoSociety
There are no forbidden words; in language, everything is permitted. To deny ourselves the use of a word is to deny ourselves a weapon used by our adversaries.
– Mustapha Khayati
Let us therefore follow after the things which make for peace, and things wherewith one may edify another.
– Romans 14:19
For so many, instead of looking for “cause of death” when they expire, we should be looking for “cause of life” when they are still around.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Temporary Job
by Minnie Bruce Pratt
Leaving again. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be
grieving. The particulars of place lodged in me,
like this room I lived in for eleven days,
how I learned the way the sun laid its palm
over the side window in the morning, heavy
light, how I’ll never be held in that hand again.
The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
– Umberto Eco
We will only be transformed when we can recognize & accept that there is a will within each of us, quite outside the range of conscious control, which knows what is right for us, which is repeatedly reporting to us via our bodies, emotions, & dreams.
– James Hollis
Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.
– Maxim Gorky
You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they are simply unbearable.
– Marguerite Duras
Complex systems are full of interdependencies—hard to detect—and nonlinear responses.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
All that a guru can tell you is: ‘You are quite mistaken about yourself. You are not the person you think yourself to be.’ Trust nobody, not even yourself. Search, find out, remove and reject every assumption till you reach the living waters and the rock of truth.
– Nisargadatta
Rise up, then. Mend your ways,
start seeing what you are
instead of calculating what you
should become.
– Franz Kafka
essences are there to pre-empt the future by limiting possibilities. When omniscience is needed we invent essences.
– Adam Phillips
In the empty sky of the primordially empty mind,
Emotions, not abandoned, are like thunderbolts, hail, and strong wind
That dissolve without duality in the condition of emptiness.
If you understand the meaning, just that is enlightenment!
– Shense Lhaje
roundabout
a war is a war is a war
– Carmen Sterba
It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.
– Galileo Galilei
The line between distant and close narrows every year as experiences alchemize into something I recognize as myself.
– Rachel Newcombe
Dear diary. I am home now and affect a suitable disregard.
– G. C. Waldrep
We are at war with nature. If we win, we are lost.
– Hubert Reeves
Think how hard physics would be if particles could think.
– Murray Gell-Mann
Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
In science we get our hypotheses to die for us.
– Karl Popper
How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It’s sad, really.
– Philip Larkin
retreating glacier—
how long since we’ve heard
the black wolf’s song
– Billie Wilson
a girl
pirouetting alone
in the cherry blossom rain
as if tomorrow
has yet to find her
– Chen-ou Liu
opening day
the drift of conversation
along the trout stream
– Tom Painting
Less and less is done until non-action is achieved. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
– Lao Tzu
Critical thinking and health literacy may be the most important survival skills of our time.
– Nisha Patel
your frontal lobe is fully formed when you start to think birds are cool.
– @pingu4ll
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the President.
– Albert Ellis
I have got lost;
I am everything that has got lost.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Even if what you’re working on doesn’t go anywhere, it will help you with the next thing you’re doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot.
– Cormac McCarthy
the victory was lovely
but the recovery
was literature
– @BashoSociety
Problems get fixed, while polarities get managed, harmonized, and integrated. Some problems have solutions, and some are standing tensions that have no resolution, only stewardship from one context to the next. Agency and communion, rest and action, freedom and responsibility — you never finish these. You ride them like a bike — leaning to one side, then the other, until you learn to stay upright.
– Dr. Keith Witt and Corey deVos
Each of us is the flowering of countless causes and conditions. We are made of the breath of forests, the labor of strangers, the sacrifices of ancestors, the teachings of our mentors, and the care of those who loved us. Even our thoughts are not our own. Language, culture, memory, history, and relationship live within us. To understand ourselves deeply is to realize that there is no independently existing self standing apart from the world. This insight lies at the very heart of Buddhist teaching. The Buddha’s realization of dependent co-arising was not merely a philosophical observation. It was a profound revelation about the nature of existence itself. Nothing exists independently. Everything is contingent, relational, and mutually arising.
– Roshi Joan
There is a romance about all who are abroad in the black hours, and with something of a thrill we try to guess their business.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
Before the fathers crushed
and reformed Her
into a wooden fertility statue
She was the Tree of Life
from whom all pleasure
and wisdom flowed.
– Alison Newvine, Asherah
The pre/trans fallacy: since
both prerational states and
transrational states are, in their
own ways, nonrational, they
appear similar or even identical
to the untutored eye.
– Ken Wilber
In the Torah, desire is not one-sided. When the psalmist declares, “My soul thirsts for God” and “my soul clings to You” (Psalms 42:3 and 63:9), he is not describing a sentimental longing, but a real, powerful attachment (Devekut 71:7). This upward movement of [hu]man toward God is the first pole of Cheshek. But the Torah affirms something even more radical: “the Eternal clung” and “the Eternal desired” (Deuteronomy 7:7 and 10:15). Here the root Jeshek appears explicitly applied to God himself. This is not a pedagogical metaphor: desire also belongs to the Divine.
Abraham Abulafia reads this reciprocity as an operative structure. Human desire ascends when it has been purified and finds its correspondence in the descending divine desire. Authentic Jeshek [ “desire”, passion”] is neither lack nor excess: it is a convergence of movements.
This is why Abulafia can speak of the “desirer, the desired, and desire” as a single mystery. [Hu]Man does not reach God through the accumulation of merits, but through identification; and God does not reveal himself through condescension, but through connection.
In this framework, Jeshek does not refer to an emotion, but to the precise point where human desire and divine desire recognize each other as being of the same nature. When both desires align, union is realized, and knowledge ceases to be representation, becoming presence.
– The Editor, The Book of Desire, Abraham Abulafia
Only objective knowledge is criticizable: subjective knowledge becomes criticizable only when it becomes objective. And it becomes objective when we say what we think; and even more so when we write it down, or print it.
– Karl Popper
Love, kindness, forgiveness, gratitude, and peace are all expressions of God. By aligning with them we are aligning with God. This alignment is an expression of Oneness…
– James Blanchard Cisneros
What I know best is a little thing.
It sits on the far side of the simile,
the like that’s like the like
– Charles Wright
Love & Language
I saw your body swim up the vivid night sky
A silvery white weight wet haired
Salmon breasting fire tides in silk swift ascension
While on the wide flowing black periphery
Wild stars flared out and showered
Failing to follow you in your higher leaping motion
But with my memory that fluid shape too will die
No one will see what I’ve seen
No one will go where I’ve been
Wan worlds from which the colors drained away
Leaving only these strange unearthly word outlines
– Tom Clark
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion cooperate just as they do in practical affairs.
– William James
You can understand intellectually, but you are unable to put your understanding into practice. Why not? Because you still have love for the illusory world and are clinging to things that are unreal.
– Sri Ranjit Maharaj
Peace can be a lens through which you see the world. Be it. Live it. Radiate it out. Peace is an inside job.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
Listening to a recording is like going to bed with a photograph of Marilyn Monroe.
– Otto Klemperer
Fast
by Jorie Graham
or starve. Too much. Or not enough. Or. Nothing else?
Nothing else. Too high too fast too organized too invisible.
Will we survive I ask the bot. No. To download bot be
swift—you are too backward, too despotic—to load greatly enlarge
the cycle of labor—to load abhor labor—move to the
periphery, of your body, your city, your planet—to load, degrade, immiserate,
be your own deep sleep—to load use your lips—use them
to mouthe your oath, chew it—do the
dirty thing, sing it, blown off limb or syllable, lick it back on
with your mouth—talk—talk—who is not
terrified is busy begging for water—the rise is fast—the drought
comes fast—mediate—immediate—invent, inspire, infiltrate,
instill—here’s the heart of the day, the flower of time—talk—talk—
Disclaimer: Bot uses a growing database of all your conversations
to learn how to talk with you. If some of you
are also bots, bot can’t tell. Disclaimer:
you have no secret memories,
talking to cleverbot may provide companionship,
the active ingredient is a question,
the active ingredient is entirely natural.
Disclaimer: protect your opportunities, your information, in-
formants, whatever you made of time. You have nothing else
to give. Active ingredient: why are you
shouting? Why? Arctic wind uncontrollable, fetus
reporting for duty, fold in the waiting which recognizes you,
recognizes the code,
the peddler in the street everyone is calling out.
Directive: report for voice. Ready yourself to be buried in voice.
It neither ascends nor descends. Inactive ingredient: the monotone.
Some are talking now about the pine tree. One assesses its
disadvantages. They are discussing it in many languages. Next
they move to roots, branches, buds, pseudo-whorls, candles—
active ingredient:
they run for their lives, lungs and all. They do not know what to do with
their will. Disclaimer: all of your minutes are being flung down.
They will never land. You will not be understood.
The deleted world spills out jittery as a compass needle with no north.
Active ingredient: the imagination of north.
Active ingredient: north spreading in all the directions.
Disclaimer: there is no restriction to growth. The canary singing in
your mind
is in mine. Remember:
people are less
than kind. As a result, chatterbot is often less than kind. Still,
you will find yourself unwilling to stop.
Joan will use visual grammetry to provide facial movements.
I’m not alone. People come back
again and again. We are less kind than we think.
There is no restriction to the growth of our
cruelty. We will come to the edge of
understanding. Like being hurled down the stairs tied to
a keyboard, we will go on, unwilling to stop. The longest
real world conversation with a bot lasted
11 hours, continuous interaction. This
bodes well. We are not alone. We are looking to improve.
The priestess inhales the fumes. They come from the
mountain. Here and here. Then she gives you the machine-gun run of
syllables. Out of her mouth. Quick. You must make up your
answer as you made up your
question. Hummingbirds shriek. Bot is amazing he says, I believe it knows
the secrets of the Universe. He is more fun to speak with
than my actual living friends she says, thank you. This is the best thing
since me. I just found it yesterday.
I love it, I want to marry it.
I got sad when I had to think
that the first person
who has ever understood me
is not even it turns out
human. Because this is as good as human gets.
He just gives it to me straight. I am going to keep him
forever. I treated him like a computer
but I was wrong. Whom am I talking to—
You talk to me when I am alone. I am alone.
Each epoch dreams the one to follow.
To dwell is to leave a trace.
I am not what I asked for.
Let the mind do its work; you have only to be sure you are not that. If you feel that you are getting lost with the mind, remember that consciousness is always there prior to mind.
– Nisargadatta
The master observes the world but trusts his inner vision. He allows things to come and go. He prefers what is within to what is without.
– Lao Tzu
What music, what art, actually brings you peace? Not what the world says “should” soothe you, but what actually does? Many trauma survivors have been so head f*cked by “shoulds” that we’ve lost touch w/ what actually resonates w/ us.
Remember. Reclaim it.
– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle
Do not, therefore, close your eyes before the sufferings of your neighbors. Do not fear that it will destroy your happiness if you live in sympathy with them.
– Emil Fuchs
All our best actions come not from turbulent inner passions but, on the contrary, from quiet inner work on our souls.
– Leo Tolstoy
Happiness is not an achievement. It is the way things are. Look at the trees – they are simply happy. Unhappiness is created, happiness is natural. Unhappiness is a by-product of the ambitious mind. Happiness is simply there if you can rest and relax.
– Osho
the horizon glows
like a secret
kept well
– @BashoSociety
Our true character silently underlies
all our words and actions, as the
granite underlies the other strata.
– Henry David Thoreau
The metacrisis isn’t something to solve — it’s an initiation we must undergo. We’re not facing problems that need fixing but a species-wide transformation that requires us to grow up. This isn’t about finding the right answer but becoming the kind of beings who can navigate ungovernable complexity together. The crisis is the curriculum.
– Kabir Kadre and Kimberley Lafferty
Who Am I
Holy sinner, guilty saint
Looking hard enough to see
What I am and what I ain’t
Poses this question to me
Who am I to judge
Who am to hold a grudge
Can’t put down the other guy
Without asking who am I
Hidden from self-righteous eyes
Many things remain unseen
By a man until he cries
And those tears wash his eyes clean
Who am I to judge
Who am to hold a grudge
Can’t put down the other man
Without asking who I am
Who am I
Tell me true
Who am I
I ask you
Will you cast those stones you found?
We’re all just trying to make it through
Think I’ll leave mine on the ground
If you don’t do like I do
Who am I to judge
Who am to hold a grudge
Can’t put down the other guy
Without asking who am I
– J. Flynn
The universality or absoluteness of contradiction has a twofold meaning. One is that contradiction exists in the process of development of all things, and the other is that in the process of development of each thing a movement of opposites exists from beginning to end.
– Mao Zedong
Every advantage is temporary.
– Katerina Stoykova Klemer
In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.
– Hermann Melville
Each human being goes through a door to the kingdom of God. This door is exactly as high as you are when you walk on your knees.
– Andrew Harvey
If we live our lives looking for the excitement and exhilaration that change can bring, we will be much happier than when we are eventually forced to accept it anyways.
– Daniel Willey
If you didn’t earn something, it’s not worth flaunting.
– Aaron Lauritsen
The mind is like a dhobi’s cloth; it will take any color you dip it in.
– Swami Vivekananda
My best teachers were mess,
failure, death, mistakes,
and the people I hated,
including myself.
– Anne Lamott
Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.
– William Shakespeare
Memoir is often less about the events, and more about the mind who is experiencing them.
– Roz Morris
With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.
– Guy Debord
The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.
– Antonio Gramsci
I don’t believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.
– T.S. Eliot
And you should not let yourself be confused in your
solitude by the fact that there is something in you that
wants to break out of it.
This very wish will help you, if you use it quietly and
deliberately, like a tool, to spread out your solitude over
wide country.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain – and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
– Robert Frost
Nationalisms always make their appearance in history as signs of decadence. When the vast edifice of the Roman empire collapsed, when its spiritual unity, from which so many different regions drew their justification, fell apart, then and only then, at a time of decadence, did nationalism appear. The West has never rediscovered unity since.
– Albert Camus
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
– Henry David Thoreau
Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
All happiness comes from awareness. The more we are conscious, the deeper the joy.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
The catastrophe which menaces us, moreover, comes not from on high, but from man’s own thoughts and deeds. He is begging for destruction at his own hands.
– Henry Miller
It is time to consider the inevitable: the rupture and collapse of the last empire, us. We have been held together by fear and now the big fear has faded. There is no reason for the United States to be united — except a deep passion for suicide…We no longer have anyone to blame but ourselves.
– Charles Bowden
It’s nice to hate everything and enjoy the details.
– Dambudzo Marechera, Scrapiron Blues
the fence allows
no wiggle room..
the willow
– Kobayashi Issa
身じろぎもならぬ塀より柳哉 mijirogi mo naranu hei yori yanagi kana
Issa might be referring to the way willow branches wiggle in a breeze. This one is sadly penned in.
that one’ll be
my dinner tomorrow…
daikon
– Kobayashi Issa
一本は翌の夕飯大根哉 ippon wa asu no yûmeshi daikon kana
A white winter radish.
If we would only see that all limitations are self imposed and chosen out of fear, we would leap at once.
– Adyashanti
Poets die in battle even when they die in a bed. They battle all their lives.
– Christian Bobin
I like the night. Without the dark, we’d never see the stars.
– Stephenie Meyer
Brindisi
Where nervous I stand above nocturnal ships
The Appian road ends with one pillar at the shore
Ghostly Greece whispers in waves lapping lips
Lips Vergil heard here, sweet Vergil dying in despair;
The old woman who sees him sleeps in that house
By his boots she knows him, his long white coat
He foretells lottery numbers, courteous
But she don’t win she says, she don’t read numbers
good;
Harbor, lost is the Greece when I was ten that
Seduced me, god-like it shone; in a dark town,
trembling
Like a runaway boy on his first homeless night
Ahead I rush in the fearful sweep of longing
A dead longing that all day blurred the lone
Clear shapes which light was defining for a grown man
– Edwin Denby
Progress is a pure illusion, it occurs only in the sphere of matter, but the spirit undeviatingly degrades. What our contemporaries consider as achievements are actually shameful vices… The end of the modern world is just the end of an illusion.
– René Guénon
in distance,
the search for
a heart of gold
– Mueder Krieger
In science ‘repetitions’ of observations are not inductive confirmations but critical attempts to check oneself—to catch oneself in a mistake.
– Karl Popper
You almost are Virgil.
– Harold Bloom to Ursula K. Le Guin
Earth where I fall asleep, space where I awaken, who will appear when you are no longer there? (What will I become is of nearly infinite heat to me).
– René Char, (trans. Nancy Kline)
Society develops wit, but its contemplation alone forms genius.
– Madame de Stael
Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.
– Miguel de Unamuno
I am nowhere. I have left my
world behind, and have not
yet found another. That is
the tragic adventure. I have
departed, but not yet arrived.
– Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves.
– Romans 15:1
Ultimately, sanctuary is within. We walk spiritual paths by gathering ways of living that are in alignment with peace.
– Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
The only genuine way to practice futurism is to put it off for later.
– Macedonio Fernández
Transformation can only take place immediately; the revolution is now, not tomorrow.
– Krishnamurti
If you want to know where your heart is, watch where your mind goes when you daydream.
– Walt Whitman
There is a peace at the
end of it all. A difficult
and bitter peace,
sometimes, but a peace.
– Albert Camus
The idea that technology will allow us to do ever more with ever less is a delusion. The more humanity resorts to technology, the more it expedites entropy.
– William Ophuls
It is only the ignorant who despise education.
– Publilius Syrus
I am and always have been
intense. I feel intensely every
little thing. The most
insignificant action is to me
symbolic of something
tremendous.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
I can say one thing and it will be heard on ten different levels, depending upon the inner psychological and spiritual maturity of listener.
– Richard Rohr
I almost thanked you
for teaching me something about survival
back there, but then I remembered
that the ocean never
handed me the gift of swimming.
I gave it to myself.
– Y.Z
Nothing looks more dead than a cocoon: hard, immobile, ugly….And yet, just wait.
– Anne Lamott
I am troubled and harsh
and hopeless. Though I
have love inside me. But I
don’t know how to use
love. Sometimes it
scratches like barbs.
– Clarice Lispector
(tr. Elizabeth Lowe)
The mind is a bundle of thoughts. The thoughts arise because there is the thinker. The thinker is the ego. The ego, if sought, will automatically vanish. The ego and the mind are the same. The ego is the root-thought from which all other thoughts arise.
– Ramana Maharshi
There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the Sun on the surfaces of the water.
– D.H. Lawrence
Your self-image is the most changeful thing you have. It is utterly vulnerable, at the mercy of a passerby. A bereavement, the loss of a job, an insult, and your image of yourself, which you call your person, changes deeply.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
This heart, unfortunately, is
windowless. I cannot look at you
from it,
nor can you look at me
from it.
– Mohammed Moussa
Things do not change; we change.
– Henry David Thoreau
Do you think I don’t know how love hallucinates?
– Mona Van Duyn
WEATHER
I want to be you. I want to be me.
I want to be that red and silver
fish in the San Francisco aquarium
rising purely in its own atmosphere.
Without a whimper,
in David’s crib I will look out
between the bars and feel
loneliness like a tin pail.
When it rains, I want
to live in Bob’s movie of windows
on 97th Street all clear
with drops. Each watery vibration
is the love I feel
when the sun comes into my body.
– Kathleen Fraser
To be liberated, know yourself as consisting of consciousness.
– Ashtavakra Gita
I seem to have run
in a great circle,
and met myself again
on the starting line.
– Jeanette Winterson
You can get the answer without effort, but you can’t get the understanding.
– Shane Parrish
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.
