If you’re not playful, you’re not alive.
– David Hockney
The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
– Michel Foucault
Obstacles are the universe’s hubs of unspeakable creativity, redeeming us from tired victories, from the banality of crossing the finish line, from the soundtrack of getting everything we want, and especially from the hubris of thinking we are in control.
– Bayo Akomolafe
At first I saw you everywhere.
Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.
– Louise Glück
Danger, when it is always imminent, does harm. It doesn’t need to actually arrive. You exhaust yourself in the act of forever looking over your shoulder. Your body readies itself to fight and never quite discharges that chemical cocktail. You channel it instead into anger and self-pity and anxiety and hopelessness. You divert it into work. But really what you do, with every fibre of your being, is watch. You are incessantly, exhaustingly alert. You don’t dare ever let up, just in case the danger takes advantage of your inattention. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have space in my brain for anything other than watching. For a long time I kept working teaching, pitching articles, writing editorial reports and for a while, that felt like a life raft. But then, incrementally, it became impossible. I was aware of a fog descending, a seizing of the gears, but it seemed diffuse until now.
– Katherine May
Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanently, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.
– Rebecca Solnit
Here in America we the people have a continent on which to work out our destiny, and our faith is great that our men and women are fit to face the mighty days. Nowhere else in all the world is there such a chance for the triumph on a gigantic scale of the great cause of Democratic and popular government. If we fail, the failure will be lamentable, and our heads will be bowed with shame; for not only shall we fail for ourselves, but our failure will wreck the fond desires of all throughout the world who look toward us with the fond hope that here in this great Republic it shall be proved from ocean to ocean that the people can rule themselves, and thus ruling can gain liberty for and do justice both to themselves and to others. We who stand for the cause of the uplift of humanity and the betterment of mankind are pledged to eternal war against wrong whether by the few or by the many, by a plutocracy or by a mob. We believe that this country will not be a permanently good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in. The sons of all of us will pay in the future if we of the present do not do justice to all in the present. Our cause is the cause of justice for all in the interest of all.
– Theodore Roosevelt
Power resides only where men believe it resides. […] A shadow on the wall, yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.
– George R.R. Martin
A mighty flame follows a tiny spark.
– Dante
Evening was coming and with it the soft, harping rain, rustling, rustling. A bird was muttering liquidly, gently somewhere, and it was very like the night – kind, strange.
– Henry Green
Science, like any tool, is neutral in morality. Its impact depends on the hands that wield it — whether for healing or harm, enlightenment or destruction.
– Carl Sagan
I sat upon a stone / covered one leg with the other / and set my elbow on them / I nestled in my hand / my chin and one of my cheeks / In this position I started pondering / How one should live in the world.
– Walther von der Vogelweide
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
It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity’s fate. You can deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can’t deceive your mind-self — for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible. Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.
– R Buckminster Fuller
Here’s a counter to the piece I shared about students not being able to stay focused on long complex pieces of reading (and while blaming the young is a very popular habit going back generations and centuries, I’ll note that on this site are way too m many not young people who are too eager to reply to read the post or the link and generally are as habituated to hot-take thoughtlessness as anyone, and that a while back when I was doing some research I was interested to find that a lot of young people complained that it was their parents who were addicted to their phones to the detriment of their capacity to pay attention to their children). Andy Black writes:
To be clear: the reason I have hope for the future is because of the students I taught in the last few years.
First, about my generation: I was fourteen when Guns n’ Roses released Use Your Illusion volumes one and two. A brash Joe Piscopo had made the transition from Saturday Night Live to sometimes movie-actor to stand-up built around body-building. Bel-Air had a new Prince, a Fresh one, whose royalty was complicated by the denizens of his kingdom making him take a cab from the airport to his new throne. Ritalin was on the cover of Time Magazine when I was fifteen because kids couldn’t pay attention.
My generation graduated high school in the mid-1990s and those of us who finished college did so just before or after 2000. I can assure you we were facing equal condemnations from professors: they were just more anecdotal, yet they were grounding assumptions: we didn’t read, we didn’t know how to write, we were lazy and entitled and too enamored with technology (like video games). The online avenues were just emerging where these might be argued with more permanence. But no boomer was talking about how my generation gave them hope for the future.
Yet there were books: Illiterate America (1985), The Closing of the American Mind (1987), or The End of Education (1995). Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich talked about this constantly, as did William Bennett. Mostly it seemed to happen in faculty lounges or happy hours, and such conclusions would be reported back to us students in class when a teacher or professor was profoundly disappointed in (in-class, on-paper) reading quiz results over books we apparently did not read. “Don’t you know what they’re saying about you?” one professor asked. We weren’t sure what he was referring to.
And this inspired policy both local and national, but really what this discourse helped foster was an attitude that wasn’t any more new than it is now. You can read some wild quotes about “the youth” on this fun reddit post. Read Horace on the wasteful “beardless youth” in Ars Poetica 2500 years ago. “My Students Can’t Read” is just a rehearsal of the texts listed above, and they turned college teaching committee meetings intto forums for anecdotal complaints about students who, again, can’t and won’t read. In 1995 or 1998 or 2002. Or for Horace, sometime between 30 and 20 BC, probably.
But us 90s kids weren’t as bad as the generation that followed (high-five, Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites!) In 2004, the NEH produced Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America finding a culprit that prior authors couldn’t have considered because of emergent technology: screens. “The news in the report is dire,” wrote its chairman, poet Dana Gioia. Print culture, also lamented above by our current author:
“affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications and insights possible. To lose such intellectual capability – and the many sorts of human continuity it allows – would constitute a vast cultural impoverishment.”
…My byline is this: I have taught at Murray State University for 13 years, after teaching as a graduate student at the Universities of Memphis and Maryland for about 5 years, after teaching at a small high school for 7 years. But here, I focus primarily on the students who I have encountered over the last few years at Murray State, because they’re the ones he (and the readers who share his article, and The Chronicle of Higher Education) seems most alarmed by.
These students mostly attended rural public schools in areas that carpetbaggers like me who move here never heard of before: Christian County, Graves County, Marshall County, Trigg County, McCracken County, or Calloway County, where Murray, Kentucky rests. Many of our students are from areas in similar rural places in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and my home state of Tennessee. Some are from more metropolitan spots – St. Louis, Louisville, Lexington, Nashville – and last year I had a delightful student from Sacramento. As such, you might assume that I could say to the author of “My Students Can’t Read:” You don’t know how good you got it, buddy. But I don’t: I want this guy to meet my students.
My students choose Murray State because it is fairly local, because it offers an avenue to a hopeful future at a reasonable cost, and because it is a respectable if not elite university. While many live on campus, a lot of my students live at home and have at least a thirty minute commute. Students would have to have very low-test scores in order not to be admitted, but even those students are entered into programs that pave the way for their acceptance. Because I teach four classes a semester, a fairly high number for a tenured college professor who also does service and research, I encounter students at all stages – seniors graduating with English degrees as well as non-majors who take my introductory writing and humanities classes.
Like him – I’ve had more than a few students who commit acts of academic dishonesty or do not complete coursework or do not follow instructions. I have students who do not find my classes valuable, interesting, or necessary. I’ll echo him and pretty much everyone else that AI has exacerbated the problem: people who do not like certain kinds of academic learning often see AI as the promise to easier positive outcomes in their courses.
But overwhelmingly, my experiences are so positive that, again, the reason I have hope for the future is because of the students I taught in the last few years.
How can I describe this? To start, students do the reading. I taught a Shakespeare class last year for upper-level students. I gave them two weeks to read each play, answer essay questions, turn in reading notes, and take an online multiple-choice quiz. The essay questions asked them to dive deep into the language and combine their reactions (often anger at a protagonist like Hamlet or Juliet’s dad or Leontes from The Winter’s Tale) with critical commentary. They read research which they adapted into visual “cheat sheets.” My favorite days were when I allowed them to use Discord, basically a chat-room they sign up for that I’ve used to create back-channel conversations over readings (and Discord is not without problems), to post memes and chatter as we were discussing the text. With computers and phones out, they weren’t distracted; they were more engaged; or when they were distracted it was because some student had posted the perfect meme that would stoke the discussion and we needed to f-ing applaud it.
I know: William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley are rolling over in their graves. The Cambridge Dons from Chariots of Fireplayed by John Gielgud and Lindsay Andersonare not amused by my students’ constant Muppet-centered comparisons to, for instance, Measure for Measure’s Lucio. But I think if you’d seen the class, you’d see 25 or so students engaging more deeply about Shakespeare than I ever did in my undergraduate class on the same subject. You want to argue this was kindergarten-level stuff? Fine, I’ll show you their final papers.
It’s not just that: it’s that I’ve tried to think more like them in finding ways to register student responses to texts that allow them to use creativity rather than more formal analysis. Two years ago, I taught a Women’s Literature class full of 300+ page texts where students turned in “Table of Contents” – writing down quotes, offering commentary, scribbling a high-five to the author for the perfect simile, or wondering why the hell the luminous Margaret Cavendish didn’t trust in microscopes. I would ask the students to keep these “ToCs” during their reading for the week and turn them in the night before class, and my class prep was just reading and taking notes on their notes so I could prepare for class.
It was wonderful and every time I taught the class there was nowhere else I wanted to be. I recently told a group of students, “The happiest I am is when I’m talking to a class about a piece of literature that I have opinions about, and get to hear theirs”
– Rebecca Solnit
Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as technology, and the latter provides the great legitimization of the expanding political power which absorbs all spheres of culture.
– Herbert Marcuse
Decipher me, my love, or
I will be forced to
destroy you.
– Clarice Lispector
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
– Frank Zappa
The more it appears to be spiritual—that is to say, something different from, aside from, apart from everyday life—the more false that kind of spirituality will be.
– Alan Watts
It is said that love is blind. But is it? Actually nothing on earth is as clear-sighted as love. The thing that is blind is not love but attachment.
– Anthony de Mello
The word “myth” comes from the ancient word “mythos” meaning word. Both ‘logos’ and ‘mythos’ mean ‘word’. While logos refers to rational thinking, mythos describes poetic or intuitive thinking.
– Mariann Burke
My faith fills my solitude with its hushed whisper of invisible life.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Only pure melancholy is left. I want nothing. Sleep.
Only to sleep. And to dream. To dream I am loved.
– Alejandra Pizarnik. Diarios
Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
I’d woken up early, and I took
a long time getting ready to exist.
– Fernando Pessoa
The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.
– GWF Hegel
Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?
– Abraham Lincoln
The problem of pain is that I
cannot feel my father’s, and he
cannot feel mine. This, I
suppose, is also the essential
mercy of pain.
– Eula Biss
When language arrives at its own edge, what it finds is not a positivity that contradicts it, but the void that will efface it. Into that void it must go, consenting to come undone in the rumbling…
– Foucault
whether understanding ever satisfies anything other than the ego, ever gratifies us in any other way than by allowing us to believe we are the kind of people who can understand, the kind of people who are understanding.
– Bruce Fink
To forgive doesn’t mean to say, “I forgive you,” but to tear from your heart every reproach and shred of anger against the person who hurt you.
– Leo Tolstoy
One of the strangest things about writing well is that it requires two different zones in the brain – rigor and recklessness – simultaneously.
– Carole Maso
The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.
….
Every separation is a link.
– Simone Weil
The body
is not a prison,
but a chapel of breath.
– @BashoSociety
Once you understand that indulging might actually be worse than resisting, the urge begins to lose its appeal.
– @dailystoic
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.
– Anaïs Nin
Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling,
or the absence of it.
– Margaret Atwood
Learn the art of forgiving.
Apply it to yourself first,
Then it becomes easy
To forgive others.
– Sri Chinmoy
I urge you: Come be angry at
a nearer distance.
– Cardan Greenbriar
People will mistake your high sense of self with arrogance. You can travel to the ends of your own reality to know yourself but if you come back full of life and self understanding, it’ll be too much for those who’ve not taken the first steps towards their own inner exploration.
– Nika Solé
How vast was a human being’s capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn’t a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.
– Janet Fitch
Since your mind is permeated by an unborn luminosity,
Do practice unceasingly!
– Padmasambhava
Meditaional therapy is the highest of all therapies, provided it is prescribed systematically. Gradually aspirants learn to deal with their problems, fears, and habit patterns.
– Swami Rama
Hope tends to appear when we see that all sorts of disparate personalities can come together, no matter how different and jarring they may seem at first.
– Anne Lamott
If all goes well, I shall disappear for some time and there will be no way to get
hold of me.
– Hermann Hesse
We make each other
alive. Does it matter if it
hurts?
– Ingmar Bergman
All mouth. Out of orbit
due to an insatiable need to be
orbited. At some point there are clouds
– Nathan Spoon
i love talking to you,
even though i have
nothing to say.
– mahmoud darwish
The Buddha called it dukkha. No matter where you go, unhappiness follows, until you awaken.
– Eckhart Tolle
You do not write your life with words…You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.
– Patrick Ness
Feel it. The thing that you don’t want
to feel. Feel it, and be free.
– Nayyirah Waheed
People write because
no one listens.
– h.h.
You are not a broken brain trying to heal. You are wholeness trying to remember itself.
– Kimia Nora
Hope is a quality of aliveness. It does not come at the end, as the feeling that results from a happy outcome. Rather, it lies at the beginning, as a pulse of truth that sends us forth.
– Cynthia Bourgeault
A hard thunder broke my sleep.
As if roused by a god,
I stood straight up;
my rested eyes moved about,
seeking acquaintance
with place.
– Dante
Revolutionary or reformer — the error is the same. Unable to dominate and reform his own attitude towards life, which is everything, or his own being, which is almost everything, he flees, devoting himself to modifying others and the outside world.
– Fernando Pessoa
When you feel perpetually unmotivated, you start questioning your existence in an unhealthy way; everything becomes a pseudo intellectual question you have no interest in responding whatsoever. This whole process becomes your very skin and it does not merely affect you; it actually defines you. So, you see yourself as a shadowy figure unworthy of developing interest, unworthy of wondering about the world – profoundly unworthy in every sense and deeply absent in your very presence.
– Ingmar Bergman
It is up to us to stop seeing Progress (which cannot be stopped by anyone or anything) as a stream of unlimited blessings, and to view it rather as a gift from on high, sent down for an extremely intricate trial of our free will.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We have come as far as we have because we are the cleverest creatures to have ever lived on Earth. But if we are to continue to exist, we will require more than intelligence. We will require wisdom.
– Sir David Attenborough
The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.
– Leo Tolstoy
The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.
– Vaclav Havel
I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn’t write them down, I should probably forget all about them.
– Oscar Wilde
I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.
– Anne Sexton
The immutable neither lives
nor dies; it is the timeless
witness of life and death.
You cannot call it dead, for
it is aware. Nor can you
call it alive, for it does
not change.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Like a muddied spring or a polluted fountain is a righteous man who gives way before the wicked.
– Proverbs 25:26
I think that in the process of writing, all kinds of unexpected things happen that shift the poet away from his plan and that these accidents are really what we mean when we talk about poetry.
– John Ashbery
We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.
– Tennessee William
The seeker of union
Must admit separation.
For the knower of union,
There is nothing to do.
– Wu Hsin
You didn’t come here to play the game.
You came here to change the entire game
board.
Start using your Heart and let your mind rest in Peace.
– Eileen Lynn
A truly revolutionary mindfulness would challenge the Western sense of entitlement to happiness irrespective of ethical conduct.
– Ron Purser
The whole mad organizing force under the billows of correct delight.
– John Ashbery
Happiness is a by-product of an effort to make someone else happy.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
I had to return to the
darkness, I couldn’t
stand the sun,
– Franz Kafka
Every father should remember that one day his son will follow his example instead of his advice.