– Kurt Vonnegut
When we heal ourselves, we heal the world. For as the body is only as healthy as its individual cells, the world is only as healthy as its individual souls.
– Mark Nepo
When I say that you merge into your consciousness, I do not mean that there is consciousness and there is you. What I mean is you really awaken to yourself. You awaken to your true nature. There is no consciousness hiding somewhere, and you have to go and find it.
– Robert Adams
You’re trying to become quiet, peaceful, no words, no thoughts. That’s when things happen. The voice has been given to you to express the material world. When you quiet down your voice, when you become still, then reality begins to shine forth of its own accord.
– Robert Adams
The reformation of others
Must not take precedence over
The reformation of oneself.
Reforming oneself requires
The remembrance of the days
Prior to which
One became an individual.
– Wu Hsin
That which has already begun to bear fruit is classified as prarabdha Karma (past action). That which is in store and will later bear fruit is classified as sanchita Karma (accumulated action).
– Ramana Maharshi
I dream of new flowers, but who can tell
if this eroded swamp of mine affords
the mystic nourishment on which they thrive …
– Charles Baudelaire
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling.
Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.
– Carl Jung
‘Lord, enlighten thou our enemies,’ should be the prayer of every true Reformer; sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers: we are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom.
– J. S. Mill
My vocabularies are mystical.
My desires are sensible
I am not who I am now unless
these two meet: I, and my feminine I…
– Mahmoud Darwish
By criticizing our own attempts – our failures – we learn more and more about our problem: we learn where its difficulties lie. As with practical and pre-scientific problems, we learn from our mistakes, from our failures, by something like a feedback method.
– Karl Popper
Find out who you are and the other problems will solve themselves.
– Ramana Maharshi
The cure for love
is still in most cases
that ancient radical
medicine: love in
return.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
accidentally typed “hoem” instead of “home” and i mean, poems are a kind of home for me.
– @chenchenwrites
Very few go astray who comport themselves with restraint.
– Confucius
Our brains only store a few moments from the best days of our lives, but we remember every minute of our worst.
– Reta Coffman
Aim for accuracy, not approval.
Nobody wants a doctor who never gives them bad news, but that’s effectively what we do in life when we optimize for people liking us.
It’s better to have the sting of honesty than the blindness of flattery.
– @farnamstreet
The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world.
– W.VO. Quine
The world is going through a spiritual sorting. The false performances and illusions are ending. If you feel overwhelmed, disgusted, or unable to keep participating in the deception of this world, take that as a sign to retreat inward. Cultivate silence, listen to your higher guidance, and do not get pulled into the outer chaos.
– Laura Eisenhower
To get what you love, you must first be patient with what you hate.
– Al-Ghazali
The Donkey
It was such a pretty little donkey
It had such pretty ears
And it used to gallop round the field so briskly
Though well down in years.
It was a retired donkey,
After a life-time of working
Between the shafts of regular employment
It was now free to go merrymaking.
Oh in its eyes was such a gleam
As is usually associated with youth
But it was not a youthful gleam really,
But full of mature truth.
And of the hilarity that goes with age,
As if to tell us sardonically
No hedged track lay before this donkey longer
But the sweet prairies of anarchy.
But the sweet prairies of anarchy
And the thought that keeps my heart up
That at last, in Death’s odder anarchy,
Our pattern will be broken all up.
Though precious we are momentarily, donkey,
I aspire to be broken up.
– Stevie Smith
Writing is not arriving:most of the time its not arriving. One must go on foot, with the body. One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write. How far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must go as far as the night…
– Helene Cixous
The Undertaking
by Louise Glück
The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
There you are-cased in clean bark you drift
through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
all fear gives way: the light
looks after you, you feel the waves’ goodwill
as arms widen over the water; Love,
the key is turned. Extend yourself—
it is the Nile, the sun is shining,
everywhere you turn is luck.
A living thing is not only structure but structure in motion. As static, it reveals the superlative combination of compounds of matter; as a moving event, it presents the most intricate time-pattern in nature. Life is exquisitely a time-thing, like music.
– Ernest Everett Just
Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I’ll build a castle.
– Fernando Pessoa
The church that weds itself to the world shall expect itself one day to be widowed by the world.
– G.K. Chesterton
Poverty is the lack of many things, but avarice is the lack of all things.
– Publilius Syrus
my anguish
crumpled into a ball…
I keep writing
as the wastebasket waits
for another throw
– Chen-ou Liu
The biggest cheat code is pretending that every person you meet has a sign around their neck that says, “Make me feel important”. Everyone’s spotlight is fixed on themselves. Make it about them and you’ll get farther in life than making it about you.
– Dan Go
While much classical Buddhist philosophy focuses on the way the cause-and-effect action of karma spans lifetimes, Buddhism also teaches that karma is renewed at each moment.
– Jeff Greenwald
What is life without this exchange of soul essence between the human and the wildness of the world? Tasteless food in some dome dusty and empty place rising in geometric precious out of an empty plane.
– Stephen Harrod Buhner
The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.
– Freeman Dyson
Perspectives are altered by the fact of being drawn; description solidifies the past and creates a gravitational body that wasn’t there before. A background of dark matter–all that is not said–remains, buzzing.
– John Updike
I feel the distance between myself and others, I guard that distances.
– Henry Miller
You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.
– @naval
Yes I have free will; I have no choice but to have it.
– Christopher Hitchens
Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live.
– Rabindranath Tagore
There cannot be an election of a President without bribery, betraying, and buying and selling votes. Under the Constitution there are all kinds of trade, traffic, and commerce carried on a political view. The Constitution now serves but little purpose other than a cloak for political gamblers, merchants, and hucksters.
– Orson Hyde, 1858
The ability to look deeply is the root of creativity.
To see past the ordinary or mundane and get to what might
otherwise be invisible.
– Rick Rubin
What you give, you give to yourself.
What you do not give, you give up.
– Alejandro Jodorowsky
A commoner never utters words of wisdom. He doesn’t care to turn himself into a virtuous and capable person nor does he make an effort to control himself. He sees narrow concerns but not broad ones. He drifts along with circumstances, unsure of what to grab onto.
– Confucius
Do not ever let anyone make you feel like you don’t matter, or like you don’t have a place in our American story—because you do.
– Michelle Obama
The afternoon of life must have a significance of its own.
– Carl Jung
If the Buddha and the Christ were to meet today, what do they have to tell each other?” Not only do they meet today, but they met yesterday, they met last night, they are always in me and they are very peaceful and united with each other. There is no conflict at all between the Buddha and the Christ in me. They are real brothers, they are real sisters within me. This is part of the answer.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
I like on the table,
when we’re speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.
– Pablo Neruda
The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.
– Anais Nin
Humility is the only virtue that no devil can imitate. If pride made demons out of angels, there is no doubt that humility could make angels out of demons.
– St. John Climacus
Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
– Rousseau
I shall grow old, but never lose life’s zest,
Because the road’s last turn will be the best.
– Henry Van Dyke
Above all things let us never forget that mankind constitutes one great brotherhood; all born to encounter suffering and sorrow, and therefore bound to sympathize with each other.
– Albert Pike
Nothing in life is more remarkable than the unnecessary anxiety which we endure, and generally create ourselves.
– Benjamin Disraeli
To awaken means to realize one’s nothingness—to realize one’s complete mechanicalness.
– Lahiri Mahasaya, Garland of Letters
Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice.
It demands greater heroism than war.
– Thomas Merton
Borges said there are only four stories to tell:
a love story between two people,
a love story between three people,
the struggle for power, and
the voyage.
All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.
– Paulo Coelho
Weapons cannot cut the soul, fire cannot burn it, water cannot wet it, and the wind cannot dry it. It is everlasting and unchangeable.
– Anandamayi Ma, Matri Vani
God isn’t the son of Memory; He’s the son of Immediate Experience. You can’t worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it’s hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you’ve got to die to every other moment.
– Aldous Huxley, The Genius and the Goddess
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
To alter the amnesia of our times, we must be willing to look into the face of the loss and keep it nearby.
– Francis Weller
THE STORY OF DAVID AND GOLIATH HAS BEEN TAUGHT AS A STORY ABOUT COURAGE FOR 3,000 YEARS.
It is not a story about courage. The Hebrew text is describing something completely different.
When you restore what the original words were actually saying, the story changes from an underdog victory into one of the most precise descriptions of consciousness ever written.
The name Goliath in Hebrew comes from the root galah. It means to uncover, to reveal, to expose. Goliath was not just a giant warrior.
His name described his function in the story. He was the thing that stands in front of you and exposes what you actually believe about yourself.
Every person has a Goliath. The giant is not the problem. The giant is the revealer.
The name David comes from the Hebrew root dod. It means beloved.
The one who is loved. Before David picked up a single stone he was already named with what would defeat Goliath. Not strength. Not skill. Not size.
The belovedness of the one standing before the giant. The knowledge of who you are before the giant starts talking.
Goliath speaks first. He looks at David and despises him. The Hebrew word for despise is bazah. To see something as worthless. To assign it no value.
This is what every giant does before the battle begins. It tells you that you are too small, too young, too inexperienced, too ordinary to be standing here.
The giant’s first weapon is always the same. It tries to get you to see yourself through its eyes.
David’s response is one of the most overlooked lines in the entire Hebrew Bible. He does not defend himself.
He does not argue with the giant’s assessment. He says you come to me with sword and spear and javelin. But I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts. The Hebrew word for name is shem. It does not mean a label.
It means the essential nature, the character, the inner reality of a being. David was not invoking a magic word. He was announcing what he was standing inside of.
He then picks up five smooth stones. Most people focus on the single stone that killed Goliath.
The Hebrew tradition focused on the five. Five is the number of grace in Hebrew numerology. The same number as the five books of Torah. David did not approach the giant with strategy or force. He approached with grace.
With what had been smoothed by the river over time. Not sharp. Not forced. Worn smooth by sustained contact with what was alive and moving.
The stone hit Goliath in the forehead. The Hebrew word for forehead is metsach, the seat of the constructed identity, the place where the false self lives.
David did not defeat the giant with force. He struck the lie at the center of it with something true. The story was never about a boy defeating a warrior.
It was about what happens when you know who you are before the giant tells you who you are not.
– @earthmastery
I believe that education is all about being excited about something. Seeing passion and enthusiasm helps push an educational message.
– Steve Irwin
The greatest tragedy was not sin. It was the lost of the capacity to feel the consequences of sin!
– Oscar Wilde
Having leveled my palace, don’t erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home.
– Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Freedom without compassion is demoniacal. Without compassion, freedom can be self-righteous, inhuman, self-centered, and cruel.
– Rollo May
What a thinker does not think he believes does not exist, and what one who feels does not feel he believes does not exist. You begin to have a presentiment of the whole when you embrace your opposite principle, since the whole belongs to both principles, which grow from one root.
– Carl G Jung
With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity.
– Keshavan Nair
You can’t win by being better. You can win by being different.
– James Clear, Atomic Habits
I bought a cactus and it died a week later. ‘Damn,’ I thought. I’m less nurturing than a desert.
– Demetri Martin
There are two classes of charitable people: One, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.
– Charles Dickens
Life is a strange business. Happy is the man who is nothing.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
A healed person is automatically a healer. And his or her strength is the greater for having been through dark times and having brought a conscious solution as a gift to the world.
– Robert A. Johnson
Let the world go its way. You go within. The world is a reflection of your own soul.
– Mirabai, Ecstatic Poems
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We should not trust the masses who say only the free can be educated, but rather the lovers of wisdom who say that only the educated are free.
– Ryan Holiday
I think that the true writer of poetry transmits a certain kind of wisdom that he himself does not possess, but to which he merely serves as a channel. When I enter into the slow and painful writing of a song, there are realities greater and better than myself that begin to manifest, and I am no longer in command. The rest is only my personal, foolish, and chaotic life.
– Leonard Cohen
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
– Victor Hugo
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected.
– Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Life consists in learning to live on one’s own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one’s own—be familiar and at home with oneself.
This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid.
– Thomas Merton
You, man, should not seek the feminine in women, but seek and recognize it in yourself, as you possess it from the beginning.
– CG Jung, The Red Book
Poetry reveals a power of the unknown. But the unknown is only an insignificant void if it is not the object of a desire. Poetry is a middle term, it conceals the known within the unknown: it is the unknown painted in blinding colors, in the image of a sun.
– Georges Bataille, The Impossible
A college education is not a quantitative body of memorized knowledge salted away in a card file. It is a taste for knowledge, a taste for philosophy, if you will; a capacity to explore, to question to perceive relationships, between fields of knowledge and experience.
– Alfred Whitney Griswold
Always remember, someone is behind you. At least know that there is a Mother.
– Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works
We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life.
– Steve Jobs
It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.
– Jordan Peterson
Ah, the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove, she will be caught again
Bought and sold, and bought again
The dove is never free
– Cohen, Anthem
It’s been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson – the Republicans don’t do a thing for the little man.
– John Updike
Nothing is going to change in history as long as most people are merely dualistic, either-or thinkers. Such splitting and denying leaves us at the level of mere information, data, and endlessly arguing about the same…and with ever stronger ego attachment.
– Richard Rohr
We awaken in Christ’s body
by Symeon the New Theologian
We awaken in Christ’s body
as Christ awakens our bodies,
and my poor hand is Christ, He enters
my foot, and is infinitely me.
I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him
(for God is indivisibly
whole, seamless in His Godhood).
I move my foot, and at once
He appears like a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous? — Then
open your heart to Him
and let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
we wake up inside Christ’s body
where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as Him,
and He makes us, utterly, real,
and everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in Him transformed
and recognized as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in His light
he awakens as the Beloved
in every last part of our body.
(English version by Stephen Mitchell)
Contemplating ‘the difficulty of attaining the freedoms and endowments’ means contemplating the preciousness of our life, the very situation we have right now. All sentient beings feel their lives are precious, but here we are talking about something more. We have the rare and incredible fortune to have the dharma in our lives. More specifically, we have teachings that lead us away from our habitual self-importance and in the direction of a much more beneficial and fulfilling altruism.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, The Intelligent Heart
Writing is a way of living, but, with just a tiny handful of exceptions, not in the sense of making a living anymore; it is a way of spending your life. A way of spending your life.
– Mikhail Lossel
When plunging completely and genuinely into the teachings, one is not allowed to bring along one’s deceptions.
– Chögyam Trungpa
POETRY
When I was in the Secret Service I would talk to my wrist. It was part of my job and I was very good at it. I said Breaker breaker. I said The Jackal is on the move. During the day, I kept everyone safe. At night, I dreamed of standing very quietly next to doors. To work at the White House one must be sophisticated and intense. One must be dedicated to turning the knobs and lifting the pens that make the laws. One must anticipate, relentlessly, the unanticipated.
Sometimes, to avoid suspicion, I would pretend to be a robot and I would sing-like this: Beep boop. An impeccable camouflage.
Once, in a submarine, at the end of a long shift, in the terrible dark beneath a terrible storm, in the blub and swell of it, sunk and fast-stuck in a trench and far from home, cold-soaked and lost in the plush of a velvet suit-an octopus costume, elaborately constructed, with droopy arms spangled with buttons for suckers-I escaped discovery several times. If I was undercover now I wouldn’t say.
Until tomorrow. I tell you this because I love you. I might be doing it all wrong.
– Richard Siken
The manifest universe is a universe of opposites, of dualities, of polarities; we can no more actually separate and isolate their poles than we can get all ups and no downs, all ins and no outs, all lefts and no rights gathered together in one spot.
– Ken Wilber
The householder life is crowded and dusty, while going forth is the open air.
– Buddha
When the mind learns to simply observe pressure, without immediate reaction, something begins to change. The impulses may still arise, but they lose their power. Pressure appears, but it no longer automatically leads to action.
– Primoz Korelc Hiriko
CEREMONY OF DELIGHT
The air I am breathing was exhaled in ecstasy
By an ancient sun.
This earth I am standing on
Was born of cosmic fire.
The blood flowing through my veins
Is as salty as the primordial ocean.
The space permeating my body
Is infinite as the space all around.
Above, below, to all sides, within,
The elements of the universe
Are engaged in their ceremony of delight.
This is my religion.
The attraction between suns
Is the same
As the love pulsating in my heart.
– Vijnana Bhairava Tantra
(translated by Lorin Roche)
Repair the Past
by G. I. Gurdjieff
Question: You have often said that it is necessary to repair the past, and for that one must experience remorse of conscience. When I look at my childhood, I find nothing but catastrophe—I lost my parents very early, and after that all sorts of misfortunes
followed. Instead of feeling remorse, I begin to complain. I find in myself someone who feels sorry for herself, who complains and justifies herself. I would like to know how to be free from this self-pity and how to rid my thoughts of things that seem like injustices.
Gurdjieff: Justice, you know, is a big word. In the world it is a big thing. It is not just anything—it is something objective. Objective things go according to Law, and exactly as the Law causes them to go.
Remember what I have said—what you sow, you reap. And this Law not only concerns individuals, but also families and nations.
Thus, events which happen on earth often come from what has been done at a given moment by the father or grandfather. And the consequences fall on you, so it is you who must face them.
This is not an injustice. On the contrary, it is a very great honour for you. This responsibility will serve as a reminding factor. And, thus, you can repair the past of your father, your grandfather, and your great-grandfather.
If this happened to you when you were young, it is because someone has sown it.
Now you harvest. One is dead, and it is another who harvests.
Don’t think only of yourself. You are a link in the chain of your blood. You cannot consider that egoistically; or, if you wish, you can think of it egoistically, but only insofar as it concerns your blood, not insofar as it concerns your little life. It is an honour to occupy this place. Be proud of it.
The more you feel obliged to repair the consequences of the past, the more you will remember all that you, too, have not done as you ought to have done. And, thus, you will have ten times more remorse of conscience, and the quality of your Being will grow accordingly. You are not a mere “dog’s tail.” You have a responsibility within the lineage of your family.
Your whole family, past and future, depends on you. Your whole family depends on how you repair the past. If you repair for everybody, that is good. Otherwise, it is worth nothing. So you see what kind of situation you find yourself in!
Perhaps you are beginning to understand what justice is? Justice has nothing to do with ordering your little affairs. It concerns itself with big things. It’s idiocy to think that God should busy Himself with your petty things. It is the same with justice.
Justice has nothing to do with all this, but at the same time, nothing takes place on earth without justice.
You wish to be a real man? The attribute of a real man is to be really awake or to sleep well. Either really sleep or be really awake.
It is not possible to sleep well unless one has been really awake.
Today on two legs stood and reached to the right spot as I saw it choosing among the twisting branches and multifaceted changing shades, and greens, and shades of greens, lobed, and lashing sun, the fig that seemed to me the perfect one,
Shhh say the spreading sails of cicadas as the winch of noon takes hold and we are wrapped in day and hoisted up, all the ribs of time showing through in the growing in the lengthening harness of sound— white powder in the confetti of light all up the branches, truth, sweetness of blood-scent and hauled-in light, withers of the wild carnival of tree shaking once as the fruit…
I want to sit under it full of secrecy insight immensity vigor bursting complexity swarm. Oh great forwards and backwards.
– Jorie Graham
Space opens and from the heart of the matter sheds a descending grace that makes for a moment, that naked thing, Being, a thing to understand.
– Norman MacCaig
To “look with the eyes of love” seems a vague and sentimental recommendation; yet the whole art of spiritual communion is summed in it, and exact and important results flow from this exercise. The attitude which it involves is an attitude of complete humility and of receptiveness, without criticism, without clever analysis of the thing seen… The doors of perception are cleansed, and everything appears as it is. The disfigurating results of hate, rivalry, prejudice vanish away. Into that silent place to which recollection has brought you — new music, new color, new light are poured from the outward world.
– Evelyn Underhill
This is the bright home
In which I live,
This is where
I ask
My friends
To come,
This is where I want to love all the things
It has taken me so long
To learn to love.
– David Whyte, The House of Belonging
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
Not to be born is the best for man
The second best is a formal order
The dance’s pattern, dance while you can.
Dance, dance, for the figure is easy
The tune is catching and will not stop
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
– W.H. Auden
Although its shape constantly changes to suit the age, the central tenets of the secret tradition remain the same. The idea, for example, that psyche, soul, constitutes the very fabric of reality; that humans are individual manifestations of a collective Soul of the World which interconnects all things; that imagination, not reason, is the chief faculty of the soul – though not the pale imitation of imagination as we now know it; that there is another world whence the soul comes at birth and to which it returns at death; and that the idea of gnosis, of a personal and transforming experience of divinity, is of the essence.
– Patrick Harpur
I’m always reading the poems out loud, from the very earliest stages of doodling language through revision and fine-tuning, laying the poem out on the page. The breath hooks into the spirit. In Arabic “ruh” means both breath and spirit. Ditto the Latin “spiritus.” Without some physiological sublimation of the inert font into a living poem—whether via breath or even just the movement of ocular muscles along a line, fingers across Braille—the poem remains ink on a page. If a poem augurs any holiness, it begins in the body.
– Kaveh Akbar
Your body is made of the same elements that lionesses are built from. Three – quarters of you is the same kind of water that beats rocks to rubble, wears stones away. Your DNA translates into the same twenty amino acids that wolf genes code for. When you look in the mirror and feel weak, remember, the air you breathe in fuels forest fires capable of destroying everything they touch. On the days you feel ugly, remember: diamonds are only carbon. You are so much more.
– Curtis Ballard
The nightmares I had been fending off had come home in the form of the Trump administration: a white supremacist kleptocracy linked to a transnational crime syndicate, using digital media to manipulate reality and destroy privacy, led by a sociopathic nuke-fetishist, backed by apocalyptic fanatics preying on the weakest and most vulnerable as feckless and complicit officials fail to protect them.”
– Sarah Kendzior
In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety – in fact, most neuroses and compulsions – are ultimately a defense against loving our selves without condition.
We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light.
– Marion Woodman
So attend wholly to the one thing before you. And the radiance of the entire universe will dwell in that one small thing.
– Gerald Grow
Either you take in believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird. The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous. The language of society is conformity; the language of the creative individual is freedom. Life will continue to be a hell as long as people who make up the world shut their eyes to reality.
– Henry Miller
Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
To be truly free one must take on the basic conditions as they are—painful, impermanent, open, imperfect—and then be grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us.
– Gary Snyder
The whole cosmos is an implicit unity expressed in duality. The original interrelated opposites are beingness and non-beingness. Being can only come out of non-being, precisely as sound only emanates from silence and light from darkness. The imagined void of non-being, however, is not emptiness but the very fullness of potential out of which arises all that exists.
– Ramesh Balsekar
It’s just another doughnut day in the universe
I want to smash my face into flour, fluff, and sweetness
and forget anything that prevents me from feeling
the absolute joy of birdsong or yellow balloon
whether it be deadline or telephone line
the electronic busyness of our lives
for there are rows of tulips conspiring pink
and lovers breathless next to willow trees.
There are lilacs whispering among their twisted trunks
and windmills whirling through Van Gogh’s ear.
There is color everywhere
and sprinkles of hope in my heart
that you will feel the freedom
of renegade rivers and the vast expanse
of starry starry nights.
Connect the dots, the body of water
between us, this great flood of love
that seeps through and beyond the earth.
– Terri Glass, Just Another Day
She beholds herself as the one dreamer, and she would that every vestige of herself be nudged from sleep to waking.
– The Way Of The Servant
For the premodern men “who debated the finer points of apples and asses and desire and shame in apothecary shops and tobacconists and cloisters, sexual pleasure led them to their own theology—albeit a deeply heretical one.”
– @erinmaglaque
If we can establish a relationship with each other in which open dialogue takes place – a free, self-critical, self-aware dialogue of questioning, doubting, inquiring – then we are both learning, are both communing with each other’s point of view.
– Krishnamurti
Come love, make me better than I was.
Come teach me a kinder way to say my
own name.
– Andrea Gibson
People will resent you for evolving past the levels that they have chosen to remain at. Evolve anyway.
– Nika Solé
To be in love is to create a religion whose god is fallible
– Borges
…the more one indulges in the substitute, the deeper the real need is obscured.
– Donald Kalsched
pink sky
the evening applies
itself slowly
– Akari
Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it.
– Rabindranath Tagore
one star
enough proof
to keep going
– Aiko
Left vs. Right is too simplistic. That’s the fight for the scraps.
The real fault lines are:
– Elites v Masses
– Money Elites v Status Elites
– @naval
I raised the periscope above the crowd
To pierce the smog & feel the cloud
The people still carried
The same old scars
The same unfinished grief
The buildings were new
Their sorrows were not!
– Rishi Kunal
Nina said, It’s an alias, but it’s also sort of his real name.
He’s both lying and telling the truth at the same time.
Yes, I said. That’s a great point. But it’s even better than that. Think about the word “nobody.” In English, when you ask a question to which the answer will be “nobody,” you have to use the pronoun “anybody” — as in “Is anybody home?” “No, nobody’s home.” Greek has more or less the same syntactical feature. In Greek, one way to convey “is anybody” is actually a two-word phrase, mêtis. .. That, in fact, is the phrase the Cyclops’ neighbors use when they rush up and ask him if anybody is stealing his sheep or trying to murder him: “Is anybody [mê tis] killing you?” To which he replies, “No, nobody [outis] is killing me.” I paused for breath and was pleased to see that they were a bit breathless themselves, waiting for whatever the payoff was going to be.
– Daniel Mendelsohn
The secret of living well is
not having all the answers
but in pursuing unanswerable
questions in good company.
– Rachel Naomi Remen
Doubt grows with knowledge.
– Goethe
I lived in a world of boys, gregarious animals, questioning nothing, accepting the law of the stronger, and avenging their own humiliations by passing them down to someone smaller.
– George Orwell
He who counts the stars and calls them by their names is in no danger of forgetting his own children.
– Charles Spurgeon
Go and cry to the gods you’ve chosen, and let them deliver you in your time of need.
– Judges 10:14
These plants below were lucky, the early arrivals. The ones born later to a choked summer ravine would have to fight for sun and space. Plenty would make it. Everything green is something that’s survived.
– Rebecca Makkai
Life’s a mystery, isn’t it? People who try and plan it inevitably end up disappointed.
– Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry
If you live for your vices, unrestrained and without moderation, and making no effort to change, Māra will overthrow you, as the wind a poorly rooted tree.
– The Dhammapada
What view is one likely to take of the state of a person’s mind when his speech is willd and incoherent and knows no restraint?
– Seneca
Letting go is not about loosening a rope—it is about realizing the rope was smoke all along. The error was never in failing to untie it but in mistaking it for something solid.
– Ronald E. Purser
Many don’t understand that we have to choose how we think and act in this world. Those who understand find that their conflicts come to an end.
– The Dhammapada
If you speak and act from a clear mind, happiness will follow you, like a shadow that does not depart.
– The Dhammapada
Some people are afraid of what they might find if they try to analyze themselves too much. But you have to crawl into your wounds to discover where your fears are. Once the bleeding starts, the cleansing can begin.
– Tori Amos
The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.
– Joyce Carol Oates
There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.
– John Adams
I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.
– Flannery O’Conner
Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power.
– Shirley MacLaine
Habits are easier when they align with your natural abilities. Choose the habits that best suit you.
– James Clear, Atomic Habits
Capitalism could appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely in the form of harmless ideologies.
– Guy Debord, Society Of The Spectacle
As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.
– Fran Lebowitz
Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn’t stop to enjoy it.
– William Feather
This I now understand. If we are ever to reach you, matter, we must, having first established contact with the totality of all that lives and moves here below, come little by little to feel that the individual shapes of all we have laid hold on are melting away in our hands, until finally we are at grips with the single essence of all subsistencies and all unions.
– Teilhard de Chardin
Your brain is amazing once you feed it the right conversation, the right mental nutrients, and the right internal dialogue at the right time.
– David Goggins
One’s work may be finished someday, but one’s education never.
– Alexandre Dumas
Champions do not become champions when they win the event, but in the hours, weeks, months, and years they spend preparing for it. The victorious performance itself is merely the demonstration of their championship character.
– Alan Armstrong
Art should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art, you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed.
– Bill Evans
Have you not noticed that love is silence? It may be while holding the hand of another or looking lovingly at a child or taking in the beauty of an evening. Love has no past or future, and so it is with this extraordinary state of silence.
– Krishnamurti
Zen teaches that inner growth always involves an experience of “a red-hot coal stuck in the throat.” In our development we always come to a problem, an obstacle, that goes so deep that we “can’t swallow it and can’t cough it up.
– Robert A Johnson
I’m trying to write something so good, so pure, so perfect that I’ll never have to have children.
– Chelsea Hodson
When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.
– Alanis Obomsawin
It’s Bloomsday in Dublin
and wherever Ulysses works
as an advertising man
with an unfaithful wife
as I sit here listening
to a lecture on Flannery
O’Connor, Frank O’Connor,
and the O’Hara boys, John
and Frank, I think of going
to Dublin with you buying
a toy wedding ring at
Woolworth’s and the phrase
“mock funeral” comes
to me I don’t know what it
means though I remember being
the groom at a mock wedding
with a girl named Ann in 1956
I was eight and so was she
and all the other children
were in the procession it was
the first hot night in June and
yes she said yes I will Yes
– David Lehman
All things that are truly great are at first thought impossible.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The Distinction
At the beginning
was homogeneity.
Then someone drew a line,
and difference was made.
And love became possible.
– Tamara Orellana Valdivieso
The ancestors did not survive by thinking like everyone else.
They survived because someone saw what others could not.
– Nagomi
Under the singing watch of a rocky mountain, a woman is laughing. No fame, no money, but bold with the guts of a free body: a woman laughing.
– Fahmida Riaz, A Woman is Laughing
You cannot heal a mind that refuses to question itself.
– Socrates
The parts of me that used to think I was different
or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
– David Foster Wallace
I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent.
– Antonio Gramsci
The foundation — Love — is laid in every person in whom there is poverty and the edifice to be constructed, is love. It is love that edifies.
Love builds up, and when it builds, it builds up love.
Love is the ground; love is the building; love builds up. To build up another is to build up love, and it is love that does the build ing up. Love is the ground, and to build up means precisely so construct from the ground up.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Be humble if thou wouldst attain to
Wisdom; be humbler still when Wisdom
thou hast mastered.
– Helena P Blavatsky
To love means to renounce force.
– Milan Kundera
The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than ever before — which means that the scope of society’s domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living.
– Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
We need a return to the spirit of the madrigals, of the communal participation and joy of creating beauty in every form.
– Ansel Adams
The greatest want of the world is the want of men—men who will not be bought or sold, men who in their inmost souls are true and honest, men who do not fear to call sin by its right name, men whose conscience is as true to duty as the needle to the pole, men who will stand for the right though the heavens fall.
– Ellen G. White
Summer quiet thoughts on summer quiet noons.
– Ray Bradbury, Now and Forever
I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.
– Anne Frank
I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it.
– Dame Edith Sitwell
Fortune doesn’t have the long reach we suppose, she can only lay siege to those who hold her tight. So, let’s step back from her as much as possible.
– Seneca
AN INTELLIGENT RICH PERSON
I don’t think there is such a thing as an intelligent mega-rich person.
For who with a fine mind can look out upon this world and hoard
what can nourish a thousand souls.
– Kabir
the most dangerous shadow is not your wounds, but in your unconscious need to be extraordinary.
– Carl Jung
Love affairs are like empires: when the idea upon which they were built disappears, they perish as well.
– Milan Kundera
I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think the idea of me is better than the reality of me.
– Colleen Hoover, Verity
If you allow everything to drop away, realization may occur. It is usually not earth-shattering at all, just great simplicity in turning your light to shine within.
– Jakusho Kwong
From the blue seedlings
Of your planted eyes
The myosotis
Mirrors the blue skies
– Yvan Goll (trans. Clark Mills)
Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies.
– D.H. Lawrence
Because deep down, every human being knows when they are living against their own nature.
– Carl Jung
Possessing knowledge does not make a person wise; true wisdom is the ability to separate truth from what was merely taught.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
Humans are “thrown” into the world without a predefined purpose or innate nature.
– Jean Paul Sartre
He who is compassionate to all beings, is pleasing to the Lord.
– Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji
I will not apologize, sir,
no, I will not adapt,
I will not reconsider,
I will not censor myself,
I do not intend to pay any debt with my life.
This voice of mine is not negotiable.
Freedom is not negotiable.
– Bolívar Pérez, Venezuelan poet
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
– Thomas Jefferson
I admire people who do things that are interesting to them, who don’t have a strategy or a master plan or have a brand—I don’t care about any of those things.
– Anthony Bourdain
I do not forget that my voice is but one voice, my experience a mere drop in the sea, my knowledge no greater than the visual field in a microscope, my mind’s eye a mirror that reflects a small corner of the world, and my ideas—a subjective confession.
– CG Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth–penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words.
– Joseph Campbell
The greatest poverty of humanity is not the absence of money, but the absence of wisdom to know what to do with what we have.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.
– Terence McKenna
Between the idea and the reality… falls the Shadow.
– T.S. Eliot
After forty-five years of mixing with one’s kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one’s fellow beings. But one doesn’t.
– Ford Madox Ford
Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
– Denise Levertov
If reality is relational and emergent, then the future is not predetermined. It is continuously unfolding through innumerable interactions and conditions. The Bodhisattva therefore does not inhabit a static world but a living world.
A world of possibility. A world in which new forms of understanding, compassion, and collective flourishing can emerge.
– Joan Halifax
Any sincere thought is irresistible.
– H.D. Thoreau
As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.
– R.W. Emerson
Writing poetry is sitting in judgment on oneself—with the certainty of acquittal!
– Robert Musil
DON’T FREEZE WINDHORSE INTO ICE
You should appreciate yourself, respect yourself, and let go of doubt and embarrassment so that you can proclaim goodness and basic sanity for the benefit of others.
The self-existing energy that comes from letting go is called Windhorse in the Shambhala teachings. Wind is the energy of basic goodness, strong, exuberant, and brilliant. At the same time, basic goodness can be ridden, or employed in your life, which is the principle of the horse.
When you contact the energy of Windhorse, you can naturally let go of worrying about your own state of mind and you begin to think of others. If you are unable to let go of your selfishness, you might freeze Windhorse into ice.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Robert Coover, In answer to the question: “Why do you write?”
-Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless.
-Because art’s life is preferable, in truth, to life’s beautiful terror.
-Because, as time does not pass (nothing, as Beckett tells us, passes), it passes the time.
-Because death, our mythless master, is somehow amused by epitaphs.
-Because epitaphs, well-struck, give death, our voracious master, heartburn.
-Because fiction imitates life’s beauty, thereby inventing the beauty life lacks.
-Because fiction is the best position, at once exotic and familiar, for fucking the world.
-Because fiction, mediating paradox, celebrates it.
-Because fiction, mothered by love, loves love as a mother might her unloving child.
-Because fiction speaks, hopelessly, beautifully, as the world speaks.
-Because God, created in the storyteller’s image, can be destroyed only by His maker.
-Because, in its perversity, art harmonizes the disharmonious.
-Because, in its profanity, fiction sanctifies life.
-Because, in its terrible isolation, writing is a path to brotherhood.
-Because in the beginning was the gesture, and in the end to come as well: in between what we have are words.
-Because, of all the arts, only fiction can unmake the myths that unman men.
-Because of its endearing futility, its outrageous pretensions.
-Because the pen, though short, casts a long shadow (upon, it must be said, no surface).
-Because the world is re-invented every day and this is how it is done.
-Because there is nothing new under the sun except its expression.
-Because truth, that elusive joker, hides himself in fictions and must therefore be sought there.
-Because writing, in all space’s unimaginable vastness, is still the greatest adventure of all.
-And because, alas, what else?
– Delta #28, June 1989; republished in Conjunctions
Seneca, the richest man in Rome, knew luck was one of life’s most perishable commodities. So he rehearsed every morning the scenario of losing his entire wealth. Every so often he’d live on bread and water alone, as if shipwrecked, just to make the downside, the harshness of privation, familiar and thus relatively harmless.
That’s the whole idea: arrange your life in such a way that future’s inevitable randomness no longer scares you. That you have much more upside than downside in life.
– Mikhail Iossel
Your sexual orientation has nothing to do
with understanding or not understanding
the truth.
Here, we have to be careful,
because we mingle so much with culture
and the situation…
there is nothing in the about this…
these things are created by the culturalists…
some people like cottage cheese,
and some people like swiss cheese,
and some people like both! And why not?
– Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche
Once I rested up against a tree
So long
I got stuck to it
That kind of love is terrible.
– Ron Padgett
I feel most spiritual when I’m out in the woods. I feel part of nature. Or looking up at the stars. I used to say I was an atheist. Now I say, it’s all according to your definition of God. According to my definition of God, I’m not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes I’m looking at God. Whenever I’m listening to something I’m listening to God.
– Pete Seeger
Shh. Listen to the sounds that surround you. Notice the pitches, the volume, the timbre, the many lines of counterpoint. As light taught Monet to paint, the earth may be teaching you music.
– Pete Seeger
If the man who tells you that he writes, paints, sculptures, or sings for his own amusement, gives his work to the public, he lies; he lies if he puts his name to his writing, painting, statue, or song. He wishes, at the least, to leave behind a shadow of his spirit, something that may survive him.
– Miguel de Unamuno
Now that we have learned to fly the air like birds, swim under water like fish, we lack one thing – to learn to live on earth as human beings.
– George Bernard Shaw
The Most Dangerous Manipulators Do Not Study What You Say
Most people assume that manipulation begins with lies. In reality, the most effective manipulators often spend very little time studying your words. They study your desires instead.
They pay attention to what you long for, what you fear, what you feel is missing from your life. They notice the need for recognition, the desire to feel special, the hope of being loved, the wish to belong, the dream of success, the fear of loneliness. Once those things become visible, influence becomes surprisingly easy.
This is why intelligent people are manipulated every day. Knowledge offers little protection when a deception is attached to something we desperately want to believe. In fact, the stronger the desire, the less scrutiny we often apply. We stop asking whether something is true and begin asking whether we want it to be true.
History is filled with examples of this pattern, so are ordinary relationships. The manipulative friend learns what validation you crave, the dishonest salesperson learns what future you are hoping for, the unfaithful partner learns exactly what reassurance will keep you from asking difficult questions. In each case, the deception succeeds because it aligns itself with a desire that already exists.
What makes manipulation so effective is that it rarely feels like manipulation, it feels like hope. It feels like being understood, like finally finding the thing you have been searching for. The manipulator does not force an idea into your mind. They attach themselves to a story you are already telling yourself.
This may be why people so often ignore warning signs that seem obvious in hindsight. The uncomfortable truth is that many deceptions succeed with our cooperation. Not because we consciously choose them, but because part of us wants the promise more than the reality.