– Charles Kettering
Love quiets fear. And a sweet and powerful positive obsession blunts pain, diverts rage, and engages each of us in the greatest, the most intense of our chosen struggles.
– Octavia Butler
Take time to do things differently. Slow down, absorb the world in a new manner. Change the color of your footsteps. You may just find a bit more life than you knew of before. After all, life is an open sky. You can always fly back home.
– J. Wool
wonder turns
even ordinary roads
into sacred ground
– @BashoSociety
When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience
– T. S. Eliot
The shortness of life, so often lamented, may perhaps be the very best thing about it.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.
– Christopher Hitchens
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the greatest possible degree.
– Ezra Pound
Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness… and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.
– Alfred North Whitehead
western clouds
holding the day
a moment longer
– Aiko
all my life
I expect no grand bouquet
yet wish for
someone to greet me
with a single flower
– Kiyoko Ogawa
With books unread, muscles untrained, and thousands of skills untouched – if you’re bored, you’re not even trying.
– @bluewmist
Children are expected to have a level of self-control that’s rarely seen in police, politicians, pastors, billionaires, and the president.
– J.S. Park
I had a profound desire to be alone, because only alone, lost, silent, on foot, can I recognize things.
– Pier Paolo Pasolini
It is not obedience that is the ultimate virtue, but humanity.
– Erich Maria Remarque
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast…
– W.H. Auden
I have had good reason for asserting that everyone possesses in his own unconscious an instrument with which he can interpret the utterances of the unconscious in other people.
– Sigmund Freud
If you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.
– C.S. Lewis
We move thru life in a
continual search
How can it be better?
Whatever it may be.
– Rick Rubin
A body that doesn’t brace itself against its breath starts feeling palpably lighter. Breath after breath, it sheds its resistant burden.
– Will Johnson
Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself.
– Hermann Hesse
O Spirit, teach us to heal the body by recharging it with Thy cosmic energy, to heal the mind by concentration and cheerfulness, and to heal the disease of soul ignorance by the divine medicine of meditation on Thee.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books…
– Erich Maria Remarque
each man’s hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind
my ruined face.
– Charles Bukowski
Psychoanalysis is a theory of original frustration. And everything depends on this story, on what you do with your frustration. Another way of saying this would be, psychoanalysis is an education in transforming and bearing frustration.
– Adam Philips
You will be forgotten either
way. So live in such a manner
that, while you remain, you
belong to yourself.
– Marcus Aurelius
What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
A chosen person can be thrown into a pit, sold out, forgotten, and falsely accused and still end up in the palace.
– Nithya Shri
Childhood is like a mirror, which reflects in after life the images first presented to it.
– Samuel Smiles
Meaning is a tool — a means. Absolute meaning would be means and end at the same time. Thus every thing is itself the means whereby we can come to know it — to experience it or have an effect on it. Thus in order to feel and come to know a thing completely I would have to make it my meaning and object at once — I would have to vivify it — make it into absolute meaning, according to the earlier definition.
– Novalis
If there’s any single talent a writer needs, it’s persistence. If you can keep at your writing and you can learn as you write, you can tell any story you want to tell.
– Octavia Butler
Instead of worrying that humanities degrees don’t prepare students for jobs in today’s world [product managers, finance consultants, startups], we should worry that we’ve created a world with such little value for literature, art, philosophy—anything that expresses the human soul.
– Priya Satia
If our elected representatives have contempt for us, if the forces of so-called law and order likewise hold us in contempt, it’s because they think we have no recourse, and no power, except for the one force they have long assumed too splintered, too divided and too forgotten to be of any use: the power of the people.
– Zadie Smith
I mean, say that you figure that everything is senseless, then it can’t be quite senseless because you are aware that it’s senseless and your awareness of senselessness almost gives it sense. You know what I mean?
– Charles Bukowski
The person who realizes that hatred is an enemy … and who persistently strikes it down, is happy in this world and the next.
– Śāntideva
Woman is the heart of humanity … its grace, ornament, and solace.
– Samuel Smiles
What’s worse than the fact that people no longer seem to know anything is that they don’t want to know anything; and the rest of us are supposed to accommodate them by speaking only in monosyllables.
– Boze Herrington
Every person carries a solution hidden within them; responsibility begins when they choose to uncover it.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
– Donna Tartt
…we do not achieve all upon which we have set our hearts, or are beaten back by headwinds stronger than our desires, we too can lay up a while, watch the glitter on the grass, and renew our strength.
– Chloe Dalton
The very greatest things – great thoughts, discoveries, inventions – have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty.
– Samuel Smiles
People say there’s no magic in books but the fact that you can string words together to create a series of visions in someone else’s brain is still our greatest achievement as a species.
– Boze Herrington
Every generation is waiting for someone brave enough to release the gift hidden inside them.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
– Ian McEwan
Stupidity has a knack
of getting its way.
– Albert Camus
I think many writers, artists, poets are permanently in love; they yearn and they love. But the world doesn’t always reciprocate.
– Joyce Carol Oates
I want to go nothing less than
to the very bottom.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded.
– Wendell Berry
A closed book can never change a life; wisdom only transforms those willing to seek, read, and understand it.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
Your gift is not a reward for humanity; it is your debt to humanity.
– Dr. Johnson Mbabazi
Self-respect is the noblest garment with which a man can clothe himself, the most elevating feeling with which the mind can be inspired.
– Samuel Smiles
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.
– Reinhold Niebuhr
Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.
– Samuel Smiles
Woman, above all other educators, educates humanly. Man is the brain, but woman is the heart, of humanity.
– Samuel Smiles
The easiest way to not be photographed with fascists is to not go to places where fascists coagulate.
– W. Kamau Bell
It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.
– Samuel Smiles
What does he know of love who has not lost what he truly loved!
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Purposes, like eggs, unless they be hatched into action, will run into rottenness.
– Samuel Smiles
Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.
– Samuel Smiles
Progress however, of the best kind, is comparatively slow. Great results cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step.
– Samuel Smiles
The ultimate choice for a man inasmuch as he is given to transcend himself, is to create or destroy, to love or to hate.
– Erich Fromm
You do not have to carry yesterday’s weight into tomorrow’s possibilities.
– Dede Hawkins
There is a reason a book has weight in your hands. It asks you to slow down, to hold it, to turn a page with intention. A screen weighs nothing and asks nothing of you — which is exactly why it gives so little back. I think the things that ask something of us are the things that end up meaning the most.
– John Green
Reading is an act of civilization.
– Italo Calvino
Riches do not constitute any claim to distinction. It is only the vulgar who admire riches as riches.
– Samuel Smiles
If we think of all the great works of poetry and prose that dilate a day or an instant into an eon, or compress whole eras into a nutshell, or run time backwards, or find some position where time can be spatialized and we can see, all at once, as Yeats writes, “what is past, or passing, or to come,” we arrive at one of the appropriate emotions for this moment, which is anger. (Another emotion, grief, is waiting close by.)
– Dan Chiasson
Karma Yogis abandon the intellect of attachment and perform actions through the senses, mind, intellect, and body, abandoning attachment, solely for the purification of the heart.
– Bhagavad Gita
Bitterness is like cancer: it feeds on the host, but it doesn’t nothing to the object of its displeasure.
– Maya Angelou
Are we not all a thousand characters in millions of plays throughout our lifetime?
– Sherrilyn Kenyon
You already are extremely incredibly successful at something but because it’s easy for you and natural for you, you don’t think it’s a skill.
– Jay Shetty
You saw her a hundred times, but not once did you look at her.
– Gabriela Mistral
We need a Democratic party with backbone.
– Mayor Mamdani
Our senses exist mainly to refine, or error-correct, our minds’ best guesses as to what we’re experiencing.
– Michael Pollan
Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart.
– Henry Clay
Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.
– Stephen Hawking
A lot of people are under the mistaken impression that progress means advances in tech. Real progress is kids who are literate, free meals for public school students, a culture in which human art & poetry are celebrated. We’re regressing rapidly & the only way forward is to read.
– Boze Herrington
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
In the end, what matters more? Living, or knowing that one is living?
– Clarice Lispector
Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs.
– Socrates
But now he knew that there were communities everywhere, sprinkled across the vast landscape of the known world, in which people suffered. Not always from beatings and hunger, the way he had. But from ignorance. From not knowing. From being kept from knowledge.
– Lois Lowry
The boy was as useless as rubber lips on a woodpecker.
– Earl Pitts
The earth must be a huge bus station where the pathways of various civilizations criss cross. We’re simply to take what we need for our journey and keep walking the cosmic path that was sealed in the stars before we got here. We did not just get here from nowhere, but surely we we meant to pass this way.
– Marjorie Bee
You can’t shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don’t know.
– Janet Fitch
Our perception is bounded only by the limits we set in our minds.
– Leaven Stark
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
– Shakespeare
I’ve spent my entire life studying atoms and molecules, but I’m sorry to tell you, they don’t exist; they are expressions of CONSCIOUSNESS.
– Max Plunk
If you’re neurodivergent, be grateful it hasn’t progressed to its more advanced stages: neuroinsurgent, followed by neuroallegiant.
– Kat Angus
One must not wish
first to understand
and then to feel.
Art does not
tolerate reason.
– Albert Camus
On many levels, we wind up being strengthened by what we join, or what joins us, as well as by what we combat.
– Octavia Butler
Who among us has not dreamt, in
moments of ambition, of the
miracle of a poetic prose, musical
without rhythm and rhyme,
supple and staccato enough to
adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the
soul, the undulations of dreams,
and sudden leaps of
consciousness. This obsessive idea
is above all a child of giant cities,
of the intersecting of their myriad
relations.
– Baudelaire
A tree is like a human being. It breathes, it lives, it takes in water. It protects us from all sorts of things.
– André Desrocher
I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them.
– Clive Davis
Clive was the one suit we weren’t distrustful of.
– Bob Weir
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob.
– G. K. Chesterton
Profound connection is what the word `spiritual’ properly refers to. The spiritual is not a matter of visions of angels, or of being carried away by ecstatic emotion… At its most basic, the spiritual is the experience of the connectedness that underlies reality.
– Arthur J. Deikman, M.D.
Who is so deafe, or so blynde, as is hee, that wilfully will nother heare nor see.
– John Heywood
The universe speaks in patterns.
The heart recognizes them
before the mind understands them.
– Nagomi
Damaged people recognize other damaged people. It’s like a club you don’t want a membership to.
– Colleen Hoover
The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while, and watch your answers change.
– Richard Bach
I honor Lenin as a man who completely sacrificed himself and devoted all his energy to the realization of social justice. Men of his type are the guardians and restorers of the conscience of humanity.
– Albert Einstein
the final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. the exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
– Wallace Stevens
It is the nature of all hypocrites and false prophets to create a conscience where there is none, and to cause conscience to disappear where it does exist.
– Martin Luther
Live for yourself and you will live in vain; live for others, and you will live again.
– Bob Marley
One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.
– Leo Tolstoy
What if I don’t want to wake up before dawn and work until midnight just so I can look at money pouring into a bank account I never have the time to use?
What if I’ve no interest in living the sort of life my foremothers sought so desperately to escape from?
What if spending all my money on a nice, grey flat then never leaving it in the evening is my own idea of hell?
– Marie Le Conte
Paradise is beyond desire.
– Swami Nitty-Gritty
“Para” is Greek for beyond.
Desire is not the issue. ATTACHMENT is the issue.
Advice, like snow, the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The ancients called it the Akashic Records.
A cosmic library
written in energy.
there was the field.
– Nagomi
With coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow – I have still joy in the midst of these things. Riches and honors acquired by unrighteousness are to me as a floating cloud.
– Confucius
Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
– Christopher Morley
Not exaggerating when I say the future of our world depends on people recovering the ability to spend an unbroken hour or two reading a book without being tempted to look at their phones.
– Boze Herrington
How under all these circumstances could I possibly perceive the good in what comes about? I can’t even see *what* comes about, since each end (synthesis) is the new thesis against which a further antithesis appears. The becoming never ceases — there are syntheses but never a true end.
– Philip K. Dick
I know, in a visionary way,
that I will die of poetry.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
Rules may look boring, but they are there in every novel and painting. They keep things whole.
– Matt Haig, The Midnight Train
And to live life well you need to know when to ignore what is expected of you. Even if it means breaking the rules.
– Matt Haig, The Midnight Train
Words convey meaning only at a certain level; they have a way of distorting, of not giving fully the significance of their symbol, of creating a deception that is entirely unintentional.
– Krishnamurti
We find total peace when we accept that, due to our karma, we deserve the good and the bad that is happening in our lives.
– Mitta Xinindlu
It is a broken Christianity that swears it can see God in presidents and billionaires but not in the poor and the powerless.
– Rev. Benjamin Cremer
The whole philosophy of art is that you don’t try to be artistic but you just approach the objects as they are, and then the message comes automatically.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Time and reflection change the sight little by little ’till we come to understand.
– Paul Cezanne
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.
Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.
To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.
– Bill Watterson
And what if there is nothing else? What if all life ends in the silent void of death? Then is it all in vain? I think not, for love, for the sake of love, will always be enough. And if our lives are but a single flash in the dark hollow of eternity, then if, but for the briefest of moments, we shine – then how brilliantly our light has burned. And as starlight knows no boundary of space or time, so too, our illumination will shine forth throughout all eternity, for darkness has no power to quell such light. And this is a lesson we must all learn and take to heart – that all light is eternal and all love is light. And it must forever be so.
– Richard Paul Evans
Every act of love is a new beginning, a new creation. To live compassionately is to believe in a love greater than ourselves yet intimately present to us, a love visible in the trees, the streams, the clouds, the poor, nonbelievers, and all who share the life that is our life—a love binding us together without constraints. We must believe that each person is capable of being transformed by love, that each tree, flower, animal, living creature, the stones, the sand, the sky—everything is capable of being transformed by love. And that when all is united by a luminous thread of love, Christ will be visible in the universe.
– Ilia Delio
There are things of strange aspect in the world, things that you come upon without expectation, and they are the more meaningful for that.
– N. Scott Momaday
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
‘To dream is to know,’ I remember my grandfather telling me on more than one occasion. I realize that this phrase must have meant many things to him, not all of which I’ll ever know. But I do feel the vibration of these words of his in reminding me always that when your existence is poised on various kinds of precarity, the substance of visions is as real as the earth, the air, the water. It is not easy to situate oneself, if even for brief moments, on the other side of time, the other side of somewhere […].
– Carter Mathes
Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.
– Salman Rushdie
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out. We’re both being someone new now, someone incredible….
– Thomas Pynchon
…and do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at some time or other, been up on a broomstick.
– Isak Dinesen
If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms – i you find yourself at a loss for what do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body – it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much less.
– Nicole Krauss
There is no such thing as a normal person. There is just you and me.
– Willie Nelson
…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
We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house. According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.
– Annie Dillard
Those who love life do not actually love life but love loving.
– Luca Dellanna
… That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
– David Foster Wallace
I can only understand what’s broken and intense
– Arthur Rimbaud
It is the nature of the visible to have an invisible lining that it makes present like an absence.
– Maurice Merlau-Ponty
If you are smart, you would benefit from more silence instead of reading more books. Too much information leads to overthinking.
– Kieran Drew
You don’t read books to obtain “information.” You read books to withdraw from the “information” machine. As David Ulin once said: “Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction…. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little by stepping back from the noise.”
– Poetic Outlaws
Usually the poetry of the memory is destroyed by confrontation with its origin.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Zwijgen
by Saskia Hamilton
I slept before a wall of books and they
calmed everything in the room, even
their contents, even me, woken
by the cold and thrill, and still
they said, like the Dutch verb for falling
silent that English has no accommodation for
in the attics and rafters of its intimacies.
Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
– Jacques Barzun
There is no sense talking about “being true to yourself” until you are sure what voice you are being true to. It takes hard work to differentiate the voices of the unconscious.
– Marion Woodman
Let your language be for you what the body is for lovers. It alone separates beings and unite them.
– Motto of literary magazine founded by Schiller and Goethe
All of the difficulties in life are our perfect teacher. We learn, grow and become wise knowing what we need to do to live the life we deeply desire.
– Barb Schmidt
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 body itself is a disease. To wish for a long stay of that disease is not the aim of the jnani [one who has realized the Self].
– Ramana Maharshi
The negotiation of desire that constitutes one’s life flourishes when tended by another’s restraint.
– Muriel Dimen
But most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though no twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don’t want, I want, and then
a pause.
– Margaret Atwood
…writing to you. It is like kissing
you. It is something physical;
– Simone de Beauvoir
death is not the problem; waiting around for it is.
– Charles Bukowski
As far as society is concerned the poet has died and the only one who doesn’t know it is the poet himself. Because of his great vanity or because he has formed a bad habit like masturbation which he finds enjoyable and can’t quit.
– Irving Layton
Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction…. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little by stepping back from the noise.
– David L. Ulin
The top and bottom of it is, that it is a crime to teach a child anything at all, school-wise. It is just evil to collect children together and teach them through the head.
It causes absolute starvation in the dynamic centers, and sterile substitute of brain knowledge is all the gain. The children of the middle classes are so vitally impoverished, that the miracle is they continue to exist at all…
Education means leading out the individual nature in each man and woman to its true fullness. You can’t do that by stimulating the mind. To pump education into the mind is fatal.
– D.H. Lawrence
I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
– Willa Cather
Desire—
The word has not yet been invented
– Marguerite Duras
… but what do such large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?
– Henry James
But I want to be better than the lessons they
taught me. I want my love to be greater than my
hate, my mercy to be stronger than my vengeance.
– Amy Engel
If we are inspired only by literature that reflects our own interests, all reading becomes a form of narcissism.
– Terry Eagleton
Whatever organ ceases to know pain,—whatever faculty ceases to be used under the stimulus of pain,—must also cease to exist. Let pain and its effort be suspended, and life must shrink back, first into protoplasmic shapelessness, thereafter into dust.
– Lafcadio Hearn
Clear water sparkles like crystal,
you can see through right to the bottom.
Mind free from all thoughts.
– Han-Shan
As always, books remain a consolation—these light little ships for traveling through time and space and beyond their limits. As long as there is a book at hand and leisure for reading, the situation cannot be hopeless, not utterly unfree.
– Ernst Jünger
I have dined so well at the banquet of respect that shame no longer persecutes me
– Muriel Dimen
One should always be kind, Lise says, in case it might be the last chance. One might be killed crossing the street, or even on the pavement, any time, you never know. So we should always be kind.
– Muriel Spark
In effing the ineffable, language fails, has to fail, should fail, and should go on failing, loquaciously failing. Failure is the aim, an apparently aimless aim, which shoots at a target it cannot see, cannot know, and cannot even conceive.
– Simon Critchley
Sometimes I feel quite distinctly that what is inside me is not all of me. There is something else, sublime, quite indestructible, some tiny fragment of the Universal spirit. Don’t you feel that?
– Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
For resentments of any nature bring their fruit in the physical.
– Edgar Cayce
You have been listening to the inner roommate your whole life. But there has always been someone watching. That witness – quiet, unchanged – is who you are.
– Michael Singer
Self-pity is not the same thing as self-compassion. Self-compassion says, ‘May you be well,’ and it reduces our suffering. Self-pity says, ‘Poor me, this is terrible,’ and increases our suffering.
– Bodhipaksa
Angry, and half in
love with you, and
tremendously sorry, I
turned away.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
I always feel that a man and a woman who do not like the same films will eventually divorce.
– Jean-Luc Godard
She stands in the afternoon sunlight, imagining catastrophes again.
– josefine klougart
If you seek the applause of your contemporaries, you are writing your thoughts on water; if you seek the truth, you must be prepared to stand in the freezing wind of their absolute indifference.
– G.W.F. Hegel
I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation, our appearance in the world, should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products, of three thousand million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man’s side in a trance.
– Sir David Attenborough
You are always my concern, I ponder a great deal on it and speak to you and take your strange, dark head between my hands and want to push the stones off your chest…
– Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Cela
If you have loved, if you have been loved, you will know in old age that that was the true and powerful bond that tied you to life, the only one that deserves to be remembered.
– Juan Marsé
I’ve always been able to work with anybody that doesn’t want success. Jazz musicians don’t want success. They have these little tin weapons – they don’t shoot….The jazz musician doesn’t deal with the structured life – he just wants that night, like a kid.
– John Cassavetes
I’m tired of trying to fill up my
empty spaces with things I don’t
need and people I don’t like.
– Beau Taplin
Now any dogma, based primarily on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user.
– Isaac Asimov
Emotions are a centerpiece of our moral philosophy. Substantive ethics theories require deep understanding of our emotions.
– Martha Nussbaum
Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.
– James Joyce
The God of Patriarchy, from the beginning, has been a God of War and Economic Exploitation; incessant warfare and economic exploitation have characterized the four-thousand-year history of this male God —a timespan that is very brief relative to the 300,000 to 500,000 years of humanoid life on earth, but still long enough to make us feel, as a species, that “it has always been this way.”
– Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother
Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are made by that sort of suffering.
– Hemingway
We’ve tried, but it seems it is in the stars for us to hate each other.
– Austin Smith
Knowledge without repentance—will be but a torch to light men to Hell.
– Thomas Watson
We are a people that like to be entertained and don’t like to sit down and think. So, there’s a drift to entertain people and not to teach them.
– John MacArthur
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously.
– Ernest Hemingway
I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward. I determined never to stop until I had come to the end and achieved my purpose.
– David Livingstone
There are things in your soul and in mine that need to meet.
– Antonin Artaud
To pray means to stop expecting from God the same small-mindedness which you discover in yourself.
– Henri Nouwen
A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken.
– James Dent
There are unforgettable people, and there is no cure for that.
– Charles Bukowski
No matter what you are going through, spend a few minutes each day to be grateful for who you still have, and for what you still have, in your Life.
– Avis Viswanathan
Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It seeks itself: this is more than it has a right to do, because literature may be one of those things which deserve to be found but not to be sought.
– Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire
I find one vast garden spread out, all over the universe.
All plants, all human beings are about in this garden in various ways.
Each has their own uniqueness and beauty.
Their presence and variety give me great delight.
Every one of you adds with your special feature to the glory of the garden.
– Anandamayi Ma
Justice
the bird comes
and devours the worm;
the man comes
and devours the bird;
the worm comes
and devours the man.
– Blanca Varela
As we talked I realized she wanted many things at the same time, and that kept her in a permanent state of dissatisfaction.
– Elena Ferrante
The deepest principle of human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
– William James
Let us, therefore, not be weary of well-doing; for we shall reap an eternal harvest of comfort, if we faint not.
– George Whitefield
Cut vegetables in triangles if you want people to eat more. Cut them in spheres if you want them to eat less.
– Swami Nitty-Gritty
Bad news travels at the speed of light; good news travels like molasses.
– Tracy Morgan
A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
– Norman Cousins
I have found the Friend in the eyes of the poor and the broken.
– Kabir
People simply
love or do not love.
Those who love will always do so—
at every moment,
intensely and passionately.
Those who do not love will never rise
even a centimeter off the ground.
Gray men and women, devoid of blood.
– Chavela Vargas
Sometimes everything you need isn’t so far from where you start.
– Matt Haig, The Midnight Train
The truly sociable man is more difficult in his relationships than others; those which consist only in false appearances cannot suit him. He prefers to live far from wicked men without thinking about them, than to see them and hate them.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dialogues
I think the trouble with life is we do things because we should. We act for outside eyes. I’m trying to live it the other way round. To do what feels right deep down even if it shouldn’t be.
– Matt Haig, The Midnight Train
Hecato says, ‘I can teach you a love potion made without any drugs, herbs, or special spell-if you would be loved, love.’
– Seneca
I loved her totally, and while I loved her, the world was love. Once she was gone, the world seemed to prove nothing more than ruins and the smoldering dreams of monsters.
– Paul Harding, Enon
As James Hillman said, “tell me for what you yearn and I shall tell you who you are.” We are what we long for.
– Mary Antonia Wood, The Archetypal Artist
A poet is always tricking himself into new discoveries.
– Richie Hofman
Calling yourself an AI musician is like saying you’re a microwave chef.
– Todd Poore
There are many days I thirst for my own silence but walk through the desert screaming instead.
– Andrea Gibson
The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Deities and Gods have no place in the Self. Neither paradise nor heaven exists there.
– Avadhuta Gita
Human beings from the moment of entry into language are ready to become dreamers and fiction-makers, not to mention liars, fetishists, and perverters of the real. Our fiction-making capacity may be foundational of our search for truth in our selves and in the world, but it does not guarantee it, nor assure our mental stability. The vehicles of truth and untruth are the same. But fiction-making does seem to be crucial to the ability to carve out a space within reality for attempts at understanding and reflection.
– Peter Brooks
I find most interesting the conspiracy of life in the desert to circumvent the death rays of the all-conquering sun. The beaten earth appears defeated and dead, but it only appears so…the desert, the dry and sun-lashed desert, is a good school in which to observe the cleverness and the infinite variety of survival under pitiless opposition. Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.
– John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
There is no absolute distinction between the alchemist and nature, between the inner and outer worlds. All are part of one creative, evolutionary process. Because of this alchemy has always possessed a spiritual dimension, since it is not possible to participate in the Great Work of Nature without experiencing a self-transformation. In order for the work to be successful, total participation is required. Alchemy is a comprehensive science of the cosmos in which both humanity and the larger universe are implicated.
– David Fideler
Cosmic pessimism is the belief that nature has no purpose and that whatever meaning exists in the world is our own human creation. This belief is taken for granted by most scientific thinkers today, but with the aid of the new idea of an unfinished universe, theology may point out that cosmic pessimism, which is usually taken as the epitome of hard-nosed realism, is not as self-evidently justifiable as it seems to most contemporary intellectuals. Geology, evolutionary biology, and cosmology now situate Earth, life, and human existence within the framework of an immense cosmic drama of transformation that is still going on.
– Ilia Delio
With this new sense of moving forward, from simple to complex life forms, from bacteria to humans, science shows that evolution is more than a method of collecting and classifying the facts of life; rather it is the means by which humanity can move forward into the future.
– Ilia Delio
In my own effort towards concentration, help is also offered through nature itself, life itself—whenever I can remain permeable to the deeply revealing impressions that it never ceases to provide. Therefore, my only concern should be to try and stay attentive to the wordless call from that which is always there, waiting for recognition.
– Henri Tracol
However, this is a magical operation in the sense of the wisdom of the Kabbala, namely that it arises not from magic, but from nature taking its natural and subtle course.
– Paracelsus
I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.
– George Saunders
One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
The mind is a machine that is constantly asking: What would I prefer? Close your eyes, refuse to move, and watch what your mind does. What it does is become discontent with That Which Is. A desire arises, you satisfy that desire, and another arises in its place. This wanting and rewanting is an endless cycle for which, turns out, there is already a name: samsara. Samsara is at the heart of the vast human carnival: greed, neurosis, mad ambition, adultery, crimes of passion, the hacking to death of a terrified man on a hillside in the name of A More Pure And Thus Perfect Nation–and all of this takes place because we believe we will be made happy once our desires have been satisfied.
I know this. But still I’m full of desire…
– George Saunders
If gifts and responsibilities are one, then asking “What is our responsibility?” is the same as asking “What is our gift?”
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
Today, all time-consuming practices, such as trust, loyalty, commitment and responsibility, are disappearing. […] I think trust is a social practice, and today it is being replaced by transparency and information. Trust enables us to build positive relationships with others, despite lacking knowledge. In a transparency society, one immediately asks for information from others. Trust as a social practice becomes superfluous. The transparency and information society fosters a society of distrust.
– Byung-Chul Han
The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
– Schopenhauer
Above all, tell them to practice an intimate presence to the beauty and wonder of the natural world through their intuitive awareness that recognizes the oneness of all life; tell them to stop and enlarge moments throughout their days to become aware of the mysteries and miracles of creation all around them – the movement of a squirrel, the sound of a bird, the pattern of a leaf, changing patterns of light, the sun, the rain, the stars, dawn and sunset. Tell them we are not ourselves without everything and everyone else.
– Thomas Berry
The outcome of an actual encounter with someone who is a carrier of the anima or animus projection ‘frequently gives rise in dreams to the symbol of psychic pregnancy, a symbol that goes back to the primordial image of the hero’s birth. The child that is to be born signifies the individuality, which, though present, is not yet conscious.’ The real psychic purpose of the conventional man’s affair with his very unconventional anima woman is to produce a symbolic child, which represents a union of the opposites in his personality and is therefore a symbol of the self. The meeting with the anima/us represents a connection to the unconscious even deeper than that of the shadow. In the case of the shadow, it is a meeting with the disdained and rejected pieces of the total psyche, the inferior and unwanted qualities. In the meeting with the anima/us, it is a contact with levels of the psyche which has the potential to lead into the deepest and highest (at any rate furthest) reaches that the ego can attain.
– Murray B. Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction
The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God. Ovid tells the story of two immortals who came to Earth in disguise to cleanse the sickened world. No one would let them in but one old couple, Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer… .
– Richard Powers
There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.
– Richard Powers
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
Sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter of an inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.
– Nicole Krauss
humid night
sheets twisted
like questions
– Sakura
Who would want to live with a novelist? A man underfoot in the house all day? A man, moreover, subject to solitary funks and strange elations. If I were a woman, I’d prefer a traveling salesman.
– Walker Percy
You’ll ache. And you’re going to love it. It will
crush you. And you’re still going to love all of
it. Doesn’t it sound lovely beyond belief?
– Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden
If you keep awake always to the Self, which is the substratum of all experiences, you will find that the world which you are now aware of is just as unreal as the world in which you lived in your dream.
– Ramana Maharshi
The world belongs to those who refuse to disappear.
– Ghassan Kanafani
The first great thing is to find yourself and for that you need solitude and contemplation – at least sometimes. I can tell you deliverance will not come from the rushing noisy centers of civilization. It will come from the lonely places.
– Fridtjof Nansen
I see you my planet, I see your exact rotation now on my floor—I will not close these eyes in this my planet…
I don’t want the moon and the stars, I want to lie here arms spread on your almost eternal turn and on the matter the turn takes-on as it is turned by that matter—Earth—as my mind lags yet is always on you,
how huge you carrying me are—and there is never hurry— and nothing will posit you as you carry the positors—as you carry the bottom of the river and its top and the clouds on its top, watery, weak, and the clouds one looks up to to see as they too turn—
– Jorie Graham
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
Between the universe that can be apprehended by pure intellectual perception (the universe of the Cherubic Intelligences) and the universe perceptible to the senses, there is an intermediate world, the world of Idea-Images, of archetypal figures, of subtile substances, of “immaterial matter.” This world is as real and objective, as consistent and subsistent as the intelligible and sensible worlds; it is an intermediate universe “where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual,” a world consisting of real matter and real extension, though by comparison to sensible, corruptible matter these are subtile and immaterial.