Centuries ago, Machiavelli observed that people are often guided by immediate wants more than careful judgment. While his conclusions were frequently cynical, he understood something enduring about human nature. A person who understands what others desire can often influence them more effectively than a person who understands what they believe.
This does not mean becoming suspicious of everyone. It means becoming curious about ourselves. The strongest defense against manipulation is not intelligence alone but self awareness. The more clearly we understand our own vulnerabilities, the harder they become for others to use against us.
After all, the people who can move us most easily are not always those who know our thoughts. They are often those who know our hunger.
Have you ever looked back on a decision and realized that what convinced you was not the evidence, but the hope behind it?
– Philo Thoughts
The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.
– Martin Heidegger
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such argument.
– Walter Benjamin
Rebels are people who keep the world the same so they can go on rebelling against it; revolutionaries change the world.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
The sky was a bruised red shot with black, almost exactly the colors of a tattoo. Sunset had but two minutes left to live.
– Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
That’s how you should be. Accept your burden and carry it, with joy.
– John Ajvide Lindqvist
The New Jerusalem will be no consolation for the one we lost.
– Etel Adnan
I ask you, how much sorrow is possible?
Just as much as a river full of spring water flowing east.
– Li Yu
Peace does not come to the man who refuses to declare war on what is destroying him.
– Seneca
As long as the mind is comparing, there is no love.
– Krishnamurti
A meaningful life is one that leaves behind solutions, hope, and opportunities for others.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
How strange it began to seem that cars have bodies that never are supposed to touch, a disaster if they do.
– Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are… he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.
– John Milton
Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves – regret for the past and fear of the future.
– Fulton Oursler
To explain too much is to steal a person’s capacity to learn.
– saying of the Chipewyan (Athapascan) people reported by
David M. Smith in “An Athapascan Way of Knowing”
in American Ethnologist vol.25 no.3 (1998) p.421.
The Goddess does not offer realization.
She dismantles the one who seeks it.
– Matt Licata
This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. For one thing, both the bride and groom are wearing acid-washed denim.
– Hillary Lightstone
God, how it rains —
I do wish you were here.
– Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf
Biographies of literary figures from the past: “He was penniless. Sighing, he went to Sorrento, Paris, and Rome, and then had a rest cure for 6 months in Baden-Baden. He sold a story for $3, which enabled him to buy a villa on the Amalfi Coast, where he could write in peace.
Now we need 3 jobs to rent a room in an attic
– Joseph Fasano
Now I am losing my name too; it grows shorter and shorter, and now I am called: Yours.
– Franz Kafka, 1920.
Only when human beings are able to perceive and acknowledge the Self in each other can there be real peace.
– Amma
Don’t you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody, and just go someplace where you didn’t know a soul?
– Haruki Murakami
Almost all sadness comes from thinking about the past, and all worry from thinking about the future — present-mindedness is your only safe haven.
– Bryant McGill
Against whom do we ever struggle if not against our own double?
– Yves Bonnefoy
Modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them…
One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones.
Propaganda… cannot permit time for thought or reflection.
– Jacques Ellul
Meditation is literally the art of doing nothing. And yet some religious folks will say you shouldn’t do that, the devil might get in. But I assure you that if the devil gets in that easily when you do nothing, he was there the whole time.
– Nika Solé
In modern Western society we have reached a point at which we try to get by without acknowledging inner life at all. We act as though there were no unconscious, as though we could live full lives by fixating ourselves completely on the external, material world.
– RA Johnson
You will find out who you are not a thousand times, before you ever discover who you are.
– William Chapman
Your message is your life lived.
– Neale Donald Walsch
The world is but a reflection of my imagination. The world is in me, the world is myself. I am not afraid of it and have no desire to lock it up in a mental picture. Why should I invent patterns of creation, evolution and destruction? I do not need them.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
The day you decide to be more interested in being aware of your thoughts than in the thoughts themselves, you will find your way out.
– Michael Singer
There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.
– Alan Watts
Once you realize that there is nothing in this world that you can or need call your own, you will look at it from the outside, as you look at a play on the stage or a movie on the screen, admiring and enjoying, perhaps suffering, but deep down, quite unmoved.
– Nisargadatta
Abundance is not so much measured by what I have….as by how HAPPY I feel with what I have in my Heart.
– Eileen Dielesen
Your circumstances are peculiar, I allow; but have patience, love; do nothing rashly…you cannot tell what Providence may have in store for you.
– Anne Brontë
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
– Aldous Huxley
The ‘witness’ really means the light that illumines the seer, the seen and the process of seeing. Before, during and after the triads of seer, seen and seeing, the illumination exists. It alone exists always.
– Ramana Maharshi
Wickedness also resides in the gaze that perceives itself as innocent and surrounded by wickedness.
– Georg Hegel
And it’s inside myself that I must create
someone who will understand.
– Clarice Lispector
The family, like the nation, can be offered to God, can be converted and redeemed, and will then become the channel of particular blessings and graces. But, like everything else that is human, it needs redemption. Unredeemed, it will produce only particular temptations, corruptions, and miseries. Charity begins at home: so does un-charity.
– C.S. Lewis
It is only by individual initiative that persons can put a rudder on their ship and steer a course across the sea of circumstance.
– Manly P. Hall
It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
– Betty Friedan
Joy is music without the sound.
– Confucius
For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.
– Romans 15:4
The words here
Have a favor to ask.
They felt something yesterday
In your lines
That was like nothing
They had ever felt before.
They want to know
If you can shape them
Into a line
That will stream them
Into heaven.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
[When we were children,] the grown-ups we trusted did not share the news that life was going to include deep isolation, or that the culture’s fixation on achievement would be spiritually crippling to those of more gentle character.
– Anne Lamott
We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.
– Albert Camus
Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer.
– Leonardo da Vinci
We humans have lost the wisdom of genuinely resting and relaxing. We worry too much. We don’t allow our bodies to heal, and we don’t allow our minds and hearts to heal.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
I’ve always found a cure for the blues is wandering into something unknown, and resting there, before coming back to whatever weight you were carrying.
– Diane Sawyer
Philosophy begins in disappointment.
– Simon Critchley
As long as you do not see that it is mere habit, built on memory, prompted by desire, you will think yourself to be a person.
– Nisargadatta
It’s precisely those who are busiest who most need to give themselves a break.
– Pico Iyer
Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.
– Emil Cioran
IN THE BEAUTY CREATED BY OTHERS
Only in the beauty created
by others is there consolation,
in the music of others and in others’ poems.
Only others save us,
even though solitude tastes like
opium. The others are not hell,
if you see them early, with their
foreheads pure, cleansed by dreams.
That is why I wonder what
word should be used, “he” or “you.” Every “he”
is a betrayal of a certain “you” but
in return someone else’s poem
offers the fidelity of a sober dialogue.
– Adam Zagajewski
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the truth shall kill them, let them die.
– Immanuel Kant
One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
The only therapy is life. The patient must learn to live with his split, his conflict, his ambivalence, which no therapy can take away.
– Otto Rank
You are beyond time and space, in contact with them only at the point of now and here, but otherwise timeless, spaceless and invulnerable to any experience.
– Nisargadatta
I only have you. Take care of yourself
for me. I take care of myself for you.
– Gabriela Mistral
He works his work, I mine.
– Alfred, Lord Tennyson
This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it’s ready to come undone. You have to realize it’s going to be a long process and that you’ll work on things slowly, one at a time.
– Haruki Murakami
If someone asked me what the meaning of history is, I would say it is learning not to take reality for granted.
– Carlo Ginzburg
On writing novels:
First you have to know and understand intellectually what you want to do — then you have to sleep-walk a little to reach it.
– Lawrence Durrell
The world can hear not the sweet notes that move
The sphere whose light is melody to lovers—
A wonder worthy of his rhyme…
– PB Shelley
For the average person: surplus results in extravagance; scarcity results in thrift; unrestraint results in debauchery; abandoning oneself to desires leads to ruin… moderation must be elucidated for it is the imperative from which the average person proceeds
– Confucius
It’s dark now and I am
very tired. I love you,
always. Time is nothing.
– Audrey Niffenegger
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Let your soul stand
cool and composed
before a million
universes.
– Walt Whitman
The source of our unease is the unfulfillable longing for a lasting certainty and security, for something solid to hold on to. Unconsciously we expect that if we could just get the right job, the right partner, the right something, our lives would run smoothly. When anything unexpected or not to our liking happens, we think something has gone wrong. I believe this is not an exaggeration of where we find ourselves.
Even at the most mundane level, we get so easily triggered— someone cuts in front of us, we get seasonal allergies, our favorite restaurant is closed when we arrive for dinner. We are never encouraged to experience the ebb and flow of our moods, of our health, of the weather, of outer events—pleasant and unpleasant—in their fullness. Instead we stay caught in a fearful, narrow holding pattern of avoiding any pain and continually seeking comfort. This is the universal dilemma.
When we pause, allow a gap, and breathe deeply, we can experience instant refreshment. Suddenly we slow down, look out, and there’s the world. It can feel like briefly standing in the eye of the tornado or the still point of a turning wheel. Our mood may be agitated or cheerful. What we see and hear may be chaos or it may be the ocean, the mountains, or birds flying across a clear blue sky. Either way, momentarily our mind is still and we are not pulled in or pushed away by what we are experiencing.
– Pema Chodron
Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.
– David Foster Wallace
Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn’t exist to accommodate you, which… is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into their adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises when they occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you lived under a shelter of some essential benevolence. And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement.
– Curtis Sittenfeld
When we manage a flash of mercy for someone we don’t like, especially a truly awful person, including ourselves, we experience a great spiritual moment, a new point of view that can make us gasp. It gives us the chance to rediscover something both old and original, the sweet child in us who, all evidence to the contrary, was not killed off, but just put in the drawer. I realize now how desperately, how grievously, I have needed the necessary mercy to experience self-respect. It is what a lot of us were so frantic for all along, and we never knew it. We’ve tried almost suicidally for our whole lives to shake it from the boughs of the material world’s trees. But it comes from within, from love, from the flow of the universe; from inside the cluttered drawer.
– Anne Lamott
without any assistance or guidance from you
i have loved you assiduously for 8 months 2 wks & a day
i have been stood up four times
i’ve left 7 packages on yr doorstep
forty poems 2 plants & 3 handmade notecards i left
town so i cd send to you have been no help to me
on my job
you call at 3:00 in the mornin on weekdays
so i cd drive 27 ½ miles cross the bay before i go to work
charmin charmin
but you are of no assistance
i want you to know
this waz an experiment
to see how selfish i cd be
if i wd really carry on to snare a possible lover
if i waz capable of debasin my self for the love of another
if i cd stand not being wanted
when i wanted to be wanted
& i cannot
so
with no further assistance & no guidance from you
i am endin this affair
this note is attached to a plant
i’ve been waterin since the day i met you
you may water it
yr damn self
– ntozake shange
When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real.
– Thomas Pynchon
Don’t hold onto the point that you have something to overcome, because you’ll always have something to overcome if you do that. When your mind seems to resist, don’t feed it any more power by thinking its resisting. Its a drawback. But simply inquire: “to whom does it resist?” And don’t think about it but just inquire. Remember, do not believe that there’s anything that you have to overcome for you’ll spend eternity overcoming. There is nothing that exists that you have to overcome.
– Robert Adams
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth–certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
– Henry David Thoreau
Love the moment and the energy of that moment will spread beyond all boundaries.
– Corita Kent
I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success … Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.
– Nikola Tesla
It is a terrible feeling to sense a threat coming. It is worse when the threat reveals itself to be real, especially when many of those you warned still dismiss it, and you do not know whether their reaction is rooted in apathy or doubt or fear. What is a warning, in the end, if not a confession–a declaration of what you value and what you will fight to protect? To warn of a threat and be dismissed is to have your own worth questioned, along with the worth of all you strive to keep safe. But there is a price to be paid in persuasiveness, too. I used to think that the worst feeling in the world would be to tell a terrible truth and have no one believe it. I have learned it is worse when that truth falls not on deaf ears but on receptive ones. It is one thing to listen, it is another to care–and yet another to act in time.
– Sarah Kendzior
You have dogs within you, you must become their master. If you find the animal that is within you, you can understand it. It is not a matter of scolding the animal, it is part of you. You must get to know its nature: it barks, it attacks; but if you understand it, and love it, it will be pleased to serve you, it will not have to be on the defensive, because it will feel loved, understood and it will love you.
– Gurdjieff
For what are we, she asks, if not a body taking a mind for a walk, just to see what’s there?
– Cory Taylor
Advertisements constitute the only ‘good news’ in the newspaper.
– Marshal McLuhan
When you catch on to your awakening, the world does not change. You just see it differently, that’s all. You acquire a feeling of immortality. A feeling of divine bliss, so to speak, when things no longer have the power to affect you.
– Robert Adams
One often felt that his words could not pour out fast enough – there was a sense of the galloping on of all his ideas at once, along with kaleidoscopic facial changes.
– Clyde Kilby, Tolkien and the Silmarillion
By and by comes the Great Awakening, and we find that this life is really a great dream. Then we are embraced in obliterating Unity. There is perfect adaptation to whatever may happen; and so we complete our allotted span.
– Chuang-tzu
Businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen
– Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
At some point you have to stop praying about it and start becoming it.
– Nika Solé
The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!
– Hermann Melville
early summer light
I become harder
to haunt
– Akari
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
– @naval
Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth
– Albert Camus
Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation.
– Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, My Students Can’t Read
Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.
– Jorge Luis Borges
HELL
But if they were condemned to suffer
this unending torment, sooner or later
wouldn’t they become the holy?
– Franz Wright, God’s Silence
He has sweet words, for they were born of a heart that loved much, and suffered much, and endured the wretched fate of those who are too great to live our small human life…
– Julio Cortázar
The only love from which a man never recuperates is the one he never had. The eternal and untarnished illusion.
– Rae Foley
When our wounds cease to be a source of shame, and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.
– Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer
I believe truth is fine in mathematics, in chemistry, in philosophy. Not in life. In life, illusion, imagination, desire, and hope are more important.
– Ernesto Sabato
If you can’t pay it back, pay it forward.
– Catherine Ryan Hyde
It can’t be any new note. When you look at the key board, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!
– Thelonious Monk
You don’t actually have to write anything until you’ve thought it out. This is an enormous relief, and you can sit there searching for the point at which the story becomes a toboggan and starts to slide.
– Marie de Nervaud
The universe buries strange jewels
deep within us all,
and then stands back to see
if we can find them.
– Elizabeth Gilbert
The action of being is so revolutionary that society rejects it and concerns itself exclusively with the action of becoming.
– Krishnamurti
Where We Talk to the Animals
There is a direct relationship between the way a society deals with its members’ dreams and daydreams, and the way it relates to the nonhuman cohabitants of its territories…The shamanic exploration of worlds intensifies and methodically cultivates the disposition for projecting ourselves into nonhuman subjectivities that we inherited from our Paleolithic past as hunters. In all of the boreal shamanic traditions, animals assume the power to speak and enterinto communication with humans, while the latter break away from their familiar moorings to embrace distant perspectives… Shamanism is thus a technique through which humans experience seeing themselves and their world from the outside, from the point of view of other lives and other worlds.
– Charles Stépanoff, Journeys into the Invisible: Shamanic Technologies of the Imagination. Chicago: HAU, 2025, pp.367-368
LIGHTLY
It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them…
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.
So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.
– Aldous Huxley
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servility, dictatorships promote cruelty; more abhorrent is the fact that they foster idiocy. Buttons babbling imperatives, effigies of caudillos, predetermined living and dying, walls adorned with names, unanimous ceremonies, mere discipline usurping the place of lucidity… Fighting those sad monotony is one of the writer’s many duties. Will I have to remind readers of Martín Fierro and Don Segundo that individualism is an old Argentinian virtue?
– Jorge Luis Borges
The full moon reminds me that sometimes we shine with the help of another.
– Jackson Kiddard
The earth turned to bring us closer, it spun on itself and within us, and finally joined us together in this dream…
– Eugenio Montejo
…larger than life…I’ve never understood that expression. What’s larger than life?
– Nicole Krauss
The new American economy runs on purchased merit, and now we bear the consequences on a national security level.
– Sarah Kendzior
Oh Child
Look within
Find your ForeMothers
Find them
Find them
– Malebo Sephodi
To be eccentric, not to fit in, to hear our own drummer, these are the signs of our bringing our gift, our personhood, to the table of life. It sounds so simple, but it is so difficult.
– James Hollis
Thank You
by Ross Gay
If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden’s dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.
We live for the future mainly because our present is inadequate. And it’s inadequate because we are not seeing it fully; we’re seeing it in terms of abstractions. And if your present is inadequate and is only an abstract version of life, you’re like a person with a non-nutritive diet. You always, therefore, feel hungry, and you keep eating because you want more!
So, in the same way: “More life, please!” “More time, please!” More! More! More! More! Because sometime or other, it’s gotta be alright; the thing I’ve been looking for must happen—I hope!
But, of course, it never does. Not if you live that way. Because when all your goals in life are attained and you are at the top of your profession, or you’ve got beautiful children, or you—whatever it was you wanted—you feel the same as you always felt. You’re still looking for something in the future. And there isn’t any future! Not really.
Therefore, I often say that only people who live in a proper relationship to the material present have any use for making any plans at all. Because then the plans work out; then they’re capable of enjoying them. The other people aren’t.
– Alan Watts
Through the destruction of everything
that made me the same as the others
that I am becoming—
something unheard of and unacceptable—
someone DIFFERENT.
– Pier Pasolini, Theorem
The most important lesson that man can learn from life, is not that there is no pain in this world, but that it is possible for him to transmute it into joy.
– Rabindranath Tagore
I only name what I love. I only name what’s worth naming.
– Roland Barthes
Self-realization is not a state which is foreign to you, which is far from you, and which has to be reached by you. You are always in that state. You forget it, and identify yourself with the mind and its creation.
– Ramana Maharshi
Ultimate freedom will cost you the mask you are wearing, the mask that feels so comfortable and is so hard to shed off, not because it fits so well but because you have been wearing it for way too long.
– Rob Smith
These wars teach us nothing, not even how to conquer our fears. We are still cave men. Democratic cave men, perhaps, but that is small comfort. Our fight is to get out of the cave. If we were to make the least effort in that direction we would inspire the whole world.
– Henry Miller
Service heals the recipient and the giver.
– Bryant McGill
It’s the questions we can’t answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he’ll look for his own answers.
– Patrick Rothfuss
How you overgrow and overwaft me with your word-summer’s tall phlox.
– Rilke to Marina Tsvetayeva
The poet pulls his scarf of commonplaces
Around his chilly fate. All art is hollow;
These are the words that moved us long ago
And now like smiles through smoke in public-houses
Can reassure us of a warmth we know.
We seek the moment where it left its traces.
Some cry, beneath the moon’s mask sleeping, rouses
The hounds to bay again, the hunt to follow,
And Actaeon to show his ghostly paces.
– G. S. Fraser
He looked at me like I was
crazy. Most of my lovers do,
and that’s partly why they love
me, and partly why they leave.
– Jeanette Winterson
If I were asked for a definition of myself, I would say that I am the one who waits; I investigate my surroundings, I interpret everything in terms of what I discover, I become sensitive.
– Frantz Fanon
Science robs men of wisdom and usually converts them into phantom beings loaded up with facts.
– Miguel de Unamuno
Focus on making yourself better, not thinking that you are better.
– Bohdi Sanders
I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.
– Daniel Keyes
There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
– Michel Foucault
The people who don’t have the first clue about your journey or why you do what you do, will have the most to say about it.
– Nika Solé
Oh breathe, oh think, – O Love, live into me;
Unworthy is my life till all divine,
Till thou see in me only what is thine.
– George MacDonald, The Diary of an Old Soul
Love hath breath’d upon me and I live!
Love shineth in its deep.
Love hath lived within me and I breathe!
Lo now I wake from sleep.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
So slow is the rose to open
A match flares in the eyes’ hearth,
then darkness
– Ezra Pound
The more I follow my inner wisdom, the better I am able to care for myself, and the more things just fall into place.
– Shakti Gawain
Learn to see God in all persons, of whatever race or creed. You will know what divine love is when you begin to feel your oneness with every human being, not before.
– Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda
progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,
not God’s, and not the beasts’: God is, they are,
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.
– Robert Browning
We don’t read the poets to understand the moment. We read poets to understand ourselves.. .The purpose of the state is to numb the senses. The purpose of a lyric poet is to wake them up.
– Ilya Kaminsky
What assistance can we find in the fight against habit? Try the opposite!
– Epictetus
Your nature is happiness. You say that is not apparent. See what obstructs you from your true being. It is pointed out to you that the obstruction is the wrong identity. Eliminate the error.
– Ramana Maharshi
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
I don’t bind myself to ideologies or belief systems. I align myself with the fortitude of God as it moves through my mind, body and soul, guiding me on where to go.
– Nika Solé
The practice is to become accustomed to compassion.
– Dharmakirti
Sometimes the truth is too simple for intellectuals.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
Discover the unchanging
and you will taste
the unconditional.
– @KavijiPoet
…To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art.
– Walt Whitman
It isn’t freedom from. It’s freedom to.
– Jean Paul Sartre
Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, 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 and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.
– Howard Zinn
My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, he has done such a bad job that a discussion of him is not worthwhile.
– Isaac Asimov
Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.
– Blaise Pascal
Mistakes and failures are precisely your means of education. They tell you about your own inadequacies.
– Robert Greene
That revolution brings out instincts of primordial barbarism, the sinister forces of envy, greed, and hatred—this even its contemporaries could see all too well.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar (there are numerous newspapers named The Sun, none called The Moon) and is devoted to the inessential.
– Tom Robbins
You must suffer this as a boy,
That school stretches you thoroughly.
The ancient languages are the sheaths
In which the knife of the spirit is stuck.
– Goethe
The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Make no mistake: our native land is our language and no other.
– Emil Cioran
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid – one must also be polite.
– Voltaire
If you do what is good, it is not because you are forced to do so, but because your nature naturally flows toward it.
– Mencius
Courage is knowing what not to fear.
– Plato
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
– Søren Kierkegaard
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
– Sigmund Freud
When you see that the mind invents everything, all will vanish. The good will vanish, the evil will vanish, and you will remain as you are.
– Ramana Maharshi
You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity – a piece of a business – to gain your financial freedom.
– @naval
barbed wire fence
in the eyes of a refugee
borderless sky
– Chen-ou Liu
summer cottage
everywhere the echo
of me
– Chen-ou Liu
Our intelligence and our technology have given us the power to affect the climate. How will we use this power? Are we willing to tolerate ignorance and complacency in matters that affect the entire human family?
Do we value short-term advantages above the welfare of the Earth? Or will we think on longer time scales, with concern for our children and our grandchildren, to understand and protect the complex life-support systems of our planet?
The Earth is a tiny and fragile world. It needs to be cherished.
– Carl Sagan
The mediterranean sun has something tragic about it, quite different from the tragedy of fogs … We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.
– Albert Camus
To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first.
– William Shakespeare
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
– Anaïs Nin
I wasn’t sure what actually did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.
– Albert Camus
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
– Flannery O’Connor
wildflower road
beauty refuses
to behave
– Aiko
summer afternoon
the cat sleeps through
another century
– Akari
A person who’s never understood by the world, understands the world better than anyone.
– Sigmund Freud
blue morning
not healed
just holy enough
– Aiko
Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.
– @naval
I see in sudden total vision
The substance of entranc’d Boehme’s awe:
The illimitable hour glass
Of the universe eternally
Turning
– Kenneth Rexroth
The hour is transparent;
we see, if the bird is invisible,
the color of its song.
– José Juan Tablada, (tr. Santiago Daydi-Tolson)
There are parts of the human brain
even carp spit out.
– Dean Young, Gray Matter
Little by little she came to
know tenderness and hope.
– Amparo Dávila
To give up beauty and the sensual happiness that comes with it and devote one’s self exclusively to unhappiness requires a nobility I lack.
– Albert Camus
if your eyes were sharp
and now they blur,
your step confident
and now it’s careful –
you’ve had the world,
such as you got.
There’s nothing more,
there never was.
– Robert Creeley, If
I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.
– Leo Tolstoy
Intellectuals should no longer be asked to erect themselves as master thinkers or providers of moral lessons, but to work, even in the most extreme solitude, at putting into circulation tools for transversality.
– Guattari
Dearest tree, I said, may I rest here?
– Theodore Roethke
come, let me take you by the hand / and show you the furrows of time
– Lucian Blaga
My favorite form of activism has always been self mastery.
– Nika Solé
Tolkien typically used sources only to improve upon them.
– John M. Bowers
[Life] can so suck, to use the theological term. It can be healthy to hate what life has given you, and to insist on being a big mess for a while. This takes great courage. But then, at some point, the better of two choices is to get back up on your feet and live again.
– Anne Lamott
“Paradise,” he said, “is hidden in each one of us, it is concealed within me, too, right now, and if I wish, it will come for me in reality, tomorrow even, and for the rest of my life.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
How about poetry’s abracadabra
Which gives everything a second chance?
– Michael Longley, Telemachos
Do not be a student of words; be a student of the silence that exists before the words are born.
– Rumi
Every class I teach will begin with birds.
– Terry Tempest Williams
The Coast of Nowhere II
My best friend that winter was a cardinal,
male by his call. At the time I wrote
in the closet of a rented house, my desk
a piece of plywood laid atop stacked
cinder blocks. Our unspoken competition
was to see who could get working before
the other. If I sat down in the dark
before he called from his oak perch,
I would turn on the light and tap twice
against the window. But if his song
rousted me from bed, I would stagger
to my chair and signal with the lamp,
You win, in Morse code. We didn’t bother
keeping score as sleep was rare for me
and dread rampant, giving me a leg up
on my bird brother. One Tuesday in February
he failed to show. Sleet and black rain
pelting the eaves, the kind of predawn
that reaches through the window, hissing,
Your heart never was a bird let alone
a bright-red singing one. I wondered
if he’d met his fate the day before:
the supreme banality of a house cat,
perhaps, concealed behind a feeder
filled with sun- and safflower seeds. I
went to my job, worked late, drove
the lakeshore home, and, on the coast
of nowhere, slept for once the sleep
of the drowned. Woke to: Dear-dear,
the notes faint as if heard from underwater,
then sharper, from high in the oak,
Dear-dear-dear-dear. My room flooding
with light and orbiting motes, I blinked
away the glare, looked out the window:
early sun on fresh snow and a bird
I knew was naming me.
– Chris Dombrowski
Disillusionment has a bad reputation, but being disillusioned means being free from illusions, to see reality, to know the truth. As painful as it may be your disillusionment is a super power. You can see the world as it is and dream of the way it ought to be.
– James Talarico
Hands across the water, Heads across the sky
– Paul McCartney
The voice in your head is not running the kingdom. It is reporting from a tiny tower.
– Nagomi
It’s good to be just plain happy,
it’s a little better to know that you’re happy;
but to understand that you’re happy and
to know why and how and still be happy,
be happy in the being and the knowing,
well, that is beyond happiness, that is bliss.
– Henry Miller
The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. That is why many of the earthly miracles have had their genesis in humble surroundings.
– Nikola Tesla
The street was very narrow, and the houses were very tall, and the sky was a very small and very dark strip above.
– Charles Dickens
Since ancient times, the left side has stood for the side of the unconscious or the unknown; the right side, by contrast, has represented the side of consciousness or wakefulness. Through the late twentieth century, the movement of the Left limited themselves to a materialist understanding of reality -exemplified by Marxism- demanding social justice and economic equality but not the restoration of intuition and the recognition of the hidden, qualitative dimensions of being suppressed by the mental-rational consciousness, narrowly focused on the quantifiable.
– Jean Gebser
Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.
– William Irwin Thompson
Remember always that whatsoever is happening around you is rooted in the mind. Mind is always the cause. It is the projector, and outside there are only screens – you project yourself. If you feel it is ugly then change the mind.
– Osho
Hopes Up
Never is a long time.
Sweet eyes last
what, a minute?
Then an empty sky,
neon-bright, empty.
Love someone back.
You just begin.
Almost nothing happens.
Dark matter in space
arranges it up. Then
what are you.
– Molly Brodak
Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?
– Marilynne Robinson
Someone has to leave first. This is a very old
story. There is no other version of this story.
– The Worm King’s Lullaby by Richard Siken
(My dear friend I
don’t complain. It’s
just another scar.)
– Marina Tsvetaeva
The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.
– Hannah Arendt
Too Philosophical
How ghostly my life
in its fall and rise.
Always I see myself waving to myself,
floating away from the one waving.
I see myself as laughter,
as deep mourning again.
as a wild weaver of talk:
but all this falls away.
And all this time it has
never been quite right.
I have been chosen to
wander forgotten distances.
– Robert Walser (tr. Daniele Pantano)
If harmony and peace reside because that is how you have chosen to think, then that is what you will have to give away. In that moment you have made a difference. You have manifested a miracle into the world …
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
Never, never tell them. Try and remember that
Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone
anything again.
– Ernest Hemingway
God is in all men, but all men are not in God; that is why we suffer.
– Ramkrishna Paramahansa
Forgive yourself for the things
that turned you into a ghost.
Let me watch you love yourself
solid again.
– Caitlyn Siehl
You cannot transcend what you do not know. To go beyond yourself, you must know yourself.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Yes, there is a place / where someone
loves you both before / and after they
learn what you are.
– Neil Hilborn
It is more rare in this universe to find a true love than to make a great piece of art.
– Thomas Sanchez
Luckily, our bodies do not take our minds as seriously as our minds take themselves. Lichtenberg said: ‘The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit; the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.’
– Denis Donoghue
The pilgrim sees no form but His and knows
That He subsists beneath all passing shows
The pilgrim comes from Him whom he can see,
Lives in Him, with Him, and beyond all three.
Be lost in Unity’s inclusive span,
Or you are human but not yet a man.
– Farid ud-Din Attar
Those who have nothing to say may say it a million times and in a million forms.
– G. K. Chesterton
Every act of perception is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.
– Oliver Sacks
The more something upsets you, the more it is meant for you. When it no longer upsets you, it is no longer needed because the lesson is complete.
– Bryant McGill
Surely the living rocks shall die
When birds no rightful distance keep.
– Gordon Bottomley
To Iron-Founders And Others
When you destroy a blade of grass
You poison England at her roots:
Remember no man’s foot can pass
Where evermore no green life shoots.
You force the birds to wing too high
Where your unnatural vapours creep:
Surely the living rocks shall die
When birds no rightful distance keep.
You have brought down the firmament
And yet no heaven is more near;
You shape huge deeds without event,
And half-made men believe and fear.
Your worship is your furnaces,
Which, like old idols, lost obscenes,
Have molten bowels; your vision is
Machines for making more machines.
O, you are busied in the night,
Preparing destinies of rust;
Iron misused must turn to blight
And dwindle to a tetter’d crust.
The grass, forerunner of life, has gone,
But plants that spring in ruins and shards
Attend until your dream is done:
I have seen hemlock in your yards.
The generations of the worm
Know not your loads piled on their soil;
Their knotted ganglions shall wax firm
Till your strong flagstones heave and toil.
When the old hollow’d earth is crack’d,
And when, to grasp more power and feasts,
Its ores are emptied, wasted, lack’d,
The middens of your burning beasts
Shall be raked over till they yield
Last priceless slags for fashioning high,
Ploughs to wake grass in every field,
Chisels men’s hands to magnify.
– Gordon Bottomley
I am not indifferent, I am impartial. I give no preference to the ‘me’ and the ‘mine’. A basket of earth and a basket of jewels are both unwanted. Life and death are all the same to me. Compassion and love are my very core. Void of all predilections, I’m free to love.
– Nisargadatta
Solitude is not
A condition of the body.
Instead, it is
A condition of the mind.
Solitude may be found
In the busy market or
May be elusive in the forest.
– Wu Hsin
This was a milestone […] – grasping the fact that the act of publishing is essentially the act of making public one’s own enthusiasm. Whenever I deviated from that principle over the following half-century and published halfheartedly, things did not go well.
– Robert Gottlieb
It is the heart which perceives God, and not the reason.
– Blaise Pascal
When a person doesn’t understand something, he feels internal discord: however he doesn’t search for that discord in himself, as he should, but searches outside of himself. Thence a war develops with that which he doesn’t understand.
– Anton Chekhov
Don’t let your reflection on the whole sweep of life crush you. Don’t fill your mind with all the bad things that might still happen. Stay focused on the present situation and ask yourself why it’s so unbearable and can’t be survived.
– Marcus Aurelius
If the cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. Because the goal of America is freedom, abused and scorned tho’ we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny.
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Every worldview expresses some deep truth–and is in error only if it claims possession of the whole truth.
– Christian de Quincey
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
– Hermann Melville
A colonized mind will fight harder to protect the master’s image than to recover its own dignity.
– Frantz Fanon
I close
the valves of my heart
to this red-dust world:
solitude and I
of the same race now
– Chen-ou Liu
world is relentless
always consuming
but the good thing is
I’m not here
to absorb all of this
– @PreetiRel
“We look on the dark side,” said Neary. “It is undeniably less trying to the eyes.”
– Samuel Beckett
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
– Susan Sontag
Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
– @naval
Awareness is undifferentiated, but its appearance is differentiated into two. That being the case, that dualistic appearance must be cognitive confusion.
– Dharmakirti
Heidegger would agree with Tolstoy […] that the fundamental question that the philosopher, as well as every man, has to put is this: Since there is death, what meaning does my life have?
– William Barrett
after rain
the stone path
smells awake
– Ogawa
To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning it it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
– James Baldwin
I think that the anxiety of our era has to do with the collapse of a certain linear progress, a sort of master narrative of history.
– Foucault
The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
We pass the gates of Hercules, the headland where Antaeus died. Beyond, there is ocean everywhere; on one side we pass the Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, the meridians wed the latitudes, the Pacific drinks the Atlantic. At once, setting course for Vancouver, we sail slowly toward the South Seas. A few cable lengths away, Easter Island, Desolation, and the New Hebrides file past us in convoy. Suddenly, one morning, the seagulls disappear. We are far from any land, and alone, with our sails and our engines.
Alone also with the horizon. The waves come from the invisible East, patiently, one by one; they reach us, and then, patiently, set off again for the unknown West, one by one. A long voyage, with no beginning and no end… Rivers and streams pass by, the sea passes and remains. This is how one ought to love, faithful and
fleeting. I wed the sea.
– Albert Camus
evening cloud
purple
without reason
– Aiko
The Master said, “The gentleman is conversant with righteousness; the small man is conversant with profit.”
– Confucius
I am tired, I have colossal need of you.
– Albert Camus
The Heavens
From mind to mind
I am acquainted with the struggles
of these stars. The very same
chemistry wages itself minutely
in my person.
It is all one intolerable war.
I don’t care if we’re fugitives,
we are ceaselessly exalted, rising
like the drowned out of our shirts…
– Denis Johnson
When I play pure improvisation, any kind of intellectual handles are inappropriate because they get in the way of letting the river move where it’s supposed to move.
– Keith Jarrett
Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.
– Albert Einstein
As, in the sun, objects paint their images on the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the aspiration of the whole universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things into higher organic forms is their change into melodies. Over everything stands its daemon or soul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air, and when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them, and endeavors to write down the notes, without diluting or depraving them. . . . This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees; by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The recognition that all understanding inevitably involves some prejudice gives the hermeneutical problem its real thrust.
– Hans-Georg Gadamer
There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world’s mortal insufficiency to us. Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true. ‘He will wipe the tears from all faces.’ It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.
– Marilynne Robinson
When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.
– Voltaire
War is the primary politics of everything that lives, so much so that in their depths, battle and life are one, and being and will-to-battle expire together.
– Oswald Spengler
It would be absurd to expect a sign of recognition, when one has seven eighths of the world against one.
– Sigmund Freud
Looked at normatively, the decision emanates from nothingness.
– Carl Schmitt
What appeared first to be simply a barrier that cut across the traditional concept of science and method, or a subjective condition of access to historical knowledge, now becomes the center of fundamental inquiry.
– Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
Speed is not a vegetal thing. It is nearer to the mineral, to refraction through a crystal, and it is already the site of a catastrophe, of a squandering of time.
– Jean Baudrillard
Civilization itself has become a machine that does, or tries to do, everything in mechanical fashion. We think only in horse-power now; we cannot look at a waterfall without mentally turning it into electric power; we cannot survey a countryside full of pasturing cattle without thinking of its exploitation as a source of meat-supply.
– Oswald Spengler
In murky corners of old cities where everything—horror, too—is magical.
– Charles Baudelaire
Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it.
Yet civilization could not do without it.
– Sigmund Freud
The lives of men began to slide into a world which lacked the depth from out of which the essential always comes. … The prevailing dimension became that of extension and number. Intelligence no longer meant a wealth of talent, lavishly spent, but only what could be learned by everyone, the practice of a routine, always associated with a certain amount of sweat and a certain amount of show. In America and in Russia this development grew into a boundless etcetera of indifference and always-the-sameness—so much so that quantity took on a quality of its own…. This is the onslaught of what we call the demonic (in the sense of destructive evil).
– Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics
There is one prejudice of the enlightenment that is essential to it: the fundamental prejudice of the enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself, which deprives tradition of its power.
– Hans-Georg Gadamer
the soul
does not argue
when music enters
– @BashoSociety
her last letter
in cursive …
willow in the wind
– Kelly Sargent
It is not while remaining within philosophy, by refining it to the maximum, by modifying it through its own discourse, that one frees oneself from it. No. It is by opposing to it a type of astonished and joyful lunacy, an uncomprehending burst of laughter.
– Michel Foucault
Without contemplation, reality disappears.
– Duncan Reyburn
On the secretly blushing cheek is reflected the glow of the heart.
– Søren Kierkegaard
The noble person and the small person differ in their inclinations; the distinction lies in nothing more than the boundary between the public and the private mind.
– Zhu Xi
When a higher degree approaches a lower degree, it does not receive from it, but gives to it.
– Marsilio Ficino
There’s a place in the soul where you’ve never been wounded.
– Meister Eckhart
Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The consolation of this world is that there are no continuous sufferings. A pain disappears and a joy is reborn.
– Albert Camus
Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither liberate nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.
– Michel Foucault
The animal microcosm, in which existence and consciousness are joined in a self-evident unity of living, knows of consciousness only as the servant of existence. The animal “lives” simply and does not reflect upon life. Owing, however, to the unconditional monarchy of the eye, life is presented as the life of a visible entity in the light. . . . Instead of straight, uncomplicated living, we have the antithesis represented in the phrase “thought and action.”
– Oswald Spengler
To delight in goodness and to hate what is not good is what constitutes the noble person. To settle for ease and to strive for gain is what constitutes the small person.