The organ of this universe is the active Imagination; it is the place of theophanic visions, the scene on which visionary events and symbolic histories appear in their true reality. Here we shall have a good deal to say of this universe, but the word imaginary will never be used, because with its present ambiguity this word, by prejudging the reality attained or to be attained, betrays an inability to deal with this at once intermediate and intermediary world.
– Henry Corbin
A Note
Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;
to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;
to tell pain
from everything it’s not;
to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.
An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;
and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,
mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.
– Wislawa Szymborska
Anger vitalizes people; it also temporarily narrows the range of vision. Anger burns through certain husks of apathy like white-hot fire through steel; it does not encourage grief, nor the examination of one’s own shadow.
– Robert Bly
Lorca
after Neruda
Because I was a poem, my country
hushed me.
They knelt me
on the cold stones of a roadway
and even when the guns had touched
my body,
I heard the birds, I heard my heart
be strong.
Listen. You have to go on
without me.
You know what my triumph was,
my victory?
I was open. I stayed
so wholly open
that I heard the birds and the gift
the Spring is singing.
They can kill the singers but they cannot kill the song.
They can kill the singers but they cannot kill the song.
– Joseph Fasano
Shakespearean Haiku
Shall I compare thee
To a summer’s day? Alright –
Thou art very hot.
– Brian Bilston
The Dream Play
What night-rule now about this haunted grove?
The spirits have dispersed, the woods
faded to grey from midnight blue
leaving a powdery residue,
night music fainter, frivolous gods
withdrawing, cries of yin and yang,
discords of the bionic young;
cobweb and insects, hares and deer,
wild strawberries and eglantine,
dawn silence of the biosphere,
amid the branches a torn wing
— what is this enchanted place?
Not the strict groves of academe
but an old thicket of lost time
too cool for school, recovered space
where the brain yields to nose and ear,
folk remedy and herbal cure,
old narratives of heart and hand,
and a dazed donkey, starry eyed,
with pearls and honeysuckle crowned,
beside her naked nibs is laid.
Wild viruses, Elysian fields —
our own planet lit by the fire
of molten substance, constant flux,
hot ice and acrobatic sex,
the electric moth-touch of desire
and a new vision, a new regime
where the white blaze of physics yields
to yellow moonlight, dance and dream
induced by what mind-altering drug
or rough-cast magic realism;
till morning bright with ant and bug
shines in a mist of glistening gism,
shifting identities, mutant forms,
angels evolved from snails and worms.
– Derek Mahon
Afterlives
(for James Simmons)
1
I wake in a dark flat
To the soft roar of the world.
Pigeons neck on the white
Roofs as I draw the curtains
And look out over London
Rain-fresh in the morning light.
This is our element, the bright
Reason on which we rely
For the long-term solutions.
The orators yap, and guns
Go off in a back street;
But the faith doesn’t die
That in our time these things
Will amaze the literate children
In their non-sectarian schools
And the dark places be
Ablaze with love and poetry
When the power of good prevails.
What middle-class shits we are
To imagine for one second
That our privileged ideals
Are divine wisdom, and the dim
Forms that kneel at noon
In the city not ourselves.
2
I am going home by sea
For the first time in years.
Somebody thumbs a guitar
On the dark deck, while a gull
Dreams at the masthead,
The moon-splashed waves exult.
At dawn the ship trembles, turns
In a wide arc to back
Shuddering up the grey lough
Past lightship and buoy,
Slipway and dry dock
Where a naked bulb burns;
And I step ashore in a fine rain
To a city so changed
By five years of war
I scarcely recognize
The places I grew up in,
The faces that try to explain.
But the hills are still the same
Grey-blue above Belfast.
Perhaps if I’d stayed behind
And lived it bomb by bomb
I might have grown up at last
And learnt what is meant by home.
– Derek Mahon
Lives
(for Seamus Heaney)
First time out
I was a torc of gold
And wept tears of the sun.
That was fun
But they buried me
In the earth two thousand years
Till a laborer
Turned me up with a pick
In eighteen fifty-four.
Once I was an oar
But stuck in the shore
To mark the place of a grave
When the lost ship
Sailed away. I thought
Of Ithaca, but soon decayed.
The time that I liked
Best was when
I was a bump of clay
In a Navaho rug,
Put there to mitigate
The too god-like
Perfection of that
Merely human artifact.
I served my maker well —
He lived long
To be struck down in
Denver by an electric shock
The night the lights
Went out in Europe
Never to shine again.
So many lives,
So many things to remember!
I was a stone in Tibet,
A tongue of bark
At the heart of Africa
Growing darker and darker . . .
It all seems
A little unreal now,
Now that I am
An anthropologist
With my own
Credit card, dictaphone,
Army-surplus boots
And a whole boatload
Of photographic equipment.
I know too much
To be anything any more;
And if in the distant
Future someone
Thinks he has once been me
As I am today,
Let him revise
His insolent ontology
Or teach himself to pray.
– Derek Mahon
I have no patience
for people who can watch
the world burn and
never wonder:
How do I become rain?
– John Roedel
Remember to love yourself, to bow down to yourself, to worship yourself, because God dwells in you as you.
– Robert Adams
…words may be made to disgorge the past that is bottled up inside them, as coal and wine, when we kindle or drink them, yield up their bottled sunshine.
– Owen Barfield
How much of life have I missed, he wondered, simply by failing to look? Or by looking and not seeing?
– Irvin D. Yalom
At the end of his life C. G. Jung (as we can see in his later letters) continually stressed that only if enough individuals would commit themselves totally to this search, each for his or her own inner truth, could the world avoid disaster. The inner story, though the same in essence for all, is always single and unique in each human being, never before lived and never to be repeated.
– Helen M. Luke
I dreamed of a love such as no one could ever dream of, a love that was all of life, all of poetry.
– Alfonsina Storni, The Prayer
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
– Robert Frost
As the painter Tony Berlant observed, “The more personal and introspective a work of art is, the more universal it becomes.”
– James Hollis
Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.
– William James
I haunted, like a melancholic ghost, places I had known intimately in a previous life, and I felt essentially vulnerable, though I knew I was protected, if not by that invisibility or transparency specters can choose for themselves, by the fact that I had become unrecognizable.
– Matei Calinescu
I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.
– Virginia Woolf
Is the thing ever ours we cannot keep?
– George MacDonald, The Diary of an Old Soul
Counsel better do I know: that ye should honour the Prince of Glory and pray to the Lord of Life for His comfort, salvation, and victory, as ye take your road…in Him is courage, power, and valour.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The head only knows how to misunderstand. It is only the heart which knows how to understand. Love is the only way to know. Logic is a pretend. It only pretends that it knows, it befools you, it deceives you. It is only love that opens the eyes of knowing.
– Osho
how simple this passage through the gap between words.
– Matei Calinescu
I believe in the virtue of small numbers. The world will be saved by the few.
– Andrè Gide
No one has named me yet but, since it’s no use crying for the moon, I have resolved to remain for the rest of my life a nameless cat in the house of this teacher.
– Sōseki Natsume, (tr. Aiko Ito & Graeme Wilson)
I’m a master of speaking silently. All my life I’ve spoken silently. I’ve lived through entire tragedies in silence.
– Dostoyevsky
The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.
– Carl Sagan
Cherry blossoms —
residents of this world
a short time.
– Issa Kobayashi
C.S. Lewis had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way, and also a facility in extempore criticism, none of which were shared (especially not the last) in anything like the same degree by his friends.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
That’s the good thing about being a tourist. We can pass through history on a boat lit up with little golden bulbs.
– Deborah Levy, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein
Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
– Alain de Botton
quiet evening
nothing urgent
becomes everything
– Aiko
I don’t recognize a distinction between literature and life. I am, as I keep moaning, an experimental critic.
– Harold Bloom
You can never see a candle in a fluorescently lit convenience-store. That’s why you have to get away from the world really to see any light.
– Pico Iyer
Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.
– T.S. Eliot
I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end.
– Jack Gilbert
We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
– Roland Barthes
The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.
– Albert Einstein
I’m searching for a phrase that will release everything that’s pent up in me.
– Henry Miller
open window
freedom smells like
fresh rain.
– Aoi
Seek first for the truth, and the new will perhaps be given you besides.
– Henri de Lubac, More Paradoxes
I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
– Sir Isaac Newton
Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.
– Brené Brown
Extreme clarity is a mystery.
– Mahmoud Darwish
It makes no sense to study everything in life, and still not know the one who is studying.
– Mooji
Peace begins when we end the war within—dismantling false identities and discovering the luminous truth of what is whole and free.
– Amoda Maa
summer moon
becoming fully
what already is
– Ogawa
The worst people you know are making bank every single day, while the healers, peace keepers, visionaries and those unwilling to sell their soul are all too often scraping by. What a world.
– Nika Solé
summer heat
even mystery
wears less
– Akari
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness
simply means being able to say to him,
“What are you going through?”
– Simone Weil
The ice-sheet sky above me is broken only by a hole too small
for you to pull me through.
– David Boose
Retreats can transform you. Traveling the world can transform you. But so can the right words from the right person at the right time. So can the perfect synchronistic line of events. So can the most mundane experience. It all depends on your willingness to transform.
– Nika Solé
Under peaceful conditions, the warlike man attacks himself.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
morning birds
tiny prophets
everywhere
– Akari
Song lyrics are the place where language goes straight from the ear to the heart in a kind of way. People need that immediacy. And they respond to it, too.
– Adrian Matejka
It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know.
– David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Society’s preconditioned habits and traditions are strong within us . . . Certainly there is some conventional wisdom, but most of it tells us how to create, live in and benefit from samsara – ignoring the fact that samsara itself is a big problem . . .
There are many wrong tracks in society, but they are all basically the same: They all take us outside of ourselves to satisfy our inner needs. Whether they take us toward material goods or toward social relationships and emotional codependence, they all ignore mind’s own potential to provide us with happiness and peace.
Unlike the cavemen, the great sages of the past sought and found independence from the preconditioned habits and traditions of society. They revolted against the great human tragedy of ignorant ego-mind and found the strength to harvest peace through looking directly at the mind. They spent their time in solitude, developing wakefulness and engaging in deep self-reflection. This unconventional path goes against the very grain of the consensus of conventional ancestors. Up to this point, most human beings have ignored the need to develop a path of wakefulness. This is the tragedy of ignorance.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, It’s Up to You
short story (after Gorki)
The royals turn their backs
on the count.
The horses step back
leaving the way free
for Tolstoy to pass.
– Alec Finlay
Nothing, not a cracker, not a crumb. Still
a vague intimation shadows the memory of
this place, and others, that somewhere down
the pike these landscapes are waiting again,
or are, perhaps, the only things we take with us—
our psychic terrain—
as though through memory we create our own afterlives—
which can’t be the entire breadth of it all,
… but in some way a homeland,
a landscape out of which we might ramble into the afterlives, yes,
the memories, of one another…
– David Bottoms
Real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
– Barry Lopez
Look to this Day, for it is Life – the very Life of Life. In its brief course lie all the truths and realities of your existence: the Bliss of Growth, the Glory of Action, the Splendor of Beauty. For yesterday is already a dream and tomorrow is only a vision; but today, well-lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this Day. Such is the salvation of the Dawn.
– The Bhagavad Gita
Arrogance in full bloom bears a crop of ruinous folly
from which it reaps a harvest all of tears.
– Aeschylus
As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tis-sues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.
And so on.Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.
– Kurt Vonnegut
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out. We’re both being someone new now, someone incredible….
– Thomas Pynchon
Eternity is not a long time; rather, it is another dimension. It is that dimension to which time-thinking shuts us. And so there never was a creation. Rather, there is a continuous creating going on. This energy is pouring into every cell of our being right now, every board and brick of the buildings we sit in, every grain of sand and wisp of wind.
– Joseph Campbell
Diversity is the magic. It is the first manifestation, the first beginning of the differentiation of a thing and of simple identity. The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.
– Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.
– Mahatma Gandhi
In the modern working world, we define diversity as a concerted effort to accommodate the full spectrum of human experience.
– Blaise Radley
All religions
All this singing
One song.
– Rumi
Diversity is the one true thing we all have in common… Celebrate it every day.
– Winston Churchill
We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.
– Jimmy Carter
I saw before me a huge crowd which no one could count from every nation and tongue. They stood before the throne and the Lamb, dressed in long white robes and holding palm branches in their hands…They said, Amen! Praise the glory, wisdom and thanksgiving and honor, power and might to our God forever.
– Revelations 7:9
Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.
– William Sloane Coffin
On the beach, at dawn;
four small stones clearly
hugging each other.
How many kinds of love
might there be in the the world,
and how many formations might they make
And who am I ever
to imagine I could know
such a marvelous business?
– Mary Oliver, On The Beach
Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion. Not to speak of its importance in philosophy. Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.
– Frank Herbert
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.
– Vladimir Nabokov
TIME PASSES TIME does not pass. Time all but passes. Time usually passes. Time passing and gazing. Time has no gaze. Time as perseverance. Time as hunger. Time in a natural way. Time when you were six the day a mountain. Mountain time. Time I don’t remember. Time for a dog in an alley caught in the beam of your flashlight. Time not a video. Time as paper folded to look like a mountain. Time smeared under the eyes of the miners as they rattle down into the mine. Time if you are bankrupt. Time if you are Prometheus. Time if you are all the little tubes on the roots of a gorse plant sucking greenish black moistures up into new scribbled continents. Time it takes for the postal clerk to apply her lipstick at the back of the post office before the supervisor returns. Time it takes for a cow to tip over. Time in jail. Time as overcoats in a closet. Time for a herd of turkeys skidding and surprised on ice. All the time that has soaked into the walls here. Time between the little clicks. Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of the stars. Time for the man at the bus stop standing on one leg to tie his shoe. Time taking Night by the hand and trotting off down the road. Time passes oh boy. Time got the jump on me yes it did.
– Anne Carson
On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other he is an impersonal creative process.
– Carl Jung
The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him-on the one hand the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire.
– Carl Jung
Out of a playful movement of elements whose interrelations are not immediately apparent, patterns arise which an observant and critical intellect can only evaluate afterwards.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.
The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
– Carl Jung
The unconscious itself is neither tricky nor evil – it is Nature, both beautiful and terrible. . . . The best way of dealing with the unconscious is the creative way. . .
– Carl Jung
It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself.
– Carl Jung
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.
– Carl Jung
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination?
– C. G. Jung
Shadow is that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors…If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is his shadow does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses etc.
– Carl Jung
The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, “divine.”
– Carl Jung
The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty
There are no watertight compartments in our inmost nature.
– Alexis Carrel
I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal.
– Lisa Robertson
As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself.
– Lisa Robertson
There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another.
– Emma Goldman
I was in my early twenties when I discovered what my name was.
– Yelena Furman
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
– E.B. White
…it was no longer possible to set anything right in his life… it was only possible to forget.
– Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
So grief isn’t just an emotion, it’s a human capacity to take in the sorrows of the world and metabolize that into medicine for the community. And that’s what we’re missing to a great degree in this culture, is that capacity to see how grief softens the heart, opens the heart.
– Francis Weller, Sounds True Interview
It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.
– Georges Bataille
A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.
– Sylvia Townsend Warner
What is important is not what you believe or do not believe, but to understand the process of your own thinking.
– Krishnamurti
I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don’t have time to savor a whole bottle of wine.
– Alice McDermott
If you’re afraid to write it,
that’s a good sign.
I suppose you know you’re writing the
truth when you’re terrified.
– Yrsa Daley-Ward
Princes Street Gardens
in among the tourists
a wee dog howls
in sympathy
with the bagpipes
– Alec Finlay
At evening, with the sun no longer overhead, the air developed a kind of viscosity in which time seemed to stand very still and the labyrinth of the city, no longer bisected by light and shade and unstirred by the afternoon breezes, appeared suspended in a kind of dream, paused in an atmosphere of extraordinary pallor and thickness.
– Rachel Cusk, Outline
I hate you, I need you, come live with me, let’s make hate together, love,
whatever you want, but together.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
When harm is done to a man, real evil enters into him; not merely pain and suffering, but the actual horror of evil. Just as men have the power of transmitting good to one another, so they have the power to transmit evil.
– Simone Weil, Human Personality
Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
– William James
Intrinsically, we are all completely and perfectly sane. We are enveloped and imbued by this sanity. But unable to bring ourselves to acknowledge this, we hatch a hodgepodge of beliefs which we embrace and then chase as if they were real, stumbling and falling on the great way. These beliefs embroider the entire sky with their flowery efflorescence.
– Dogen
It would be better, think they, if Heaven were above and Hell below – anywhere outside, but not within. But that comfort has been knocked from under us. There are no places to go to, either for reward or punishment. The place is always here and now, in your own person and according to your own fancy . . . You are the author, director and actor all in one: the drama is always going to be your own life, not some one else’s. A beautiful, terrible, ineluctable drama, like a suit made of your own skin. Would you want it otherwise? Could you invent a better drama?
– Henry Miller
If those who lead you say, ‘See, the Kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the children of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.
– Jesus
When we fail to appreciate Sophia’s presence at work in nature, we are also more likely to fail to appreciate the sacred.
– Ilia Delio
When they asked me
what my religion was
I said I was
Non-Delusional
– unknown
If you are reading this and are you having a medical ordeal, then this may be of help to you…
Dark cloud is at the door.
The trail out of it is dark cloud.
The zigzag lightning stands high upon it.
An offering I make.
Restore my feet for me.
Restore my legs for me.
Restore my body for me.
Restore my mind for me.
Restore my voice for me.
This very day take out your spell for me.
Happily I recover.
Happily my interior becomes cool.
Happily I go forth.
My interior feeling cool, may I walk.
No longer sore, may I walk.
Impervious to pain, may I walk.
With lively feelings may I walk.
As it used to be long ago, may I walk.
– The Night Chant, DINÉ
I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for the wood and the fish for the pool. When the first galaxies fell into luminous clumps, already matter was struggling toward consciousness. The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush. If there is a voice in Sagittarius, I’d be a fool not to listen. If God’s voice in the night is a scrawny cry, then I’ll prick up my ears. If night’s faint lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I’ll sit back on a dark hillside and wait and watch. A hint here and a trait there. Listening and watching. Waiting, always waiting, for the tingle in the spine.
– Chet Raymo
Decision takes us into a different experience of time. In Creative Time the end reaches back and pulls the beginning towards it. The decision to engage at any stage in a process puts us in contact with all the other stages in a process. In the world where a decision is taken, the action has already taken place. The decision then moves into ordinary time where an act, a cause, leads to an effect…
– Robert Fripp
Everything I can think of that my parents
thought or did I don’t think and I don’t do.
I opened windows, they shut them. I pulled
open the curtains, they shut them. If you
get my drift. Of course there were some
similarities-they wanted to be happy and
they weren’t. I wanted to be Shelley and I
wasn’t. I don’t mean I didn’t have to avoid
imitation, the gloom was pretty heavy. But
then, for me, there was the forest, where
they didn’t exist. And the fields. Where I
learned about birds and other sweet tidbits
of existence. The song sparrow, for example.
In the song sparrow’s nest the nestlings,
those who would sing eventually, must listen
carefully to the father bird as he sings
and make their own song in imitation of his.
I don’t know if any other bird does this (in
nature’s way has to do this). But I know a
child doesn’t have to. Doesn’t have to.
Doesn’t have to. And I didn’t.
– Mary Oliver
In the West, you find the idea that only humans have language. I never believed that. We know bacteria sing to each other, that even subatomic particles are self-aware and communicate and tangle with one another. So, for me, the universe is itself language; everything is speaking to everything else, in particular chemical, sonic, and territorial languages. There are sorts we can’t even imagine, yet together they form part of what we as humans can sense and perceive. We can talk about things as if we know what we are talking about. That’s the most fascinating thing in the world because in truth we don’t know much at all. What we don’t know composes 99.9 percent of the real. That possibility of sensing what we cannot name makes language what it is—a reaching for what cannot be said.
– Cecilia Vicuña
And so this brings us to the final formula of the Bodhisattava way, the way of the one who is grounded in eternity and moving in the field of time.
The field of time is the field of sorrow. “All life is sorrowful.” And it is.
If you try to correct the sorrows all you do its shift them somewhere else. Life is sorrowful. How do you live with that?
You realize the eternal within yourself. You disengage and yet, reengage. You—and here’s the beautiful formula—“participate with the joy in the sorrows of the world.” You play the game. It hurts, but you know that you have found the place that is transcendent of injury and fulfillments. You are there, and that’s it.
– Joseph Campbell
Certainty
by Octavio Paz
If the white light of this lamp
is real, and the hand that writes
is real, then are the eyes that
observe what I write also real?
From one word to another
what I say evaporates.
I know that I am alive
between two parentheses.
The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness, and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o’clock.
– Margaret Halsey
A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me — a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day’s blow
rang out, metallic — or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
– Denise Levertov
Hope envisages its future and then acts as if that future is now irresistible, thus helping to create the reality for which it longs. The future is not closed. . . Even a small number of people, firmly committed to the new inevitability on which they have fixed their imaginations, can decisively affect the shape the future takes.
– Walter Wink
responsibility, n. A detachable
burden easily shifted to the
shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune,
Luck or one’s neighbor.
In the days of astrology it was
customary to unload it upon a
star.
– Ambrose Bierce
The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor — not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.
– Stephen Jay Gould
There are moments when things go well and one feels encouraged. There are difficult moments and one feels overwhelmed. But it’s senseless to speak of optimism or pessimism. The only important thing is to know that if one works well in a potato field, the potatoes will grow. If one works well among men, they will grow – that’s reality. The rest is smoke. It’s important to know that words don’t move mountains. Work, exactly work, moves mountains.
– Danilo Dolci
To inquire and to create; these are the grand centres around which all human pursuits revolve, or at least to these objects do they all more or less directly refer.
– Wilhelm von Humboldt
To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.
– Robert Bly
I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication.
– Oliver Sacks
We tend to focus on, and speak about the soul life of an individual in terms of spiritual comfort and deep nourishment, qualities which are a central, and abiding dynamic of its presence, but the equally unsettling and disturbing quality about this strange, often wild and courageous faculty of belonging inside us we have come to name ‘the soul’ is its ruthless, and almost tidal wish to find its own way to a full union with the world. The soul is a planner’s nightmare, the career counselor’s central surprise, the biographer’s conundrum, an internal abiding spring that is both a source and a continual unstoppable flow, an internal stranger at the door of our outer life about to break everything apart and leave; a pilgrim suddenly more in love with the horizon than its home; and most disturbingly, someone who is willing to fail, often spectacularly, at their own life rather than succeed drably, at someone else’s.
– David Whyte
Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.
– Marcel Prous
Instead of seeing karma as a debt incurred in the past, perhaps we can learn to see it as a motive for positive action towards creating a new future? The past is beyond anyone’s grasp to fix.
– Pico Iyer
I am so busy. I am practicing
my new hobby of watching me
become someone else. There is
so much violence in reconstruction.
Every minute is grisly, but I have
to participate. I am building
what I cannot break.
– Jennifer Willoughby
Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome.
– Goethe
I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with
anger.
– Simone de Beauvoir
In the last corner of the labyrinth of the soul grunts a frightened ape.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila
If I see one dilemma with man, it’s that he can’t accept how beautiful he is. He can’t accept that he is pure light, that he’s pure love, that he’s pure consciousness, that he’s divine.
– Ram Dass
How strange it is to think that love, so vital and all- consuming, can slip away like
water through your fingers.
– Haruki Murakami
We are synthetic men, uprooted.
The strength of the hills is not ours.
– C.S. Lewis
She is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair …
– Oscar Wilde
How strange is man. He destroys his present while worrying about his future, but weeps in the future by recalling his past.
– Imam Ali
Perception, imagination, expectation, anticipation, illusion-all are based on memory. There are hardly any border lines between them. They just merge into each other. All are responses of memory.
– Nisargadatta
. . . ah, thought kills me, that I am not thought
– William Shakespeare
dawnlit sky
a canvas
of birdsongs
– Chen-ou Liu
A University degree, four books and hundreds of articles and | still make mistakes when reading. You wrote me ‘good morning’ and I read it as ‘I love you’
– Mahmoud Darwish
As your mind becomes more quiet and less reactive, it is natural to have less to say. Just allow yourself to become more okay and more comfortable with your silence. Let everything take its natural course. Nothing stays the same forever, or even for very long.
– Adyashanti
What you need will come to you if you do not ask for what you do not need. Nature is neither pleasant nor painful. It is all intelligence and beauty. Pain and pleasure are in the mind. Change your scale of values and all will change.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
– Ellen Willis
Most people don’t have a life problem.
They have a thinking problem.
The same thoughts, repeated every day, create the same experiences.
– Remez Sasson
She naturally loved solitary
places, vast views, and to feel
herself for ever and ever and ever
alone.
– Virginia Woolf
With you, intimacy colours my voice. Even ‘hello’
sounds like ‘come here.’
– Warsan Shire
I am not all hostile with regard to magic. I even think that, in many cases, it constitutes a mode of mapping of psychic Assemblages of great interest.
– Guattari
Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, canceled, made nothing dipped in oblivion? If not, you will never really change.
– D.H. Lawrence
You will be given back the years that the locusts have taken.
– Buddy Wakefield
By degrees, as the night came on, this second crowd changed its character, and when the gas-lamps were lighted, two descriptions of besetting people faded away, and gave place to others.
– Edgar Allan Poe
Why did you vanish…
by Izumi Shikibu
Translated by Jane Hirshfield
Why did you vanish
into empty sky?
Even the fragile snow,
when it falls,
falls in this world.
The truth is that every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins.
– Ada Limón, A New National Anthem
Learning to write … is a desperately idiosyncratic, eccentric, single-souled, lifelong quest.
– Bret Lott
How Many?
by Najwan Darwish
How many bedrooms do I need
to get a bit of sleep?
How many chairs
to sit myself down?
How many roads
to walk back to you,
my distant country?
This time I’ve gone
and I’m not coming back
Your job, now, is to slip out,
lovesick and afraid,
and come in search of me.
The most exquisite pleasure in the
practice of medicine comes from
nudging a layman in the direction
of terror, then bringing him back
to safety again.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Vertigo
by Anne Stevenson
Mind led body
to the edge of the precipice.
They stared in desire
at the naked abyss.
If you love me, said mind,
take that step into silence.
If you love me, said body,
turn and exist.
I am at war with myself, it’s true, you couldn’t possibly know to what extent, beyond what you can guess, and I say contradictory things that are, we might say, in real tension; they are what construct me, make me live, and will make me die. I sometimes see this war as terrifying and difficult to bear, but at the same time I know that that is life. I will find peace only in eternal rest. I thus cannot really say that I assume this contradiction, but I know that it is what keeps me alive, and makes me ask precisely the question you recalled earlier, ‘how does one learn to live?’
– Jacques Derrida
We are attached to another because in ourselves we are insufficient, psychologically dependent, and therein lies our misery.
– Krishnamurti
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
– John Stuart Mill
I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don’t see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune.
– William S. Burroughs
If you’ve never been here, never been present, I’m sure you’ll be terrified of death because your whole life has been an absence.
– Marion Woodman
Don’t take security in the false refuge of consensus.
– Christopher Hitchens
Sorrow is real love in the future.
Generous people are the only ones who love in excess.
– Elvira Sastre, One Day I Will Save Myself
The mystery of the psyche is that we are haunted not by what we want out of life, but by what life wants out of us.
– D. Stephenson Bond
Love is like a butterfly, a rare and gentle thing.
– Dolly Parton
When you got up the courage to read me I was already in another book.
– Elvira Sastre, One Day I Will Save Myself
The main affliction of civilization is that we don’t know how to handle suffering inside and so we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
Love is like death, it must come to us all, but to each his own unique way and time, sometimes it will be avoided, but never can it be cheated, and never will it be forgotten.
– Jacob Grimm
Fools, the solution for everything is on our lips.
– Elvira Sastre, One Day I Will Save Myself
Lovers find secret places inside this violent world where they make transactions with beauty.
– Rumi
I believe in an America where separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.
– JFK
To talk like that, like there’s no hope, I don’t know, that just seems wrong to me. I don’t think anyone has the right to tell people there’s no hope.
– Sigrid Nunez
my heart is crushed, and soon you won’t fit inside —and these hands aren’t cowardly enough to reject you—.
– Elvira Sastre, One Day I Will Save Myself
If capitalism worked corporations would not need tax breaks, subsidies, exemptions, grants, ballouts, legal protections, and trade barriers in order to survive.
– Edward Shuttleworth
I have forgotten you,
broken love.
But don’t be afraid
that no one will remember you:
poetry won’t ever forget you.
– Elvira Sastre, One Day I Will Save Myself
But be free,
blessed sadness,
be free,
– Elvira Sastre
Wake up from the dream of the ego. The waking state is just as much a dream as the nightly one.
– Lalla Ded
Your life is a journey from the illusion of “two” to the reality of “one.”
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
The arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.
– J. G. Ballard
Too much of what is called ‘education’ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
– Thomas Sowell
You have two hands: One to help yourself, the second to help others.
– Audrey Hepburn
The more we see the injustice of the world, the more we are tempted to use our own power to bring about justice, but in so doing we often create new forms of injustice.
– Henri Nouwen, With Burning Hearts
Once you have a machine think and write for you, you’re cooked as a species’
– Dave Eggers
The ordinary lunatic is generally a harmless, isolated case; since everyone sees that something is wrong with him, he is quickly taken care of. But the unconscious infections of groups of so-called normal people are more subtle and far more dangerous.
– CG Jung
Whenever parents talked about “love,” some part of my brain switched off. They had their story, and they were sticking to it. The story was that they loved us with a love that we were incapable of understanding, and the reason things were the way they were was because they loved us so much.
– Elif Batuman
I tend to make peace with my world
when I see someone talking alone
out loud: one less case of solitude.
– Elvira Sastre, One Day I Will Save Myself
The mind is a wound that never heals, only learns to hide the bleeding.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.
– Babe Ruth
It is really the individual’s task to differentiate himself from all others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities, such as membership in organizations, support of “isms,” and so on, interfere with the fulfillment of this task.
– CG Jung
Writers aren’t people exactly. They’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
In effect, conflicts are ‘fed’ more readily than people are nourished. This reality reflects not only operational shortcomings but also a fundamental imbalance in political and moral priorities.
– Pope Leo XIV
The archetype is a force with autonomy and it can suddenly seize you like a seizure. Falling in love at first sight, is such a case.
– CG Jung
There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one’s efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.
– Georges Bataille
Anyone whose goal is something higher must expect some day to suffer vertigo.
– Milan Kundera
One loves that for which one labors, and one labors for that which one loves.
– Eric Fromm
The truth is that the city,
my lungs
and climate change
have been thankful for this springtime communion.
– Elvira Sastre, One Day I Will Save Myself
When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.
– Yukio Mishima
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.
– George Washington Carver
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea if it’s the only one you have.
– Emil-August Chartier
We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
– John Archibald Wheeler
The love you gave was never lost. It became part of the subtle architecture of the universe.
– Nataraj Chaitanya
He smiled at her as a man might smile at a memory.