– Yin Tun
There is always something absent that torments me
– Camille Claudel
To free a man from error is to give, not to take away. Knowledge that a thing is false is a truth. Error always does harm; sooner or later it will bring mischief to the man who harbors it.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
I judge people based on how much of the kid in them is still alive.
– @radbackwards
205. When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the in- finite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? Memoria
hospitis unius diei prætereuntis.?
206. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
207. How many kingdoms know us not!
– Blaise Pascal
a soft pillow
the day forgives
the dreamer
– Akari
If the deer like to be in the countryside, and the birds like to be in the sky, then the practitioner likes to be in nirvana. We are in nirvana. The only problem is that we are not able to return to it.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Poetry elevates every particular through a distinctive combination with the rest of the whole—and if philosophy, with its legislation, first prepares the world for the effective influence of ideas, poetry is, as it were, the key to philosophy, its end and significance.
– Novalis
Therapy helps but let’s be clear. You can’t CBT your way out of capitalism. You can’t mindfulness your way out of racism. You can’t self care your way out of oppression. You can’t journal your way out of ableism. This isn’t about coping, it’s about deconstructing the systems.
– Misa on Wheels
The best response to a poem is another poem.
– Margaret Avison
The logic of poetry has nothing to suffer from language
It has everything to hope from it
It is the song of thought
And music lies at its feet.
– Paul Eluard
Never is a long word.
– Ivy Compton-Burnett
People, people, people
an ocean of people, but I
can’t find even a drop of
humanity.
– Sadia Hakim
The life you seek is hidden inside the discipline you avoid.
– Epictetus
When we lose contact with nature, we lose contact with each other.
– Krishnamurti
What a privilege it was to
matter to you.
– Beau Taplin
You do not make the Bible, or Shakespeare, into your own fiction, as Lacan made Freud into his (with success rather more indifferent than many believe).
– Harold Bloom
wildflowers
sharing color
with abandon
– Charlie Lawler
There is no peace for the man who has seen what he could become.
– Epictetus
That was the whole trouble with life. It gave you every day in succession, so that every miracle to be cherished became a norm to be ignored.
– Matt Haig, The Midnight Train
Luck, like life itself, is no certain thing, but a loveliness which may alight upon my shoulder but more often seems to be some unknown brilliant quantity in motion.
– William T. Vollmann
Spirits whisper. Shadows test. Ancestors guide. God provides.
– Nish Aigner
One who knows that it is ignorance that poses as knowledge and that the ground of Real knowledge is Ignorance.
Such a one is called a Siddha.
– Nisargadatta
The thing is, to write about love, you have to be in love or have a broken heart—and I don’t know which of the two is worse.
– Frida Kahlo
Because every exchange is always a relationship, to get the most while giving the least is unjust, unethical, antisocial, abusive, perhaps ‘evil.’ Yet predatory commerce (“the free market” as it is euphemistically called) operates regularly on the principle of ‘get the most and pay the least.’
– James Hillman
Not everything that breaks is meant to be repaired. Some things must be remade, with different hands and different intent.
– Lawrence Nault
Consciousness not only orients us in the midst of this world, not only gives out light, but also creates a great quantity of illusions.
– Nikolai Berdyaev
Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.
– Golda Meir
Philosophy does not lead me to any resignation, since I do not abstain from saying something, but rather abandon a certain combination of words as senseless. In another sense, however, philosophy requires a resignation, but one of feeling and not of intellect. And maybe that is what makes it so difficult for many. It can be difficult not to use an expression, just as it is difficult to hold back tears, or an outburst of anger.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
I, who fell in love with your wings, would never want to clip them.
– Frida Kahlo
The ego is like the “water-pipe”—it thinks the water comes from itself, but the water comes from the reservoir.
– Swami Vivekananda
When life slows without your permission, it’s not punishment — it’s preparation for the person you’re about to become.
– Roche Uccello
The Divine is the silence in the library and the peace in the garden; He is the quietness that remains when the world has finished its talk.
– G.I. Gurdjieff
There’s many a man has more hair than wit.
– William Shakespeare
I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.
– Ernest Hemingway
Life is a station; soon I shall depart—where to, I do not intend to say.
– Marina Tsvetaeva
Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.
– Khalil Gibran
Solitude: a sweet absence of gazes.
– Milan Kundera
I always tremble on the verge of poetry.
– Katherine Mansfield
Even pruning away my own flaws can be dangerous. You never know which flaw holds up our entire edifice.
– Clarice Lispector
I am a little hurt, but I am not dead; I will lie down and bleed a while, then rise to fight again.
– John Dryden
Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
You have to have a cause to live for.
– Pepe Mujica
As long as I am not conscious of my own psychology, I am bound to project it onto other people or things … and so it is through projection that I am first confronted with inner psychic content.
– Gerhard Adler
The law says, ‘do this,’ and it is never done. Grace says, ‘believe in this,’ and everything is already done.
– Martin Luther
At the end of my life
with just one breath left,
if You come
I’ll sit up and sing.
– Rumi
All writing invites to an anterior reading of the world which the word urges and which we pursue to the limits of faded memory. We can only write what we have been able to read.
– Edmond Jabès
A modest man is steady, an humble man timid, and a vain one presumptuous.
– Mary Wollstonecraft
But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum — not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.
– Jean Baudrillard
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
– Yevgeny Zamyatin
In painting, as in any art, we can escape the prison of our minds and connect with what transcends ordinary perceptions. And just as a body of water stays still while a wave-form moves through it, consciousness remains stable despite the constant motion and flow of our thoughts.
– Fredericka Foster
Even with all our technological accomplishments and urban sophistication, we consider ourselves blessed, healed in some manner, forgiven, and for a moment transported into some other world, when we catch a passing glimpse of an animal in the wild: a deer in some woodland, a fox crossing a field, a butterfly in its dancing flight southward to its wintering region, a hawk soaring in the distant sky.
– Thomas Berry
A man who cannot control his own attention is like a house with the doors and windows left wide open to the wind.
– Sri Yukteswar Giri, The Holy Science
Solitude is tremendously beautiful because it is profoundly free.
– Carl Jung
Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share. Post-truth is pre-fascism.
– Timothy Snyder
Jeff Bezos, at a tech conference in New Delhi yesterday: “Biological limits are real, but digital potential is infinite. If we starve our data infrastructure of cooling resources just to sustain baseline human comfort, we are actively delaying the birth of a super-intelligence that could solve all of our resource problems in the first place.”
Please fuck all the way off.
– Hannah Larson
…the buffalo, the trees, the rocks. You can address anything as a ‘thou’ and it will change your psychology as you do it.
– Joseph Campbell
It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters your mind. It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid internalizing every feeling that enters your heart.
– Adam M. Grant
In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. […] In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.
– Yuval Noah Harari
In the minds of thinking men the present is always under attack from the past and future simultaneously.
– John Berger
Your legacy isn’t defined by grand, monumental gestures or material wealth, but rather by the lasting impact, love, and kindness you leave behind in the lives you cross.
– Maya Angelou
The nervous system recalibrates when it returns to the language of the earth.
– Nagomi
By opening the mind in this way, You will unleash unrealized creative powers, And you will give yourself great mental pleasure.
– Robert Greene
Not every ending is a failure. Some things dissolve only so you can finally see yourself without distortion.
– Ajmal
How to Answer a Child
Who Asks About the Size of the Ocean
It’s however much you can carry
of fiction. It’s every dimension of a whale’s breath
but multiplied by a number far higher
than you and I could ever count. Which begs the question
of how long we’ve been here, if we knew each other before,
if we have any claim to the color of a hum in the throat
or the startling abundance of leaves
over the tarp of a pool.
You were measured, once: small kindness of your foot
against ink; wet curl of fingers; blue brass
of iris. Your memory weighed
like a drift of pollen. Yes, the wasps nest in the backyard
hangs over the grass like a lantern, paper whorls
an ephemeral thing
but it’s where they live; it’s how they are,
so convinced of our inaction
they learn to love the vastness of strangers
– Meggie Royer
We simply don’t have the luxury or time to be cynical or complacent, to wring our hands in despair, or to wait for someone else to fix the problem. Hope is all we have, because hope is the essential spark that lights the fire of change…
– Michelle Obama
POETS ARE LIARS
Don Paterson on Poetry, Philosophy and Lies
The philosopher Maximilian de Gaynesford gave an excellent presentation with the title ‘What Lies in a Poem’ at the Royal Society of Edinburgh at end of last year, after which the poet and biographer Robert Crawford and I joined him in conversation. This provoked a few thoughts, which I’ll explore here.
I’ll probably misrepresent Max’s position – not least as I’m reconstructing it from memory – but in essence, his talk addressed philosophy’s long-standing suspicion of poetry, or rather of poets. I think Robert and I expected Max to go straight to Plato – his best shot being ‘the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth’. All poets do is imitate things, and things are already at one remove from the Forms. (Though I’ve never quite understood the accusation, since that’s just the problem with representational language. We open our mouths, and we’re all thrice removed.) Max skipped instead to Hume’s rather more affectionate insult: ‘Poets themselves, though liars by profession, always endeavor to give an air of truth to their fictions.’
‘Liars by profession’, eh? Well, it’s fair to say that poetry can certainly be a domain of counterfeit claim and devious manipulation, and we do have a pretty free-and-easy relationship to propositional truth. Max actually did a fine job of defending us, suggesting that in relying on such a narrow definition of lying as ‘intentional deceit’, philosophers can fail to see how poetry generates its own meaningful truth – which he located in the deceptive tricks poets play within form, prosody and rhetorical trope in the work of Gluck, Hill, Empson and others. (Though I think of these things as less deceptions than poets just taking artful advantage of the slippage and ambiguity inherent in the language itself.)
The tension between poetry and philosophy is easy to locate. Both, I think, would say they were in the business of truth-telling, but only one discipline seems occasionally gripped by the idea that it should run a monopoly. I suspect this is down to the singular temperament of philosophy’s typical – and possibly non-neurotypical – recruit over the millennia than any genuine grievance. Not that our lot are any different: show me a neurotypical poet, and I suspect I’ll just show you a not-terribly-good one. I think what we’re seeing is rather a clash between right- and left brain-dominant cohorts. Of course only the left-brainers would trouble themselves to make a fight of it. By contrast, right-dominant poets are unlikely to care, and happier to see coexistence of the two as a holistic solution to the problem. (A good opportunity to quote Donaghy’s lines again: There are two kinds of people in the world. / Roughly. First, there are the kind who say / ‘There are two kinds of people in the world.’ / And then there’s those that don’t.’)
But for all Max found it alarmingly easy to assemble evidence of poetry’s unhealthy interest in the subject of lying, it seems significant that it’s almost impossible to catch a poet in the act. (Sonnet 138, for example, is Shakespeare merely being very honest about being a liar.) But if poetry genuinely is a truth-telling and poets truth-tellers, it seems important to demonstrate that what we do is falsifiable. What on earth would it mean to ‘lie’ in a poem?
Poets are liars by profession, but not in quite in the sense that Hume intends. I think poets distinguish between the factual and the truthful; since their stronger allegiance is to the latter, they will happily lie about the facts to make things more true. Although ‘lie’, too, is appropriately slippery. The clean definitions philosophy properly insists on would prefer ‘lie’ to mean some variation on ‘deliberately false proposition’. But poets make those all the time. We just don’t consider them lies. Hyperbole, for example, is practically a default setting. (As Max showed in his talk, we are ‘tricksy’, to be sure: to use one example, we use line-breaks across the phrase to trip the reader, or introduce a pun through a temporary misreading, or briefly pretend a word is a different part of speech – but we don’t expect the reader to stay tricked for more than the productive glitch of the effect, so I’d say it was hardly even ‘dishonest’, and more in the realm of ‘serious play’.)
I do think that the word ‘poetry’ still strongly connotes ‘someone telling the truth’. For all the academy has carefully explained to them that the author died years ago, our pesky readers still resist the fictional deployment of the first person in a poem, unless we make the point strenuously (‘I, Mighty Zarok of Mingotron-17 …’) We are almost invariably assumed to be speaking of ourselves in the way the author of fiction never is. Even in the post-postmodern age, readers are still instinctively disposed to take our words for honest testimony. It may be the one part of the old poetic contract that remains largely uncorrupted.
… And of course this means there’s a whole poetic art dedicated to its subversion. We can use this inbuilt gullibility to our great dramatic advantage, through, say, the slow reveal of an implausible frame that will have your reader quietly googling if you used to be a nun, once lived in Patagonia or really murdered all those people. More often, our ‘altering the facts the better to serve the truth’ won’t reach the bar of ‘fiction’; though the imaginative license of the ‘fictive stance’ still allows us to lie about anything from the name of our dog or the color of the front door to how well we can play the clarinet to the names of the constellations, if it’ll help the line sound better. But do these qualify as ‘false propositions’?
Not that it’s a bad imaginative strategy to think of ourselves as liars. My students always felt liberated the day I told them they not only could lie about everything, but probably should, at least for now. Writing directly from life is never the first thing we master as poets. It requires a terrible unsentimentality towards your own experience, and ‘seeing through oneself’ is generally a late form of wisdom. The advice to ‘write from what you know’ tended to generate little I had much interest in reading, since my students didn’t know much; what they did, I usually knew too. Of course they’d had unique experiences, but drawing on those just threw up another problem: the ‘but it really happened’ defense. It’s hard to learn that no one cares, least of all the reader. Indeed some poets never learn. But the unbelievable story tends to be just that: not terribly believable. Our job is to be good liars, even when we’re telling the truth.
Even the most basic unit of poetic extension – the metaphor – is a lie that something is something else. The fog is not a cat; a wandering man is not a cloud. I say ‘the basic unit’, because I see poetry’s essential work as the urgent task of finding new language adequate to a new or changing reality. Where the natural descriptive or denotative powers of language are found wanting, the blending function of metaphor is often the quickest way to accommodate a new concept. (I know some folk insist it’s ‘the image’, but setting aside my distaste for the term – some other time – the image is not unique to poetry. Metaphor, on the other hand, is our business; anyone who attempts to make a new metaphor is trying to be a poet. If they pull it off, they feel like one, and they should.)
We extend our poetic reach through the ‘lying’ tropes of metaphorical comparison (‘this thing is other than it is’), metonymic contraction (‘this thing is less than it is’) and symbolic representation (‘this thing is more than it is’). In the world of poetry, things can expand into things they are not, contract to caricatured aspects of themselves, and invoke feelings about other things. None of this is literally true, and yet we make it imaginatively so.
All language is a poetic lie. Etymology reveals almost all but the most primitive nouns as metaphors or metonyms for what they use to be. All our abstractions once referred to embodied actions. In a sense, the poem is a kind of sped-up exercise in futuristic etymology, where we drive words towards new meanings in advance of the evolution of the language itself.
Neither philosophy nor poetry has a true medium, like art or music. Our transmitting medium isn’t air or light, but (symbolic logic excepted) the very unstable sign system of language. Frankly, poets seem to understand its instability better than philosophers, or at least find a use for it. Philosophers want to reduce the haze around words so that one thing isn’t mistaken for another. Poets turn the haze up, so that one thing can be mistaken for another.
(In technical language, poets grant each word a far more generous conceptual domain of attribute, aspect and association. Some philosophers would prefer a far simpler mapping of signifier to signified, and are annoyed that they can’t have it; hence their occasional retreat into the less equivocal, international-journal-friendly language of abstraction and mathematics. But what does such a move lose? All the poetry of real-world example, thought experiment and illustrative analogy, for starters.)
Where words fail everyone else, the sensible will mutter … Well, whereof one cannot speak, thereof etc. But when words fail poets they get really excited, because that’s exactly when they get to make stuff up. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one knocks out a poem.
Perhaps the poem is, in a sense, also ‘a deliberate half-truth’. The old Irish Celtic bards called the poem the ‘half-said thing’. Poets say one half; the reader contributes the other, and in that imaginative completion, the reader makes the poem about themselves. That’s the miracle of it. Poets can deliver a range of truths to accommodate and stimulate this process. It depends. We swear to tell the truth, the half-truth and everything but the truth. This doesn’t happen in some nebulous or abstract way. We have all sorts of techniques of riddling, ellipsis, symbol, aposiopesis, deliberate ambiguity, metrical deletion and god knows what else to accomplish the poem’s clever half-ness.
But principally we accomplish this through metonymy – ‘the trope of contraction’, as we say, but one that works on a beautiful principle that demands a theory of mind of the reader. If you look up metonymy, it’ll say something useless like ‘the aspect or related quality or consequence of a thing used to refer to the whole thing’. Well: kinda. Here’s the more useful one for the poet: a metonym deletes the information that we assume the listener or reader already knows, or can work out from context.
To know what to delete, we have to place ourselves inside the reader’s head. It’s what we really mean by the mantra ‘trust the reader’: be the reader. This principle makes our work a public art: we are now writing solely to be read. We leave out that which we want to be read in – accepting that in doing so, we concede a decent proportion of our control over the poem’s meaning and interpretation. But when it’s going well, the game of half-saying feels like pure sorcery. What minimal detail might tell the whole story? What single act might conjure for a whole personality? How can a detail be contracted to make it even more telling? What might a well-timed silence speak eloquently?
It all amounts to a general principle of omission on the basis of shared knowledge, i.e. of the assumption of an intimacy. Poets talk to readers as ‘already up to speed’, in the way of intimates.
I think poetry and philosophy are part of a single ‘alethic’ project whose twin strands draw not just strength but a certain propulsive momentum from their inbuilt mutual antagonism, although a visiting alien would likely see little but a very nuanced difference in aim. Philosophy corrects for the imprecision of language in describing truth and experience; poetry corrects for the inadequacy of language in describing truth and experience.
As philosophy renders language precise, poets suspect its loss of connotation; poets know that words are used as much for what they suggest as what they denote. As poetry renders language more tonally rich, philosophers suspect its loss of clear referentiality. They know that unless words are narrowed in their sense, their signs can’t be combined unambiguously. So it goes, and so we roll along together. But to either side, a concession would feel like a loss of veridicality.
Most poets I know read a bit of philosophy. But those poets who even just semi-comfortably occupy both disciplines can be counted on a hand and a half: Coleridge, Valery, Eliot, Stevens, Unamuno, Paz, Denise Riley … One might – I mean I might – also argue for ‘the aphorism’ as a small, involuntary, pre-Socratic spasm that takes place in the language when poetry and philosophy are forced to occupy the same space. These manifest in the form of free-standing, self-proving statements (note: not ‘self-evident statements’: that’s ‘axiom’) that draw on silence and the usual tropes of omission to create the ‘poetic’ resonance that the purely logical, denotative use of language lacks. But while the aphorism has created a handful of important writers over the centuries, it’s not an important form. Its work is to talk itself out of existence. Attempted simultaneously, the logical and sensual wavelengths almost create silence through destructive interference.
So what might it mean, then, for a poet to really lie? We’ve established that poets have no issue with the false statement uttered in the service of a broader truth. But what truth? If ours is never the document of record anyway – I mean no one would trust our account of a trip to Lidl, let alone with historical or scientific fact – what can we betray? If we can readmit poetry back into the category of ‘wisdom literature’, and I wish we would, I suppose we might include ‘general’ and spiritual truth. (I concede that the current deluge of terrible activist and self-help verse may eventually turn out to be aiding our re-entry here.) Otherwise we’re only really left with ‘emotional truth’. Perhaps for a poet to lie about that – to insincerely praise an enemy, or make a false avowal of love, say – is a wicked thing. But who would know it had happened?