– John Steinbeck
Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.
– Maggie Nelson
There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.
– Edgar Allan Poe
Do not speak lightly; words are not to be cast away. Every word finds an answer; every good deed it’s recompense.
– Confucius
A drop of water, if it could write out its own history, would explain the universe to us.
– Lucy Larcom
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same.
– Anne Spollen
God does not require us to achieve any of the good tasks that humanity must pursue. What God does require of us is that we not stop trying.
– Bayard Rustin
You are not big enough to accuse the whole age effectively, but let us say you are in dissent. You are in no position to issue commands, but you can speak words of hope. Shall this be the substance of your message? Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God. You agree? Good. Then go with my blessing. But I warn you, do not expect to make many friends.
– Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable
If you’ve decided to become a gymnast, you have to go through training that involves a lot of repetition . . . To become a doctor, you need to be strong academically. To become a lawyer, you need a certain level of wits. But to become a proficient lojong practitioner, all you need is determination. Recognizing the cause of your suffering, you are determined to reduce your self-centeredness; and recognizing the cause of joy, you are determined to cultivate an altruistic state of mind. The wisdom and skillful means of these practices are universally applicable, no matter who you are. They are right there to help you fulfill your motivation. All you need to do is practice over and over, gradually acquiring familiarity.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, The Intelligent Heart
Immersed
Having no hope for outcome
or reward is how we stay immersed
in the exchange. We shape clay,
brush paint across a canvas, press
words that arrive on the wind
of each new breath onto a blank page,
expecting nothing in return but joy
in the act of creation. It’s the same
for the mulberry tree, which does not
worry each summer which birds
it will attract, or how many, before
agreeing to bloom and fruit—it simply
sends out the berries it has to give
without wavering, because the body
says to, because like us, the tree
can’t help itself.
– James Crews
I regard Consciousness as fundamental.
I regard matter as derivative from Consciousness.
We cannot get behind Consciousness.
Everything that we talk about,
everything that we regard as existing,
postulates Consciousness.
– Max Planck
I want to live in a world where harm is not systemic, where love organizes society, where the earth is respected, and where life is valued above all else.
– Yung Pueblo
It is not the gentle loving mother
we need, but the destroyer.
It is the only way we will ever
have a chance to save our planet
from the killing machines and the
men who operate them.
– Tamara Albanna
The good news
they do not print.
The good news
we do print.
We have a special edition every moment,
and we need you to read it.
The good news is that you are alive,
that the linden tree is still there,
standing firm in the harsh winter.
The good news is that you have wonderful eyes
to touch the blue sky.
The good news is that your child is there before you,
and your arms are available:
hugging is possible.
They only print what is wrong.
Look at each of our special editions.
We always offer the things that are not wrong.
We want you to benefit from them
and help protect them.
The dandelion is there by the sidewalk,
smiling its wondrous smile,
singing the song of eternity.
Listen. You have ears that can hear it.
Bow your head.
Listen to it.
Leave behind the world of sorrow,
of preoccupation,
and get free.
The latest good news
is that you can do it.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
It is a māyā, an illusion, that we all imagine ourselves to be living inside our skins separated from the rest of the cosmos. We’ve been taught to ignore this enormously significant relationship.
– Alan Watts
What we neglect in ourselves blends itself secretly into our actions towards others.
– CG Jung
The mind is a beautiful tool. But if we’re used by it, we’ll quickly find ourselves back in the spinning web of egoic consciousness.
– Adyashanti
A word, so long as it’s not absorbed without remainder into a sense, remains essentially extended between other words, stretching to touch them, though not merging with them: and that’s language as body.
– Jean-Luc Nancy, (tr. Richard A. Rand)
We believe in so many things on hearsay. We believe in distant lands and people, in heavens and hells, in gods and goddesses, because we were told. Similarly, we were told about ourselves, our parents, name, position, duties and so on. We never cared to verify.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
If one keeps one’s cool one is always alright.
– G.B. Smith
Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
– Irvin D. Yalom
You give reality to concepts, while concepts are distortions of reality. Abandon all conceptualization and stay silent and attentive. Be earnest about it and all will be well with you.
– Nisargadatta
You are powerful enough to raise your spirit in any situation that may seem to bring it down.
– Michael Logue
Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself; and therefore is to be called home and confined within itself: that is the true solitude, and that may be enjoyed even in populous cities and the courts of kings, though more commodiously apart …
It is not enough to get remote from the public; ’tis not enough to shift the soil only; a man must flee from the popular conditions that have taken possession of his soul, he must sequester and come again to himself …
– Montaigne
bees on clover
obsessed and
unashamed
– Ogawa
As long as the mind is there, your body and your world are there. Your world is mind-made, subjective, enclosed within the mind, fragmentary, temporary, personal, hanging on the thread of memory.
– Nisargadatta
I think there are multiple stories within any “true” story. If I choose to write something that involves another person, I’d better have done the work to become aware, to have asked the questions, to have considered the consequences.
– Lynette D’Amico, Whose Story Is It Anyway?
How could everybody hate you / If there was no everybody? Or even anybody.
– Arthur Vogelsang
What is empty
can’t be emptied.
We have reached the end of
ending.
– Marina Tsvetaeva
Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude
And flew to the silence of sweet solitude.
– John Clare
You can insult a man pretty badly by using a word he doesn’t understand.
Blizzard in the suburbs
-the mailman
And the poet walking
– Jack Kerouac
Book of Haikus
The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps.
– Carl Sagan
Writers working in fragments or building a collection already know: it’s hard to string all the writing together in a way that feels naturally connected and makes deeper meaning.
– Allison K Williams
Perhaps we’re all fellow sufferers unable to see each other’s truth.
– Irvin D. Yalom
It is vital to remember that information—in the sense of raw data—is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.
– Arthur C. Clarke
after summer rain
the cedar bark
breathes again
– Basho
War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
– Leo Tolstoy
Being in harmony means you’re experiencing your self as an integral part of life instead of as someone who is opposing a piece of life. When you experience harmony, you know it.
– Charlotte Joko Beck
We are here to help each other get
through this thing, whatever it is.
– Dr. Mark Vonnegut
In this universe, which was created by a Divine, organizing intelligence, there are simply no accidents.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
Living safely is dangerous.
– Yalom
cicada heat
even silence
starts humming
– Ogawa
Your burden is of false self-identifications – abandon them all. You are divine. Take it as the absolute truth. Your joy is divine, your suffering is divine too. Focus the mind on the pure being ‘I am’, and stay in it.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation.
– Franz Kafka
“Very well,” he thought, “there are truths that have no words.”
– John Gardner
Your circumstances do not determine what your life will be; they reveal what kinds of images you have chosen up until now. … Once your thoughts reflect what you genuinely want to be, the appropriate emotions and the consequent behavior will flow automatically.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
How do I look away now
that I have seen you?
– Rachel Mennies
To attain self-realization, there’s really nothing you have to do. It does not require puja, it does not require meditation, it does not require prayer, it does not require yoga. It does not require anything, for self-realization is your natural state to begin with.
– Robert Adams
summer moon
the body remembers
its wild grammar
– Akari
We live in an anti-relational, vulnerability-despising culture. One that not only fails to nurture the skills of connection, but actively fears them. We are all victimized by the violence of disassociation and disconnection.
– bell hooks
And even if we never talk again, please remember that I’m forever changed by who you are and what you meant to me.
– Chasing Amy
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
The only place you will ever find me, is on my growth edge.
– Nika Solé
When you adhere to one philosophical system (siddhanta) you are obliged to condemn the others. That is the case with the heads of monasteries (matadhipatis).
– Ramana Maharshi
summer noon
time itself
slows
– Ogawa
If I am anything, which I highly doubt, I have made myself so by hard work.
– Isaac Newton
My journal has become the journal of
you. It is full of you – brimming full.
– Anais Nin
Understand that there will never be “enough” and that the unchecked pursuit of more ends only in the bankruptcy.
– Ryan Holiday
People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
– Aldous Huxley
The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundance of the poor.
– Voltaire
Allow me to give you some advice from the heart: don’t give up art, and even give yourself over to it even more than so far… Living in solitude and embittering your soul with recollections, you can make your life very gloomy. There is a single refuge, a single medicine: art and creative work.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
It is not that the time we have is meagre, but that we lose much of it.
– Seneca
No one can get out of their individuality.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
My memory of men
is never lit up and
illuminated like my
memory of women.
– Marguerite Duras
Wearing her heart on her sleeve would be too conventional for [Emily Dickinson], who slaps it on a fruit dish and sends it down the street like a phone-order pizza.
– Camille Paglia
A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, and unnecessary suffering.
– Terry Eagleton
Poetry is an art of beginnings and
ends. You want middles, read
novels.
– Dean Young
Every time I sit down to write, I think, Will I find someone at the crossroads? And sometimes I do, and I feel my soul. When I don’t, I’m disappointed.
– Jamaica Kincaid
The distance from this sentence to your eyes is my sculpture.
– Ken Friedman
what I love about the world is its shape
– Edwin Morgan
humid dawn
my shirt already
defeated
– Aoki
It is the untold stories that are most moving.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The majority of men… are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and… are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Evidence
A great deal of anecdotal evidence suggests that we respond
positively to birdsong
– scientific researcher, Daily Telegraph, 8 February 2012
Centuries of English verse
Suggest the selfsame thing:
A negative response is rare
When birds are heard to sing.
What’s the use of poetry?
You ask. Well, here’s a start:
It’s anecdotal evidence
About the human heart.
At first love seemed easy,
But then difficulties arose.
– Hafiz
You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don’t, do you? And neither does he. You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can’t value you more than you value yourself.
– Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Our job is to love people. When it hurts. When it’s awkward. When it’s uncool and embarrassing. Our job is to stand together, to carry the burdens of one another and to meet each other in our questions.
– Jamie Tworkowksi
Even disasters have design. I told her I distrust history now more than ever, because how much of it has always been gaslighting and ruthless curating? How much of what we believe was decided for us? I explained to her that we are always living in each other’s collective imagination. We can only be free to the extent to which we, or people who love us, can see.
– Eloghosa Osunde
Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into it and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route of becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the tough core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in your world, and to come into your own. Difficulty is always a school, though learning is optional. Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own selves and lives. Even princesses are chattels to be disowned or sold by fathers, punished by stepmothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children’s stories not in who they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one.
– Rebecca Solnit
The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.
– Iain McGilchrist
Empire is militant denial. It is also a form of faith. The bad faith of an abusive husband can be addressed in court. The bad faith of a trillionaire who denies the incoming data of his own lifestyle choices is less easy to manage, but it can be addressed by people who insistently tell the truth and invite that trillionaire to step outside of his armored vehicles, touch grass, and behave like a human being among human beings, considering the data of his doings. When he declines, that’s more data on what we’re contending with when it comes to him & his enablers. They are outnumbered. Empire is doomed.
– David Dark
one of life’s bitter truths is that grief can only be processed alone, while joy – its truest form – can only be felt when shared.
– unknown
You are the alchemist
of your loneliness.
You can create anything
in its place.
– Warsan Shire
If we are going to regard the universe as a result of evolution at all, we must think that not merely the existing universe…but the whole Platonic world, which in itself is equally real, is evolutionary in its origin, too.
– Peirce
We are ruined, not by what we really want, but by what we think we do; therefore never go abroad in search of your wants, if they be real wants, they will come home in search of you; for he that buys what he does not want, will soon want what he cannot buy.
– Charles Caleb Colton
All things in heaven and on earth are wonderful! But the greatest wonder is man’s freedom to choose between good and evil!
– Faust
Buddhahood – the discovery of dharmakaya – is nothing other than the uncontrived and unadulterated essence of awareness becoming evident.
– Longchenpa
With both hands I’ve forgotten, I keep
Having forgotten, I keep
Having forgotten. I’ll have no such shrines here.
I will not bow in the middle of the room
To the statue of nothing
With the flies turning around it.
On these four walls I am the writing.
– WS Merwin
They swallow God without thinking,
they swallow country without thinking.
Soon they forget how to think,
they let others think for them.
– Charles Bukowski
I think we are seeing a hunger that is not just felt by New Yorkers, but frankly by Americans from coast to coast, for a new kind of politics, one that puts working people at the heart of it.
– Mayor Zohran Mamdani
My love
Is like the grasses
Hidden in the deep mountain;
Though its abundance increases,
There is none that knows.
– Ono no Yoshiki
Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Our span of life is brief, but is long enough for us to live well and honestly.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
The future of psychiatry will be in de-prescribing.
Trust me
We are moving in that direction
– Dr. Roger McFillin
I’d like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them then.
– David Foster Wallace
I don’t know, but dear God, I wish you would take care of making it a sound story because I don’t know how, just like I don’t know how to write it but it came.
– Flannery O’Connor
Language ceases to be merely a vehicle of meaning and appears as sonic material that affects the body.
– Lacan
mountain path …
I slip a little
into the past
– Dave Read
If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment … all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named.
– Roland Barthes
Are you healed or are you isolated with no
one around to trigger you?
– Carl Jung
There is nothing we can be more proud of than the independence of our heart.
– Gabriela Mistral
Spare your heart some space for forgiveness. Not for them but for yourself.
– Verliza Gajeles
You have tried changing things the way you want. Now try accepting them the way they are. Acceptance brings things closer to you. And closer they are, more influence you have over them.
– Shunya
The spirit is the wing of the Soul.
– Kabir
Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.
– Frantz Fanon
Those who have understanding do not please the majority, nor does the majority please them. Consequently, they are considered mad and are mocked; they are hated and despised, and sometimes they are even murdered.
– Hermes, Corpus Hermeticum IX, (On Thought and Sense)
America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.
– Peter Kropotkin
The future rewards those who press on. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I’m going to press on.
– Barack Obama
Without a noise, without my pride, I reach out from the inside.
– Peter Gabriel
What use is a writer if not to destroy literature?
– Julio Cortázar
are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?
a lot of weight when you’re well.
– Toni Cade Bambara
Real intelligence in politics, as in science, is the ability to recognize connections that are not necessarily obvious, to see relationships—seeing the interconnectedness of all life, all peoples, and all wars. Real intelligence is the ability to understand that when you unleash a destructive force in one place, it affects all mankind destructively, including those who unleash it.
– F. William Engdahl
If you don’t think every day is a good day, try missing a few. You’ll see.
– Bob Ross
the sun is up
in its place
the clouds are
down in theirs
– Alec Finlay
Why, darling, I don’t live at all when I’m not with you.
– Ernest Hemingway
I really cannot stress enough how infinitely serious climate collapse is. every issue we’ve ever faced will dwarf in comparison. if we continue to allow big oil and corporations to lord over us through our so called governments, society will fall.
– @earthlyeducation
A seed grows with no sound, but a tree falls with a huge noise.
– Confucius
And I believe happiness is the exact opposite of sadness, bitterness, and hatred: happiness should remain unexamined as long as possible.
– Stephen King
Half of life is lost in charming others.
The other half is lost in going through anxieties caused by others.
Leave this play. You have played enough.
– Rumi
Friends or not, the competition between them is always lurking just below the surface. Rivalry isn’t in the water—it is the water. It’s what can buoy or drown them.
– Dorey Beck Stein
The mystery of one human being is too immense and too profound to be explained by another.
– Henri Nouwen
Yes, I love you, and if you knew to what extent, nothing could sadden you—not even for a second—in your entire life.
– Albert Camus to María Casares
Every time I wrote a book, I had the impression that I was thrusting a dagger into the dictatorship, while the same time giving courage to people.
– Ismail Kadaré
The practice of slowing down to notice the living world around us, and the practice of tending to our inner lives, are not separate practices. They nourish each other.
– Kritee Kanko, PhD
There’s so few people in Congress who are willing to just be like, the government doesn’t pick ideological winners and losers in choosing what to fund, and that includes the arts. And so sometimes the government is going to fund art that makes people angry, and that is OK, because making people angry is actually a legitimate function of the arts.
– Isaac Butler
When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap
and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways
to drink directly from the stream of cool water,
I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone,
who used to do the same thing at that age;
And when he lifts his head back up and, satisfied,
wipes the water dripping from his cheek
with his shirtsleeve, it’s the same casual gesture
my brother used to make; and I don’t tell him
to use a glass, the way our father told my brother,
because I like remembering my brother
when he was young, decades before anything
went wrong, and I like the way my son
becomes a little more my brother for a moment
through this small habit born of a simple need,
which, natural and unprompted, ties them together
across the bounds of death, and across time …
as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds
and entered this one through the kitchen faucet,
my son and brother drinking the same water.
– Jeffrey Harrison
In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him
– Bhagavad Gita
For it is in lingering that we receive insight,
that consecrates.
– Rilke
Inside the heart, a murmur of poems.
– Sam Roxas-Chua
The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.
– Wendell Berry
It is your integrity and your kindness that makes the world beautiful. May all beings be happy.
– Michael Kewley
Finding yourself doesn’t require that you fly to Tibet, join a convent, or build a meditation room. Just consistently keep a minimal commitment to empty time.
– Martha Beck
I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope– an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford’s greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one’s past.
One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn’t found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world.
– John Fowles
Let’s hope we are learning more about the ‘arts of noticing.’ This kind of attention is not about relationships between the human brain and ‘the world out there’ but is all about immersion in living ecologies. Aboriginal people I have worked with learn about it from their elders. As children they are not encouraged to ask questions, just to be attentive. After a while they know. It is know-how more than knowledge. When an Aboriginal tracker sees things in the environment that the rest of us fail to notice, this is not a matter of a specialised psychology, but a matter of intergenerational attunement in a particular world. Noticing one thing may also depend on being attuned to many others: the sun, the wind and the way finches flock in that part of the country. It’s an art, but not necessarily an individual one. It comes in bursts, or in waves.
– Stephen Muecke
If you eliminate even one group, you
eliminate the entire
circle.
– Bernie Glassman
If systems help create homelessness,
systems can help prevent it.
– Prince William
First of all nothing will happen, and a little later nothing will happen again.
– Leonard Cohen
I like that the language in a poem doesn’t
have to be euphonious. It can be discordant.
It can be gnarly, crunchy. It’s something
you can feel in your mouth, the mouthfeel
of the poem.
– Harryette Mullen
What method should the truth now adopt so it can compete with the lie and also be believed?
– Günther Anders
We are not taught to be thinkers, but
reflectors of our culture. Let’s teach
our children to be thinkers.
– Jacque Fresco
This shit doesn’t happen in France, and I’ll tell you why: the rich went too far and they cut all their heads off and now, when those in charge get above themselves, the French just stop working and everyone remembers who actually holds the real power. Don’t forget your real power.
– unknown
Taking it easy feels empty unless you’ve done something hard, the vitality of life is found in the contrasts, and by heightening the contrasts you deepen life.
– Dylan O’Sullivan
The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It’s a miracle that it exists at all.
– Lauren Groff
Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.
– Octavia Butler
You know that feeling at the end of the day, when the anxiety of that-which-I-must-do falls away and, for maybe the first time that day, you see, with some clarity, the people you love and the ways you have, during that day, slightly ignored them, turned away from them to get back to what you were doing, blurted out some mildly hurtful thing, projected, instead of the deep love you really feel, a surge of defensiveness or self-protection or suspicion? That moment when you think, Oh God, what have I done with this day? And what am I doing with my life? And how must I change to avoid catastrophic end-of-life regrets?
I feel like that now: tired of the Me I’ve always been, tired of making the same mistakes, repetitively stumbling after the same small ego strokes, being caught in the same loops of anxiety and defensiveness. At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me…
– George Saunders
The totality of causes of phenomena is inaccessible to the human mind. But the need to seek causes has been put into the soul of man. And the human mind, without grasping in their countlessness and complexity the conditions of phenomena, of which each separately may appear as a cause, takes hold of the first, most comprehensible approximation and says: here is the cause.
– Leo Tolstoy
Nothing hinders people’s improvements more than their desire to improve their own lives through violence. Violence against others distracts people more than anything else from the one thing that can improve their lives: striving to become better themselves.
– Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
– Anne Carson
Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
– Anne Carson
A signal does not necessarily mean that you want to be located or described. It can mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable and Hidden.
– Fanny Howe
I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.
– Gustave Flaubert
Strive to become the true human being:
one who knows love, one who knows pain.
Be full, be humble, be utterly silent,
be the bowl of wine passed from hand to hand.
– Khwaja Abdullah Ansari
Let your loyalty to another human being come about in this way: there will be moments — quickly passing by — when he will seem to you filled and illumined by the true, primal image of his spirit.
Then can come, yes, will come, long stretches of time when your fellow-being seems clouded, even darkened. But learn at these times to say to yourself: The spirit will strengthen me; I will remember the true, unchanging image that I once saw. Nothing at all — neither deception nor disguise — can take it away from me.
Struggle again and again for the true picture that you saw. The struggle itself is your faithfulness.
And in those efforts to be faithful and to trust, a human being will come close to another as if with an angel’s power of protection.
– Rudolf Steiner
Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.
– Tom Stoppard
Writing a book is always a hard job. One is always tempted to limit oneself to dreaming it.
– Gaston Bachelard
Wrote a thing for that 250th birthday trying, first of all, to refuse to define the USA as one thing rather than many. E pluribus unum all the way home. Here it is:
The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. The United States of America is … so many things, horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and cursed, as it approaches its quarter-millennium mark. I say it as though the US was one thing, but it is a thousand things.
It is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good as she stood up for immigrants, but it is also Good herself and the immigrants, and the streets of Minneapolis and their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past – and present and future. The US before 1865 was slaveowners, but it was also the enslaved and the abolitionists.
The US is the KKK and the ACLU and the NAACP, right-to-life terrorists and Planned Parenthood security guards. It is Chevron and Exxon and one of the world’s first environmental organizations, the Sierra Club, founded in San Francisco in 1892, and the thousands of environmental, environmental justice and climate groups right now. It is its contradictions, its conflicts.
It is 340 million people, including almost 2 million prisoners, a population larger than 12 US states (which has long made me think that prison can be imagined as the 51st state, one with virtually no representation).
It is a country where guns outnumber people, and a country that produced nonviolent resistance’s most lyrical advocate, Martin Luther King Jr, who was shot on a balcony of a motel in Memphis.
King is said to have come out to the balcony of the motel to greet the jazz musician Ben Branch, whose rendition of the song Precious Lord King loved. It is the country that gave the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill; it is its best and its worst people and products.
At its heart the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers, which is to say it was never and will never be one thing, even if it has one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene. It is tempting to make the current White House a metaphor for the country.
Currently, one-third of the people’s house built under Roosevelt has been wrecked and carted away, leaving an open wound visible in aerial photographs, its rose garden built up by Jacqueline Kennedy has been paved over, its lawn recently covered with a glitzy Thunderdome gladiatorial arena in which toxic masculinity would fight itself.
But he is not the country. The United States is the 77 million adult citizens who voted for him, the 75 million who voted for Harris, and the nearly 90 million who didn’t vote, and it’s also all the children, noncitizens, prisoners and former prisoners who are not part of that voting population.
It is the land itself from the maple and birch forests of the north-east to the glaciers of Alaska to the tropical rainforests of Hawaii, with a lot of prairie, swamp and desert in between. That land was here in various configuration not for millions but billions of years before 1776, and it will be here long after the US has ceased to exist, because cease it must at some point, and so must the human race.
The US is the desert tortoises who have been ambling through versions of the Mojave deserts of what is now California, Nevada and Arizona for 60m years and the people who strove to create the protected lands in which they may survive a little longer.
But the question at hand is the US at 250 and its possible futures. One thing about this wildly diverse country’s future is certain: it will become a non-white majority country in a couple of decades, and there is nothing that Stephen Miller and the other white nationalists can do about it.
Earlier this year, I was struck by the valiant, idealistic, dedicated young people who one after the other came into the spotlight. We only came to know Renee Good, 37, shot on 7 January, and Alex Pretti, also 37, shot on 24 January, through their willingness to face death for what they believed in and who they believed matters.
But another young person came into power on New Year’s Day of 2026, while they were still alive, Zohran Mamdani, age 34. He beat the odds and the status quo and all the money behind Andrew Cuomo (who’s been accused of sexual assault), to become mayor – the city’s first Muslim mayor – of this country’s biggest city as he spoke up for all the marginalized and minority populations that make New York City what it is.
On 8 February, despite rightwing outcries, Bad Bunny, age 32, took the Super Bowl stage and put on a half-time show that was a celebration – in Spanish – of his beloved Puerto Rico, of the musical traditions that converge in his songs, and the huge spectacle he staged was striking for the range of its performers, and for his insistence on his version of America, a generous joyous multilingual one, an America in which anyone can dance with anyone else.
Later that month, Oakland’s own Alysa Liu, daughter of a refugee from China, won the figure-skating gold at the Olympics with a performance whose freedom and joy cast a shadow over virtually all other figure skating before her victory on 19 February.
She had dropped out of the sport, refusing to be another one of those young women who are managed and controlled, and then returned on her own terms. As she skated out of the arena after a stunning performance, she shouted: “That’s what I’m fucking talking about,” as she laughed joyously.
These were not typical Americans, but like the 8 million people who showed up for the No Kings demonstration on 28 March, they were Americans. No Kings was unprecedented in sheer size as well as in how the protests took place in every single congressional district in the country. I said the US is a perpetual question; these lives and these performances were demonstrations of the answers some of us have given and some of us have cheered.
I do not believe that Trump will destroy the US, but he has badly broken it, and what comes after has to include consequences for the criminals and a massive cleanup operation. There will be no return to how things were, and we must go ahead by fixing what allowed this destruction to happen.
In the end, I come back to Abraham Lincoln at the battlefield and burial grounds of Gettysburg: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work … that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
That is in one sense an ideal never yet realized, in the other a moral north toward which this country at its best has been pointing for those 250 years.
– Rebecca Solnit
The only way out for America now as far as I can see is socialism…. It simply is a shame that there is no real progressive party because now there is a progressive scene possible.
– Allen Ginsberg
like the god
who knows every hair on your head,
this bird has memorized each flower
in your yard
– Ann Tweedy
She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or forty-seven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it’s going to be in words.
– William Faulkner, Light in August
The spirit of childhood knows no hatred, frustration or resentment. It stands naked and immense before the universe. It demands a response that matches its dreams. It asks for a renewed miracle every day.
The children sway like the fountains, the sun’s reflections, the movement of the clouds. You are missing this high light that frees the soul and makes the body light. Rediscover this feeling of plenitude in all your actions and your life will change.
In difficult trials, in the face of daily aggression, use the spirit of childhood as a crystal shield. It is one of the weapons of the spiritual warrior. It does not respond to violence with aggression. Its nature is more subtle. It reflects and returns light.
– Dugpa Rimpoche
Be ever mindful of the shortcomings of desire’s rewards, and know that all the phenomena of the cycle of existence are never still, like the ripples on a pond, and that these manifestations of delusion, which are no things in themselves, are like magic and dreams.
When you have the determination to be free of samsara and are content with your material situation, you will be able to sit quietly with your mind happy and at ease.
– Kalu Rinpoche
Try to spend much time by yourself. Do not read too much. Do not watch TV too much. Do not get involved with the world too much. Go deep, dive deep within yourself and find all the answers you’re looking for. They are all within you, they’ve always been there.
– Robert Adams
In dreams begins responsibility, said a poet. In dreams, in imagination, we begin to be one another. I am thou. The barriers go down.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind
Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
– Bob Dylan
You do not want to give up either worldly knowledge or so-called spiritual knowledge, and yet, through these worldly concepts, you want to understand the riddle of your existence, and that is precisely why you are not able to understand.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
I prefer a theology of silence, the eschatology
of the shrug, a religion of holding my wife’s hand
for now.
– Bob Hicok
Before you act, you have freedom, but after you act, the effect of that action will follow you whether you want it to or not. That is the law of karma. You are a free agent, but when you perform a certain act, you will reap the results of that act.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
God // is a dress we slip over solitude.
– Bob Hicok
The most highly credentialed people I know aren’t wealthy.
They’re broke.
– Tim Denning
There is no need to turn round and round in endless questioning; find your Self and everything will fall into its proper place.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Expect and…endure with patience both faces of fortune. For all things follow from God’s eternal decree….hate no one, despise no one, ridicule no one, be angry with no one, envy no one….each should be content with what he has and should help his neighbor.
– Spinoza
Do not cling to what is inferior, either in yourself or others. If a person or thought or practice is not in harmony with the principles of the Sage, quietly let go.
– I Ching [17.2], Brian Browne Walker
I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Sometimes I am
empty for a very
long time.
I have no identity.
– Marguerite Duras
after work
the soul unbuttons
slowly
– Akari
it’s so easy to be a poet
and so hard to be
a man.
– Charles Bukowski
Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.
– Immanuel Kant
True spirituality is not easy. It means changing your entire viewpoint, looking at life completely differently. Trying to keep quiet most of the time. Keeping your mind quiet, never allowing it to judge, never allowing your mind to think too much on any one subject.
– Robert Adams
Birches
by Robert Frost
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Realization is for everyone; Realization makes no difference between the aspirants. This very doubt, whether you can realize, and the notion ‘I- have-not-realized’ are themselves the obstacles. Be free from these obstacles also.
– Ramana Maharshi
I think in order to survive one must be reborn, one must overcome one’s childhood, the injustices, and recognize the privileges. You can’t use your past as an alibi.
– Leonard Cohen
You are part of a system, a universe, that has perfectly well been able to take care of itself for at least 10,000 million years.
– Alan Watts
First, space, which has been an open dimension
since the beginningless beginning,
and pristine awareness, are indivisible.
Pristine awareness denotes that aspect
within the discerning capacity of the mind
that has been there since the very beginning.
– Guru Padmasambhava
Alphard My favorite star is Alphard,
very heart of the Hydra,
(I think it means the solitary one)
earth’s atmospheric scintillations
making it erratically
and often rather eerily,
continue still
to beat.
– Julian Cason
We are programmed to see ourselves everywhere—we see a face in the light socket, we yell at the car for breaking down, we apply complex psychological motivations to our cat. What is God but the attempt to make the universe more like us—to make it living, breathing, thinking, moral, creative, thoughtful, emotional, and answerable?
– J.G. Keely
But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself, into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously.
– Julio Cortazar
You project your chemistry on other people and your relations with them are a result.
Your unconscious manifestations are more powerful and get more results than your so called ‘conscious.’
You receive what you evoke.
– Kathryn Hulme
I tried to establish order over the chaos of my imagination, but this essence, the same that presented itself to me still hazily when I was a child, has always struck me as the very heart of truth. It is our duty to set ourselves an end beyond our individual concerns, beyond our convenient, agreeable habits, higher than our own selves, and disdaining laughter, hunger, even death, to toil night and day to attain that end. No, not to attain it. The self-respecting soul, as soon as he reaches his goal, places it still further away. Not to attain it, but never to halt in the ascent. Only thus does life acquire nobility and oneness.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
Ten thousand / Atoms of sorrow whirl away / In the wind.