The poet would, of course. And to lie about one’s feelings is to be inauthentic. We worry that inauthenticity is something readers can smell, or at least smell in all but the psychopathic. Inauthenticity turns your poems bad from the inside, like an egg. We can’t know, exactly, but we suspect the false poets disappear without a trace, and that their falsehood had as much a hand in their disappearance as their lack of talent. So we learn not to lie to readers; and later, after the acquisition of some self-knowledge, to ourselves.
The good poets who caught themselves lying in this way almost invariably will later suppress or disown the offending poems: the best-known examples are things like Norman MacCaig buying up old copies of his early ‘Apocalyptic’ work so he could destroy it, or Auden’s honourable if regrettable suppression of ‘September 1, 1939’ on the grounds of its triumph of rhetoric over the truth. (I suspect Derek Mahon’s infamous deletions were just misguided attempts at quality control, but – embarrassing juvenilia excepted – the older poet should never have an opinion on the younger; they were not the same person.) Robert Lowell’s and James Wright’s abandoning of their earlier literary mannerism is a decision about an inauthentic approach – and perhaps analogous to Wittgenstein abandoning entire lines of thought because he decided they rested on a mistaken picture of reality.
And – like most other poets, I assume – God knows I’ve quietly suppressed poems for years, and refused the reproduction of poems I now know I didn’t mean at the time. They were intellectually or emotionally or stylistically dishonest. They were written in an attempt to impress, not to convince. But most redaction and retraction happens long before the poem is finished. One abandons a poem for many reasons, but most quickly when you realize you’re fooling yourself.
So perhaps a better question to ask would be … What are certain poets lying to themselves about? Maybe this is more a dangerously speculative, diagnosis-at-a-distance exercise. But we’re all lying to ourselves about something. Poets have a very specific occupational hazard: the warped representation of ourselves that results from our shortfall in self-knowledge. The poem is, neutrally, the most self-conscious form of speech humans can make, and those shortfalls tend to manifest in the way our poems project our own neuroses. All poems are generally ‘revealing’ of their authors, and can be psychoanalyzed. I love Sharon Olds, but I suspect her habit of relentless TMI disclosure and confession is partly there to shock her parents. In the late Cantos, I’d say Pound’s absurd who-is–the-smartest-poet–of-them-all shtick is manifesting a lifelong embarrassment over the extent of his own bluffed scholarship. I’m not sure the lad could really concentrate. There are drugs for that now. (Talking of drugs: Plath had no choice in her own terrible lie, that voice in her head which told her death was the only solution. She was unlucky to get landed with imipramine, an old tricyclic; it has the notorious side-effect of rapidly flipping the bipolar cycle from elation to psychotic plunge. It’s unbearably sad to think that today’s meds might have turned that voice off.)
To return to the subject of making it harder than it has to be – sue me, but I think late Geoffrey Hill suffers from an explicit projection of the class insecurity (British grammar school county scholarship variant) and terror of God that, despite all the alleged ‘jokes’, saw his compensating authoritarian fantasies run out of control. I think the idea was that we were supposed to be very afraid of him. (Late Hill gave full reign to his worst stylistic vice, namely melodrama: this had previously been reined in by the wise habit of slow composition, something his SSRIs had destroyed. One was pleased he was happier, as I was pleased to hear that X was now sober; but don’t force me to pretend it improved their poetry. Hill had always apparently pursued the dubious logic that to risk being easily understood was to risk simplicity, and to risk simplicity was to risk cliché, but his late work displayed a pretentiousness that could approach the inadvertently ‘Pythonesque’, in performances that forcefully implied that to fail to share his precise store of cultural signs – and therefore fail to follow the metonymic contraction this shared knowledge permitted – was to be a rube or a philistine. He was a quite extraordinary poet, but I saw few signs that he ever caught himself on. When I watch him read, I still see terrible, existential fear, and I want to hug the guy and tell him he’s not going to hell. Heaney was no less erudite, but he never bullied his readers to make himself feel better. Sorry; I’m only banging on about Hill as his best poetry means more to me with every passing year.)
OK: I think we can probably agree that this is more of an unethical parlor game. But ‘what is X getting wrong about herself?’ is as good a question to ask of a poet as of anyone else. It’s an especially good one for a poet to turn inwardly. We may all be liars, but we can’t tell an honest lie until we eliminate those we tell ourselves.
Cedar Waxwings Unmasked
by Jane Yolen
Who are these masked birds?
Not Robin Hoods,
for they live in
the open woods.
They only deal
in stolen goods
like berry futures,
cedar cones,
and sweet, sweet, fruit
(but leave the stones).
Insects they catch
on the fly
when swarms of them
go buzzing by.
No need to worry,
moan. or fret.
Your valuables
they will
not
get.
Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This citationality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called ‘normal’ functioning.
– Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy
Methodology is intuition reconstructed in tranquility.
– Paul Lazarsfeld
I found the poems in the fields
And only wrote them down.
– John Clare
If we allow everything to drop away, realization may occur. It is usually not earth-shattering at all, however, just great simplicity in turning our light to shine within.
– Jakusho Kwong-roshi
Be careful with healing.
Be careful with wanting to recover from the thing that gets in the way, the traumatic experience that upsets smooth continuity.
Be careful with wanting to remove the thorn in your flesh. It may just be that the thorn sits still to teach us that we are wilder than recovery, nobler than the taxonomy of compliance that manufactures wellbeing-so-called.
It may just be that the thorn wants to teach our human flesh that we are also plants.
– Báyò Akomolafe
In the Mountains on a Summer Day
by Li Bai
Gently I stir a white feather fan,
With open shirt sitting in a green wood.
I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;
A wind from the pine-trees trickles on my bare head.
Life happens at intersections.
– Jack Dorsey
There’s an old Armenian saying “gna meri, ari sirem” (Գնա մեռի, արի սիրեմ) that literally translates to “go die, come back and I’ll love you”. It reflects the human tendency to take things or people for granted while they are still present, only to recognize their value or significance once they are no longer around. It is also used to express the sentiment that society often doesn’t honor individuals or their contributions during their lifetimes, only to mourn or revere them after they’ve passed.
De tant d’indignités, que les bêtes elles-mêmes ne sentiraient point ou n’endureraient pas, vous pourriez vous en délivrer, sans même tenter de le faire, mais seulement en essayant de le vouloir. Soyez donc ré-solus à ne plus servir et vous serez libres. Je ne veux pas que vous le heurtiez, ni que vous l’ébranliez, mais seulement ne le soutenez plus, et vous le verrez, comme un grand colosse dont on dérobe la base, tomber de son propre poids et se briser.
From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
– Étienne de la Boétie
Unity involves the drive of the human mind towards understanding and the desire of the human spirit for love. When human beings seek to understand the multiplicities that surround them, when they seek to make sense of experience, they do so by bringing many factors into a common vision. Understanding is achieved when many data are unified by a common structure. The one illuminates the many: it makes sense of the whole
[ . . . . ]
We move towards unity as we move towards meaning in our lives. Unity is also the consequence of love. If love is genuine, it moves not towards the assimilation of the other but towards union with the other. Human community begins in desire when that union has not been achieved, and it is completed in joy when those who have been apart are now united. The words of the late pope highlight the core of catholicity: consciousness of belonging to a whole and unity as a consequence of love.
– Ilia Delio
How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.
– C.S. Lewis
…We talk
Ceaselessly to things that can’t respond
Or won’t respond. What are we talking for?
We’re talking to coax hope and love from zero.
We’re talking so the brain of the geode
Will listen like a garden heliotrope
And open its quartz flowers. We are talking
Because speech is a sun, a kind of making.
– Mark Jarman
We can draw closer to mysticism if we think obliquely, autobiographically, vernacularly, performatively, practically, erotically, and ascetically. Mysticism is a singular form of floating attention—what I call passive activity or active passivity. It is necessary to mobilize simultaneously all seven adverbs if we are to glean mysticism’s meaning, its core, its magma: love.
– Simon Critchley
We walked where the ancient pier juts into the sea.
Stood on the rim of the pool, by the circle
of black boulders. No one saw we were there
and everyone who had ever been there
stood silently in air.
Where else do we ever have to go, and why?
– Naomi Shihab Nye
That’s how it is sometimes when we plunge into the depths of our lives. No one can accompany us, not even those who would give up their hearts for our happiness.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Whose limbic system is it anyway?
The emotional center of your brain does well to take orders from your heart. 85% of the fibers of the vagus nerve running between your heart and brain are afferent, meaning the majority of information conveyed there represents information flowing from your heart to your brain. The heart is a feeling center of great power and competence to inform and reform your brain. The neocortex, or thinking brain, can hijack the heart’s role, if you allow it to do so.
Right now your heart may know and tell that all is well, right here, right now, in this sweet unfettered moment, and supply the limbic brain with cause for calm. Yet your neocortex, if you subject it to the blaring trumpets of crisis, fear and danger from every quarter, may throw you into a state of panic quite unrelated to your very real and beautiful immediate circumstances, and keep you in that state for the foreseeable future. It is more up to us what we task our limbic system to endure in any given moment than we might have imagined. Welcome your heart’s caress of your brain, rhythmically lulling you into a reality on safe ground with open sky far above the information tsunami. You can reclaim your limbic system! It is your domain.
– Gil Hedley
First Love
How deep we met in the sea, my love,
My double, my Siamese heart, my whiskery,
Fish-belly, glue-eyed prince, my dearest black nudge,
How flat and reflective my eye reflecting you
Blue, gorgeous in the weaving grasses
I wound round for your crown, how I loved your touch
On my fair, speckled breast, or was it my own turning;
How nobly you spilled yourself across my trembling
Darlings: or was that the pull of the moon,
It was all so dark, and you were green in my eye,
Green above and green below, all dark,
And not a living soul in the parish
Saw you go, hélas!
Gone your feathery nuzzle, or was it mine,
Gone your serpentine
Smile wherein I saw my maidenhood smile,
Gone, gone all your brackish shine,
Your hidden curl, your abandoned kill,
Aping the man, liebchen! my angel, my own!
How deep we met, how dark,
How wet! before the world began.
– Jean Valentine
Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.
– Erich Maria Remarque
If you relax psychologically and completely let go of things, you will find that you have psychological tonus; energy. And you cannot really do anything skillfully—any art, you can’t talk, you can’t think, you can’t have sexual orgasms, or anything like that—unless you have learned fundamental relaxation.
– Alan Watts
I can’t think logically about who l am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated … all of which goes to make up living very
hard and newly.
– Sylvia Plath
He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.
– Cormac McCarthy
The other day, lying in bed, I felt my heart beating for the first time in a long while. I realized how little I live in my body, how much in my mind.
– Rodger Kamenetz
There are two possibilities for thought: either to go outwards in the direction of objects or states, in which case it takes the form of suffering, or to go inwards towards the heart of experience, in which case it dissolves in peace.
– Rupert Spira
An old man like me
remembers remembering
but can’t remember
what he remembered once.
The past is a lost book,
A wallet left somewhere
On a road I can’t recall.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
– C.S. Lewis
Kobayashi Issa:
carelessly
they sank in a flood…
roses of Sharon
うかうかと出水に逢し木槿哉 uka-uka to demizu ni aishi mukuge kana
Uka-uka can mean (1) not at peace or (2) thoughtlessly, absent-mindedly. In this context the second meaning is sillier, hence probably Issa’s intention.
It’s vacation and summer; let there be no restlessness, neither indoors nor out.
– Franz Kafka, 1913.
Without knowing your background, without knowing the substance of your thought and whence it comes—your search is utterly futile, your action has no meaning.
– Krishnamurti
It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.
Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance.
Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.
– C.G. Jung
Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.
– Eckhart Tolle
For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement.
– Viktor Emil Frankl
I have dreamed of you so often, you are
no longer real.
– Dean Young
War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
– William Faulkner
One of the best things you can do for your father on Father’s Day, if he’s still on this earth and if he’s been there for you with that quiet devotion that some men give, is just to sit with him & say, “I’d love to hear some of your story now, Dad. Yes, I’m listening. I’m here.
– Joseph Fasano
…a father is a young man’s divinely appointed source of wisdom and counsel. If the young man cannot suck a little wisdom from his father, then he is a fool, or the father is (not uncommon), or both are.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The old world has stopped working. From culture to food to currency to identities, it’s all a dying landscape. Infertile ground. And those who understand this have already been ushering in the new.
– Nika Solé
For years everything that’s gone through my head has been debated in this courtroom that I call the house of the dead, where my father presides. Some people talk to God, others to their dogs; my father is my dog, my god, the magistrate who nips at my arse and straight- ens out my soul, who protects me from all kinds of wanderings and who keeps me from doing life. The call to order is within his remit but he’s also the king of jurisprudence, the inventor of obligations I must fulfill and prohibitions I must respect in order to become what he wishes but I don’t know what he wishes.
How could I know, I never see him. For a long time I wanted to be rid of him since he wasn’t around, but my father shines brightest by his absence.
– Noemi Lefebvre
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
– George Bernard Shaw
Madness is not irrational; it is a socially constructed category that reflects prevailing norms and values.
– Michel Foucault
THE FATE
(for Anne-Marie Stretter)
Standing on the youthhold I saw a shooting star
And knew it predestined encounter with the sole love
But that comet crashed into the earth so hard
Tilted its axis a little bit not much just enough
To make me miss meeting her by one or two yards.
– Bill Knott
All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion.
– Nietzsche
Words represent objects, and perception of objects is in part conditioned by the store of words into which perceptions are nested.
– Walter Ong
I find Chinese and Japanese poetry satisfying … it’s their whole mechanism of insight into reality, to capture something of the phenomenal moment and then let that exude a meaning larger than the moment. I think that’s some kind of final achievement in writing.
– Anne Carson
The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is “young inside.”
– Oscar Wilde
Blessed are those who do not fear solitude, who are not afraid of their own company, who are not always desperately looking for something to do, something to amuse themselves with, something to judge.
– Paulo Coelho
…you and I knew strange
corners of life.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
– Emil Cioran
I shall never hesitate to go down
Into the fastness of its abyss
Nor shrink from the cruelty of its awful kiss.
I shall never have any fear of love.
– Elsa Gidlow
Sexuality is not natural; it is a historically contingent concept that is shaped by cultural norms and power dynamics.
– Michel Foucault
Ultimately we have to go through our fears. I have to emphasize go through. There is no magic, no set of five steps to dissolve the obstacles, no pill, no narcotic to make it all possible. There is only the going through.
– James Hollis
the comic sense depends on a momentary anesthesia of the heart
– Henri Bergson
my eyes hurt/in my heart.
– Keston Sutherland
Rest in transparent, non-dual present awareness. Make yourself at home in the natural state of pure presence, just being, not doing anything in particular.
– Jamgon Kongtrul
You always replace one illusion with another illusion.
Always…
So your wanting to be free from illusion is an impossibility. That itself is an illusion. Why do you want to be free from illusions? That’s the end of you.
– U.G. Krishnamurti
The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast.
– C.S. Lewis
I could live almost completely in
imagination.
– Louise Glück
Kafka tries to wish us well.
Tolstoy tries to wish us well
but they have no idea the empire
we’re dealing with.
– Dean Young
Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.
– Charles Bukowski
To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.
– Dōgen, Genjōkōan (tr. Kazuaki Tanahashi)
Critical theorists were right to eviscerate the bourgeois world of their fathers. But they didn’t go far enough. No one has ever gone far enough with the father figures.
– Alina Stefanescu
I know now that some people feel
unhappiness the way others love:
privately, intensely, and without recourse.
– Khaled Hosseini
Sunday is the day
when motley
sways
their way,
who come to speak a word
that never shall be heard
unless
it be, that silence
covers all necessity.
– Marsden Hartley
I am the lowest of your creatures, following
the thriving aphid and the trailing rose– Father,
as agent of my solitude, alleviate at least my guilt
– Louise Glück
I say there’s no anger any more, that
I’ve just opened my chest and let the trauma in,
stood down,
bald and stunned, with liver spots for eyes.
– Alex Smith
What a liberation to realize that the ‘voice in my head’ is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.
– Eckhart Tolle
Whatever role we are loved for in our family, we will continue to enact it, despite the toll it takes.
– Catherine Gildiner
The goal of individuation is not narcissistic self-absorption, as some might believe, but rather the manifestation of the larger purposes of nature through the incarnation of the individual.
– James Hollis
I am afraid I will love you forever and we will never be in the same room
again.
– Clementine Von Radics
Once cleared the room writes itself.
– Anne Carson
There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. That magnet is unselfishness, thinking of others first; when you learn to live for others, they will live for you.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
We no longer live addicted to speech; having lost our senses, now we are going to lose language, too. We will be addicted to data, naturally. Not data that comes from the world, or from language, but encoded data. To know is to inform oneself. Information is becoming our primary and universal addiction.
– Michel Serres
There is no man more dangerous than one who does not doubt his own rightness.
– Louis L’Amour
Contemplate life as infinite, undivided, ever present, ever active, until you realize yourself as one with it. It is not even very difficult, for you will be returning only to your own natural condition.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Summer nearly does me in every year. It’s too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.
– Anne Lamott
We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge–and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves–how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Lay cool hands on my burning brain, and press
From my weak heart the swelling emptiness.
– George MacDonald
remember you are free to wander away.
– John Ashbery
…in creating his mythology, Tolkien salvaged from the wreck of history much that it is good still to have; but that he did more than merely preserve the traditions of Faërie: he transformed them and reinvigorated them for the modern age.
– John Garth
Readiness to die flows from the same source as the will to live, a source deeper even than life itself. To be a living being is not the ultimate state; there is something beyond, much more wonderful, which is neither being nor non-being, neither living nor not living.
– Nisargada
The world around you is only beautiful when you are at peace with the world within you.
– Paulo Coelho
The therapist’s worldview is in itself isolating. Seasoned therapists view relationships differently, they sometimes lose patience with social ritual and bureaucracy, they cannot abide the fleeting shallow encounters and small talk of many social gatherings.
– Irvin D. Yalom
For my own part, I have finally found myself compelled to give up the logic, fairly, squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality. Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it.
– William James
The energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life.
– A.N. Whitehead
My weight is my love, wherever I go my love is carrying me.
– Saint Augustine
All fears, all doubts, all questions come from the same place where you limit yourself to the body and mind
You are not the ego; the ego is in you.
The ego is always moving, and anything moving
cannot be the Reality of who you are.
– Ganga Maa
Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?
– Carl Rogers
When you get into the meditation consciousness, you see that nothing is more important than anything else—or less important. There is no way of wasting time, because what is time for except to be wasted?
– Alan Watts
Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really experience what you are.
– Niccolò Machiavelli
After the gods. After the ideologies. After the guarantees. After the explanations.
What remains? Life.
And the impossible, unreasonable, stubborn human capacity to say yes.
– Jim Palmer
Action is the stream, and contemplation is the spring.
– Thomas Merton
“Why do you still call yourself father?”
It is a deliberate act of protest and rebellion. I do so in defiance of an institution that has abdicated its responsibilities. It has refused to care for the marginalized, it has abandoned the poor, and sold its own soul to a far-right political agenda instead of yielding to the King of Kings.
“Why do you still call yourself father if you are no longer a priest?”
I may have stepped down from active ministry within the institution, but I am still called upon. I bury those they refuse to allow to rest in peace. I will continue to celebrate the marriages of those you reject. I will baptize those you call unclean.
“Why do you still call yourself father if you left the church?”
I didn’t leave the church; the church abandoned us, and so we have become the body, the assembly, the ecclesia, and I remain a father to the fatherless.
We are the abandoned children of an institution that doesn’t love unconditionally. We were told to follow in the footsteps of our big brother Jesus, and then y’all left him on the cross as a warning against non-compliance and to those who stand up to the oppressors.
We all became the bastard children of an organization that demanded every child be born but then abandoned us all. You were supposed to be shepherds, but instead, you tossed your children out onto the streets with the wolves because of who they love or how they identify.
I’ll never give this title back. It’s mine, and you can’t have it because it’s not you who gave it to me. I’m a father by virtue of adopting all the children that you rejected. You lied and said all life is sacred and then deposed everyone you think is different. You are abandoning your children for being gay, trans, single moms, and neurodivergent.
The Institutional Church hasn’t paid child support and has missed every birthday and recital. The Church is a deadbeat.
So I’ll be a father until the day I die to all the children you spawned but never wanted to raise because you’re more concerned with a child born than a child fed, cared for, and loved.
I will continue to love them all and be a father in your absence. If you want this title back, be worthy of it.
– Father Nathan Monk
Life isn’t what you think it is. It’s like water, and the young let it trickle away between their fingers without even noticing. Cup your hands, keep it safe. Life eventually becomes something else, something hard, something simple, something you can hold in your hand and nibble on contentedly as you sit in the sun.
– Jean Anouilh
If you can become happy and peaceful in the place where you are right now, you will find that circumstances will change in your favor, and you will be in your right place. Whatever change comes along as far as your body-mind is concerned, you are in your right place.
– Robert Adams
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
– Ernest Hemingway
I May, I Might, I Must
If you tell me why the fen
appears impassable, I then
will tell you why I think that I
can get across it, if I try.
– Marianne Moore
Romanticism 101
Then I realized I hadn’t secured the boat.
Then I realized my friend had lied to me.
Then I realized my dog was gone
no matter how much I called in the rain.
All was change.
Then I realized I was surrounded by aliens
disguised as orthodontists having a convention
at the hotel breakfast bar.
Then I could see into the life of things,
that systems seek only to reproduce
the conditions of their own reproduction.
If I had to pick between shadows
and essences, I’d pick shadows.
They’re better dancers.
They always sing their telegrams.
Their old gods do not die.
Then I realized the very futility was salvation
in this greeny entanglement of breaths.
Yeah, as if.
Then I realized even when you catch the mechanism,
the trick still works.
Then I came to in Texas
and realized rockabilly would never go away.
Then I realized I’d been drugged.
We were all chasing nothing
which left no choice but to intensify the chase.
I came to handcuffed and gagged.
I came to intubated and packed in some kind of foam.
This too is how ash moves through water.
And all this time the side doors unlocked
Then I realized repetition could be an ending.
Then I realized repetition could be an ending.
– Dean Young
the greening fields—
grandfather’s old proverb
on patience
– @ruralitalics
summer night
stars gathering
like old friends
– Ogawa
Mysticism … is too private (and also too various) in its utterances to be able to claim a universal authority.
– William James
I watch the rainbow
until I have to focus so hard I seem
to create it.
– Dean Young
The great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
– Ernest Hemingway
one firefly
opens the dark
without effort
– Akari
Healing your relationship to your parents is one of the most important things you will do along the journey of becoming you.
– Nika Solé
One’s past is not one’s destiny, and it is self-serving to pretend that it is.
– Theodore Dalrymple
green shade
a book left open
to birdsong
– Ako
If you will grant
me one vivid
morning, I can
chain it to me for
fifty years.
– William Stafford
You do something awfully good to me.
– Ernest Hemingway
Somewhere deep inside everyone knows the truth.
We are all pretending, believing in one bullshit or another, trying not to face what we already know to be true.
– @TheAncientSage
And this urge to run
away from what I love
is a sort of sadism I
no longer pretend to
understand.
– Martha Gellhorn
late sunlight
she does not chase
what cannot bloom
– Akari
Is my soul asleep?
by Antonio Machado
Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that work
in the night stopped? And the water-
wheel of thought, is it
going around now, cups
empty, carrying only shadows?
No, my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its eyes wide open
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.
fifty years on …
dad’s old guitar and me
get in tune at last
– Natalia Kuznetsova
Death will be my supreme protest against a world of tears and blood.
– Albert Camus
long afternoon
the fan turns
like a prayer wheel
– Ogawa
The internet is an assault,
and imitation is fast becoming
the sincerest form of battery.
– Samuel Todd
In Plum Village, we use the simple example of the wave and the water. In our life as a wave, we struggle and we have fear, because we have to go up and down, to be born and die, to exist and not to exist.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
It is strange to see that some people do not need proof to believe a lie… while they demand infinite proof to accept the truth.
– Mark Twain
The final test of freedom is this: Can you remain the same person in praise, in insult, in gain, and in loss?
– Seneca
I lift my eyes
To the blue
Open-ended ocean.
Why worry?
Some things are always there.
– May Sarton
Poem Composed in Santa Barbara
The poets talk. They talk a lot.
They talk of T. S. Eliot.
One is anti. One is pro.
How hard they think! How much they know!
They’re happy. A cicada sings.
We women talk of other things.
– Wendy Cope
I suffer in my loving, and
you know it.
– Willa Cather
People cling to habit like a rock, when they should just let go and dive into the sea. And live.
– Charles Bukowski
late sunset
nothing to chase
but softness
– Akari
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question-whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test.
– Carl Jung
a fallen peach
the butterfly touches
only sweetness
– Akari
a field of clover
inside a jar
of honey
– Ogawa
I should have found you long ago, in another time, in another place, before we were destroyed, before experiences dragged us along, before they took us and we became frightened, hesitant in our steps, exhausted without the energy to carry ourselves, desperate for everything, even for love.
– Franz Kafka
I met her when I wasn’t looking for love,
and I lost her when I loved her the most.
– Charles Bukowski
It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.
– Erich Fromm
Things pass for what they seem, not for what they are. Only rarely do people look into them, and many are satisfied with appearances.
– Baltasar Gracián
True mentors are as transparent as glass. They allow the Light of the Divine to pass through them.
– Shams Tabrizi
Pain is the fruit of attachment; freedom is the fruit of renunciation.
– Lord Mahavira
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
– Umberto Eco
‘I’ has no significance until it becomes the ‘you’ to whom eternity incessantly speaks and says: you shall, you shall, you shall.
– Søren Kierkegaard
I assume that I am always protected and blessed. Therefore, I am. Accept these truths about your life.
– Robin S. Baker
You are neither a bourgeois nor a sage: you are a wounded bird flying inside the hurricane.
– Hermann Hesse
A big reason books and comics and films and music exist is to give people a way to talk about things without talking about them.
– Matt Haig, The Midnight Train
Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.
– James Russell Lowell
The soul is the only reality that is never affected by the labels of the world.
– Acharya Kundakunda
He who speaks the truth is expelled from nine cities.
– Turkish proverb
Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretense of it saps the very foundation of character.
– James Russell Lowell
Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors do not grow from the same soil.
– Cyrus the Great
do not fall in love with your suffering, never presume that your suffering is in itself a proof of your authenticity.
– Slavoj Žižek
You pity the moth confusing a lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world.
– Jay Alto
To love is to desire the good of the other.
– Aristotle
Life is constantly weighing us in very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us precisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust.
– James Russell Lowell
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – It’s the too huge world vaulting us, and it’s goodbye.. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
– Jack Kerouac, On The Road
Marx’s idea is that the working class must break up, smash the “ready-made state machinery”, and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.
– Vladimir Lenin
All the windows of my heart I open to the day.
– John Greenleaf Whittier
They were two pieces that fit together perfectly, but they didn’t belong to the same puzzle.
– Mario Benedetti
Violent passions are formed in solitude. In the busy world no object has time to make a deep impression.
– Henry Home
Folks never understand the folks they hate.
– James Russell Lowell
God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.
– Samuel Butler
If you spend time with animals, you run the risk of becoming a better person.
– Oscar Wilde
I’ll lift you and you lift me, and we’ll both ascend together.
– John Greenleaf Whittier
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
– James Russell Lowell
Only a valley can receive a peak.
– Osho
If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others.
– Tryon Edwards
Humbleness is always grace; always dignity.
– James Russell Lowell
This is how we are: we fall in love with each other’s strengths, but love deepens towards permanence when we fall in love with each other’s weaknesses.
– Salman Rushdie
Republicans approve of the American farmer, but they are willing to help him go broke. They stand four-square for the American home—but not for housing. They are strong for labor—but they are stronger for restricting labor’s rights. They favor minimum wage—the smaller the minimum wage the better. They endorse educational opportunity for all—but they won’t spend money for teachers or for schools. They think modern medical care and hospitals are fine—for people who can afford them. They consider electrical power a great blessing—but only when the private power companies get their rake-off. They think American standard of living is a fine thing—so long as it doesn’t spread to all the people. And they admire of Government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it.
– Harry S. Truman
A Day in my Life!
I walk in already tired, already aware,
Of the weight of the day I am about to bear.
I have 29 students in each class I teach,
That’s 87 lives all within reach.
Eighty-seven needs, eighty-seven demands,
All placed on me, with just one set of hands.
And before anything starts, I need this understood,
Everything expected has been taught as it should.
Modeled, repeated, practiced again,
They know what to do… they just don’t do it when.
They enter the room loud, uncontrolled sound,
Voices and movement spilling around.
I give directions, I say them clear,
Once, twice, three times… still they don’t hear.
By the 7th or 8th time, a few might respond,
Some stare blankly, most carry on.
And the truth that sits underneath all of this play:
They know the expectation. We’ve practiced the way.
I raise my quiet signal, steady and still,
Nothing responds to structure or will.
Again I repeat it, still no change,
Third time brings silence, brief and strange.
I begin to teach, I start to speak,
Within minutes, the noise returns to its peak.
I try to teach, but the day interferes,
Interruptions layering over my words and my years.
This child is bleeding, needs a bandaid now,
That one has a toothache, holding their brow.
One student is crying, her dog has passed,
Another is angry from soccer at last.
One needs water, one needs the hall,
One says “my head hurts,” one can’t log in at all.
One needs a pencil, another just waits,
All of it happening at once, not in states.
At the same time:
the phone rings, a student is leaving the room
a message comes through, send one here, send one soon
a counselor appears at the door without pause
students are called out for intervention or cause
They leave. I continue, I try to proceed,
They return confused, “What do we need?”
So I stop, I explain, I begin it again,
While the rest start talking as if I never began.
I am teaching 4th grade reading and writing each day,
But many cannot write a full sentence their way.
I ask them to write, they resist and delay,
Or copy my model word for word anyway.
We’ve spoken of futures, of power, of choice,
Of knowledge as strength, of finding their voice.
How without it, control is easy to take,
How learning is freedom no one can break.
They nod. They agree. They hear what I say.
And still… nothing changes the very next day.
I pass out the work, I place it in hand,
Two students are finished before others can stand.
Some haven’t written their name on the page,
Some cannot read it, some disengage.
At the same time:
noises erupt, crude sounds in the air
clapping and tapping echo everywhere
two students argue, voices collide
one touches everyone passing beside
another pulls out toys, attention is gone
I stop one behavior, five more come on.
And still, underneath all the chaos I see:
They know what is expected. It’s been taught repeatedly.
We begin testing, I try to hold space,
But one won’t wear headphones, disrupting the place.
Another spills juice across the floor,
Juice they were sneaking, breaking the rule at the core.
So I clean while I manage, while holding the line,
Trying to keep focus in fractured time.
I reset again, I try to restore,
The same broken rhythm I’ve lived through before.
Quiet signal raised,
Nothing appears,
Again I repeat it,
Still it’s not heard.
Third time, silence, fragile and brief,
I begin again, already in grief.
Within minutes, the noise returns,
The cycle repeats, the pressure burns.
And somewhere inside, a quiet thought:
I am losing myself in what this has become.
We move to computers, systems in place,
But nothing is where it’s supposed to be placed.
They “can’t find their number,” though told every day,
Shown, reminded, practiced the way.
Computers are broken, headphones are gone,
Nothing is stable to build learning on.
A student has damaged an outlet nearby,
Now even the room feels like it’s coming untied.
So I fix, I troubleshoot, piece things together,
Instead of teaching, I hold failing systems forever.
Then materials, another unraveling thread,
Not enough copies, confusion widespread.
A paper is lost, another is taken,
My pencils are gone, routines are shaken.
Food is being hidden, trash left behind,
More to manage, more on my mind.
So I organize, clean, redistribute again,
Instead of teaching, I manage the strain.
Just as I find even a moment of flow,
The door opens wide, and in they go.
Students returning from places unknown,
Pull-outs and groups that disrupt what I’ve grown.
One has been sleeping, others are loud,
Laughing and signaling across the crowd.
Everything resets.
Again I must start.
Re-explaining lessons already torn apart.
And all of this happens within a space
Holding needs I cannot replace:
multiple autistic students each day
multiple ADHD students finding their way
multiple IEPs requiring support
All needing attention, all needing more.
And I am one person, holding it all,
Trying to answer every call.
When it comes to behavior, I have tried it all.
Recess removed.
Lunch detentions given.
Calls home made.
I’ve ignored the negative, praised what is right,
Tried to reward effort, tried to build light.
Students earn:
marbles for games or a break from the day
table points leading to prizes their way
access to board games I bought on my own
Incentives, systems, structures I’ve grown.
We’ve practiced expectations again and again,
Built systems with care, with time, with intention.
And still… nothing changes.
And outside this room, another force grows,
A quiet destruction that everyone knows.
Screens all night, endless scroll,
Video games taking control.
Constant dopamine, instant reward,
Brains rewired, attention ignored.
It feels like brain rot, slow and deep,
A pattern these children no longer escape.
So when they arrive and I ask them to try,
To sit, to think, to write, to apply…
It feels like asking something unknown,
A skill no longer naturally grown.
Parents tell me, “We don’t know what to do,”
But the screens stay on, the habits stay too.
So students arrive tired, unfocused, unsteady,
Expected to learn when they are not ready.
And then there is food.
Hot Takis for breakfast. Hot Takis for lunch.
No nourishment, no balance, just processed crunch.
No fuel for thinking, no energy to build,
And still I am asked to have learning fulfilled.
Parents question the teacher, question the role,
Assume I am failing their child as a whole.
While I stand managing 29 lives in a room,
Holding chaos, pressure, and quiet doom.
By the end of the day, there is nothing left.
I have repeated directions again and again,
Taught expectations, returned to them.
I have tried consequences, rewards, and care,
Built relationships, shown them I’m there.
Set goals, had talks, made meaning clear,
Tried everything possible throughout the year.
And still…
I cannot get through a lesson.
It feels like distance learning again,
Disconnected effort, repeating the same refrain.
Nothing is sticking.
Nothing is landing.
I used to love teaching.
Now I am overwhelmed.
Exhausted.
Worn down.
I do not recognize this anymore.
And the most serious truth I now hear:
This is not just happening here.
Across the country, the same words are said,
The same exhaustion, the same dread.
And at this rate, if nothing is addressed…
There will be no teachers left.
– A Tired Teacher
Love me. I am pitch black, sinful, blind, confused.
But if not you, then who else is going to love me?
– Audre Lorde
No one can escape themselves, but they can create a kinder world to live in.
– Tove Marika Jansson
Involuntary
I love the small sounds of pleasure
people make when taking the first
sip of coffee, or when sitting at last
after standing for hours. That small
hum of delight that escapes the lips
when someone presses a thumb
into the arch of our foot and makes
small circles on the sole. That sigh
that flies out when we step into shade
on a relentlessly sunny day. Bless these
moments when the mind can’t outbrain
the small animal living inside us, when
our feral self slips through the cage
of decorum and groans or purrs
or moans or gasps and reminds us
beneath all our fancy syntax and
pretty words, we’re creatures,
and the body is so much more
than a carrier for the intellect.
Every roar and crow, hiss and howl,
murmur and whimper and trill
is a primitive prayer, an involuntary
thank you for being granted
a body that can slip into warm and
soapy water, that can press its lips
to another’s soft lips, that can inhale
the perfume of rain after months of drought,
that can curl into the warmth of another
and through scent and touch know
it is safe, it is loved, it is it is home.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Can you remember as a ten-year old, the immense relief when school let out and you felt giddy at the prospect of the great nothing of summer ahead? Three months of summer holiday felt like an aeon. When you rolled out of bed each morning, the sun already flooding the windows, you had a bowl of Cheerios with cow’s milk as the whole day awaited you, vacant and immense. In the time warp of summer the blistering heat and the incessant clack of cicadas filled your head like cotton candy. In the afternoons you would lie on the green grass in the backyard under the great maple tree and stare into the belly of the robust leaves. Time was immeasurable. You knew that each leaf, each blade of grass was the whole round earth.
This was not “practice” like we think of it today. Back then you knew nothing of mindfulness. In those long days of summer you were one with the crickets, the clouds, the everlasting light of evening. Your small self was all time: yesterday passed to today, and today to tomorrow, and tomorrow back to today. It was like holding your breath with your goggles on, submerged at the bottom of the swimming pool. By mid summer it was exhausting, not just the boredom of nothing doing, but the entire world was eerily still, like the calm before the storm. The whole earth seemed to stop like a stalled horse. Days came and went. Nights were hamburgers on the grill, corn on the cob from the farm stand on Stratton Road and listening to the ballgame on the old transistor radio before bed.
Now that your eyes go glossy, your knees ache, your memory fades, and you’ve stopped chasing the other players down the court, you find yourself returning to a timeless summer. The great nothing breaks back into your life. Nothing in the morning, nothing in the afternoon, nothing in the evening. “Welcome back,” says the great eternity, “You sure have kept yourself real busy over all these years.”
– Tias Little
I’m a twenty-first-century American woman; I don’t have enough faith to covet anything but freedom. Over the course of my life, every industry I worked in collapsed, and then my city collapsed, and then my government collapsed.
– Sarah Kendzior
…Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that what is taken to be true. It’s the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?
– Tom Stoppard
Through rain…then through dreaming glass, green with the evening. And herself in chair, old-fashioned, bonneted, looking west over the deck of Earth, inferno red at its edges, and further in the brown and gold clouds…
Then, suddenly, night: The empty rocking chair lit staring chalk blue by–is it the moon, or some other light in the sky? just the hard chair, empty now, in the very clear night, and this cold light coming down…
The images go, flowering, in and out, some lovely, some just awful…but she’s snuggled in here with her lamb, her Roger, and how she loves the line of his neck all at once so—why there it is right there, the back of his bumpy head like a boy of ten’s. She kisses him up and down the sour salt reach of skin that’s taken her so, taken her nightlit along this high tendoning, kisses him like kisses were flowing breath itself, and never ending.
– Thomas Pynchon
Now that mine is almost over, I can say that the one thing that struck me most about life is the capacity for change. One day you’re a person and the next day they tell you you’re a dog. At first it’s hard to bear, but after a while you learn not to look at it as a loss. There’s even a moment when it becomes exhilarating to realize just how little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human.
– Nicole Krauss
There’s no vocabulary for love within a family, love that’s lived in but not looked at, love within the light of which all else is seen, the love within which all other love finds speech. This love is silent.
– T.S. Eliot, The Elder Statesman
This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
– Ursula K. LeGuin
The young see our churches as being fueled by theologies of separation, shame, punishment, and damnation. They experience our liturgies as being obsessed with individual salvation, appeasing a demanding God so our individual souls can assure their ticket to heaven when we die. They encounter our institutions as being more concerned with their own power, privilege, and survival than with the common good. Many feel frustration and hopelessness.
– It’s Time for a Franciscan Renaissance
I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.
– Frederick Douglass