– Tu Fu (tr. Kenneth Rexroth)
Critical thinking builds corporate cultures of accountability in which critical voices are not silenced. And a trained imagination is essential for innovation, a key to any healthy economy: no nation can thrive on the basis of yesterday’s skills learned by rote.
– Martha C. Nussbaum
No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight of the soul.
– Ingrid Bergman
i turn off the lamp
the moths escape from the cult
they’d stumbled into
– clark strand
I think advice is best kept til asked for…. One must beware of meddling.
– C.S. Lewis
Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
– R.E.M.
Im full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry.
– Ernest Hemingway
Empathy requires a secure enough self to tolerate someone else’s reality without it being a referendum on your own work.
– Brad Reedy
The process of finding the truth may not be a process by which we feel increasingly better and better. It may be a process by which we look at things honestly, sincerely, truthfully, and that may or may not be an easy thing to do.
– Adyashanti
The task of a philosopher: we should bring our will into harmony with whatever happens, so that nothing happens against our will and nothing that we wish for fails to happen.
– Epictetus
The more a person deems absolute equality among all people to be a desirable condition, the further left he or she will be on the ideological spectrum. The more a person considers inequality to be unavoidable or even desirable, the further to the right he or she will be.
– Roderick Stackelberg
The thing about your words is they reveal what’s inside of you, and you will never rise above your words.
– Zig Ziglar
Ethics alone is not enough to make a change in the world. For instance, take the environment: We’re not motivated to fight for it simply because we ought to. Of course we are ethically responsible…. We must first be moved by beauty. For then, love is aroused. When you love something, then you want it near, not to be harmed
– James Hillman, What Kind of Society Nurtures the Soul?
There will come a time when your only source of peace and happiness will be found in withdrawing from the noise of the crowd.
– Ali Ibni Thalib
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
– Sigmund Freud
My creative spasm comes only in the early hours of the morning when the enemy in my body is too sleepy to throw up walls against the foray of my brain.
– J. M. Coetzee, Dusklands
Pain leaves a mark too deep to be seen, a mark beyond the reach of sight and mind.
– Margaret Atwood
A certain kind of micrology and belief in authority are characteristics of greatness — namely, the perfecting micrology of the artist, and the historical belief in the authority of nature.
– Friedrich Schlegel
Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.
– Rumi
I don’t believe in state control of industry or collectivizing farms, but I do see value in policies derived from a socialist ethos, like Social Security and Medicare.
– Jon Stewart
Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one’s true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling.
– John Dewey, Democracy and Education
No one can see you exactly as you are; everyone understands you only as much as their own knowledge allows.
– Saadi Shirazi
If the individual is nothing, society cannot be something. Take his substance away from him, and the State has no more substance; if he has nothing to sacrifice, there is nothing before him to sacrifice to.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Hebrideean scene
the lux-
uriance of
an orchid
in the rags
of a sun-
breeze
– Alec Finlay
On this 250th birthday/anniversary, I can’t help but think of Buddy the Elf and what he says in the mailroom:
“You’re young, you’re so young.”
“My Papa, he didn’t make Master Tinker until he was 490.”
– Anne Heaton
The male God is an ontological lie,
intellectual regression, and theological disaster.
– Helen Hye-Sook Hwang
It is not the gentle loving mother we need, but the destroyer.
It is the only way we will ever have a chance to save our planet from the killing machines and the men who operate them.
– Tamara Albanna
White Christianity suffers from a bad case of Disney Princess theology. As each individual reads Scripture, they see themselves as the princess in every story. They are Esther, never Xerxes or Haman. They are Peter, but never Judas. They are the woman anointing Jesus, never the Pharisees. They are the Jews escaping slavery, never Egypt. For citizens of the most powerful country in the world, who enslaved both Native and Black people, to see itself as Israel and not Egypt when studying Scripture is a perfect example of Disney princess theology. And it means that as people in power, they have no lens for locating themselves rightly in Scripture or society – and it has made them blind and utterly ill-equipped to engage issues of power and injustice. It is some very weak Bible work.
– Erna Kim Hackett
A person can spend thirty years acquiring the complete literature of their own liberation and never act on a single sentence of it. The collecting feels like progress because it carries the texture of effort without the risk of exposure.
This is the most sophisticated trap on the entire road to sovereignty, because the internal saboteur has learned to perform growth and quote the philosophers while avoiding the one irreversible move that would change everything.
You break this by taking an action you cannot retract and discovering that the world declines to end. What follows is the humiliation of realizing how long you stood at a door that was never locked, and then the clean air of having finally walked through it.
– Stan Taylor
What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.
– Jane Austen
Looking for
consciousness
in the brain
is like looking
inside a radio
for the
announcer.
– Nassim Haramein
Lochan
(For Jean Johnstone)
When all this is over I mean
to travel north, by the high
drove roads and cart tracks
probably in June,
with the gentle dog-roses
flourishing beside me. I mean
to find among the thousands
scattered in that land
a certain quiet lochan,
where water lilies rise
like small fat moons,
and tied among the reeds,
underneath a rowan,
a white boat waits.
– Kathleen Jamie
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.
– Briana Mills
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts.
– Franz Kafka
I still believe in my country, not because I am immune to / disappointment nor because I’ve stopped counting the ways we fail / each other, but because here, people keep doing small impossible / things.
– Oladosu Michael Emerald
Hold to the now, the
here, through which all
future plunges to the past.
– James Joyce
And the memories of all we have loved stay and come back to us in the evening of our life. They are not dead but sleep, and it is well to gather a treasure of them.
– Vincent van Gogh
We are the expression and extension of a long line of survivors. Our lives are but a continuation of all those who came before. And though many perished, your people didn’t. They saw and lived and endured and their resilience is your true inheritance. In this way, their wounds are our own, in that it is always up to us to turn the salt of bitterness into the salt of wisdom. It is liberating to consider that when we heal an ancestral pattern, we are healing backwards through time, liberating all those souls who were left unresolved, unforgiven and misunderstood.
– Toko-pa Turner
A poet is the first citizen of his country and for this very reason it is the duty of the poet to be concerned about the politics of his country.
– Yiannis Ritsos
Recently, I was asked, “In what ways are your poems political?”
Is the practice of seeing political? Is the practice of meditating political? People have made it their duty to hurt other people. There have been successful and unsuccessful attempts to eradicate people on this earth. The dismemberment has been active. As long as we are living in a society or culture that says that it’s okay for some people to have voices and others to not have voices, then speaking is a political act. As long as we are living in a society that promotes war, hate, fear—then, sadly, even love is made political. But I believe love is larger than politics much larger, but as long as systems are trying to dismantle love-then, in this context, the poem for love, for liberation, for humanity becomes political—because political systems are institutionalizing or reiterating hatred.
So, then, the poem protesting the killing of people in Iraq, the poem protesting the brutal displacement of Palestinians, the poem envisioning better schools in our neighborhoods-these should be called common sense poems, I think. But these poems are made political because they are in direct response to political violations and systems that are against people.
– Aracelis Girmay
MEDITATION: Because some answers can only be found on the Inner net.
– Shira Tamir
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
– Octavia E. Butler
Do not be distracted from this state beyond all thought.
And although there is no particular deity to meditate upon,
no visualization details or attributes that you have to remember,
no object for the mind to concentrate on,
at the same time there must be no wandering,
no lack of mindfulness.
The close mindfulness and vigilance needed here
are the same as those of someone
trying to pull a thorn out of his skin
– very carefully, without hurting himself.
The real meditation is to simply remain in the absolute nature
without obscuring the mind with all sort of intellectual constructs.
– Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
The human heart wants to give, and when we let it, it opens up and heals us, body, mind, and spirit.
– Cara Lai
In(ter)dependence Day
It is summer and I want to celebrate
that my neighbor speaks English and Spanish
in the same sentence,
that I can read any book I want,
that my body is mine
to fling into the lake or walk freely
down the street without fear.
I want to celebrate with potlucks,
block parties, fusion dancing,
and poetry. With laughter
and community, cookouts
and accountability.
While we celebrate the hard-won
freedom we gained,
please also remember
that it is our interdependence
not just our independence
that makes this life worth
fighting for.
– Alix Klingenberg
Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one’s native place, for instance. She is most significant to a lover. A lover of Nature is preeminently a lover of man. If I have no friend, what is Nature to me? She ceases to be morally significant.
– H.D. Thoreau
when they all turned blue
ranchers piled on tires and petrol : lit
them: and so the blue sheep rose
in plumes over the prairie : am I counting
them now?: in the warhead factory
down the road lead-gloved hands shaped
sleepless isotopes into triggers:
– Radha Marcum, 3 a.m.
Listen to me. This may save your life.
There is a spirituality that seems “untouchable” – always calm, always wise, always unemotional. Never angry.
Never sad.
Never suffering.
Like pristine pottery – smooth, symmetrical, untouched by chaos. Beautiful to look at. But lifeless in the hands. No cracks, no fingerprints, no blood.
Just repressive silence posing as peace.
And beneath it, a terrible fear:
Fear of mess. Fear of grief. Fear of being fully human. Fear of intimacy.
I know. I hid there once, too. I thought peace meant rising above heartbreak, longing, trauma.
Hiding out in “Pure Awareness” … like a zombie.
But life did not let me escape. Grief came anyway. Shame. Rage. Doubt. Not to punish me, but to finally liberate me.
True peace did not come from avoiding my humanity. It came only when I turned toward it. When I let myself be cracked open.
When I surrendered, and found God in the wreckage.
I do not seek a polished spirituality anymore. Not the kind that bypasses trauma. Not the kind that mistakes emotional numbness for wisdom.
I seek trembling. I seek the body, the nervous system, the sensuality and raw truth of each sacred moment.
In the end, life shatters every dogma, even the dogma called “Pure Awareness.”
What remains is the holy mess. Grief. Longing. Rage. Connection. The utter, utter beauty of the unresolved.
You are not here to be perfect. You are here to be utterly fucking real.
You are here to lose the answers and feel your way through. You are here to weep your way toward the Beloved, in mad devotion to life.
Even your deepest human wound is not a mistake. Don’t bypass it.
Flood it with the elixir of warm merciful attention and breath.
Then it is nothing less
than a doorway home.
– Jeff Foster
Surrender is what
finally begins to
disentangle us from
life’s difficulties.
– Jack Kornfield
Jesus was not a Christian.
He never used the word. He never asked anyone to become one. He never instructed people to build a religion around his life, defend doctrines about his identity, or worship his person. He invited people into a radically different way of being human.
Christianity came later.
It was constructed over centuries through the interpretations of Paul, the theological battles of bishops, the decisions of church councils, and eventually the interests of empires. Whatever Christianity became, it was no longer simply the life Jesus lived. It had become a religion about Jesus more than the way of Jesus.
History’s greatest irony may be that Jesus spent much of his life confronting religious authority, only to become the central figure of one of history’s largest religions.
If Jesus walked into most churches today, I suspect he would be less interested in joining them than in asking the same uncomfortable questions he asked two thousand years ago. Who benefits from this system? Why are people carrying burdens they were never meant to carry? Why has love become secondary to belief? Why is certainty valued more highly than compassion?
Jesus remains one of history’s best-kept secrets because millions have been introduced to Christianity without ever being introduced to him.
There is a religion-free Jesus waiting beneath centuries of doctrine, dogma, institutional control, and theological argument. He belongs no more to Christianity than the Buddha belongs to Buddhism or Socrates belongs to the academy. Great human beings inevitably become larger than the institutions built in their names.
Christianity does not own Jesus. It never did.
To encounter him may require leaving behind much of what has been said about him in order to hear him again with unborrowed ears. The truth that sets us free may begin by freeing Jesus from the religion created in his name.
– Jim Palmer, Inner Anarchy
We are hurt; we are lonely:
and we turn to music or words,
and as compensation beyond all
price we are given glimpses of
the world on the other side of
time and space.
– Madeleine LEngle
The most real never dies. The unreal never lived.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.
– John Steinbeck
Good tea is eloquent enough, it turns out, to change a person’s mind.
– Banana Yoshimoto
The one who knows what is good, and not the man who knows many things, is wise.
– Aeschylus
The motivation of evil, blind absorption by contingent self-interest, tends to dissolve in the medium of thought.
– Theodor W. Adorno
I want to learn from those who have slowly discovered the long way to what lasts.
– Tish Harrison Warren
I think the poets and novelists are often further along than the scientists, as they often are.
– Michael Pollan
If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.
– Federico Fellini
I get yelled at for saying this but for many hundreds of years people went to university not to get diplomas or be employable but because immersion in the humanities was considered foundational to a good life, and school must return to its original purpose: the joy of learning.
– Boze Herrington
If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate.
– Elbert Hubbard
Resorting to a military solution rather than fixing the underlying incapacity or dysfunction in civilian institutions diverts the military from focusing on its primary combat mission, and … it is not the military’s job to save the republic from political impasses. Indeed, if you ask too much of the military, you risk the entire enterprise.
– General Charles Q Brown
“Are you a communist?”
“No I am an anti-fascist”
“For a long time?”
“Since I have understood fascism.”
– Ernest Hemingway
I measure the strength of a spirit by how much truth it can take.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
– Iris Murdoch
These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people — amongst whom your life is passed — that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire — for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience.
– George Eliot, Adam Bede
Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.
– Franz Kafka
Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
– Thomas Jefferson
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
– John Adams
They have all kinds of laws. Laws that can help you, too!
– Mary Astor
Beware of monotony; it’s the mother of all the deadly sins.
– Edith Wharton
Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.
– Thomas Jefferson
I am still the captain of my soul.
– J. M. Coetzee
Failure need not be permanent In a world in which in all evils are due to lack of knowledge.
– David Deutsch, Beginning of Infinity
One thing your brain is good at is forgetting. It will never hold on to information that’s not important.
– Justin Sung
Don’t look at my feet; I come from hell. Look at my soul; I am heading toward the stars.
– Zab G. Andrade
The living wander away, we don’t hear from them for months, years—but the dead move in with us to stay.
– Garrison Keillor
If we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.
– Maya Angelou
Our minds are tortured and twisted because we are making such tremendous effort – to live, to do, to act, to think. Effort in any form must be a distortion.
– Krishnamurti
Thought is a beacon not a life-raft, and to confuse the functions is tragic.
– R.P. Blackmur
As the body is distinct from the clothes it wears, the soul is distinct from the body it inhabits.
– Shrimad Rajchandra, Atmasiddhi
If you want to know why everyone feels defeated and demoralized, it’s because art and literature and theater and natural splendor, all the things that gave life meaning, have been stripped from public life. We live in a culture that gives ugliness instead of beauty, scrolling instead of poetry, and we are starving for both.
– Boze Herrington
Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.
– Santiago Ramón y Cajal
The simplest definition of trauma is that it’s a life experience we didn’t have the mental and/or physical and/or emotional capacity to deal with and the psyche was wounded in the process.
– James Hillman
It does not take a genius to know that the whole world is bullshit. But you all do not get it.
You are still like the salesman, you can always think of a circumstance in which you might be fulfilled.
You never get the point! You do not get the point about the world because you do not get the point about yourself.
– Adi Da Samraj
When told the simple truth that the Kingdom of Heaven is within him, the Christian is not satisfied and will read far-fetched meanings into the statement. Mature minds alone can grasp the simple truth in all its nakedness.
– Ramana Maharshi
Greatness happens when the person with the wild imagination collaborates with the person who knows how to get things done.
– Simon Sinek
It is pointless trying to know where the Way leads. Take the first step, the rest will come.
– Rumi
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.
– John Keats
Divinity is within you, not in concepts or books.
– Hermann Hesse
Restoring land for production of natural resources is not the same as renewal of land as cultural identity. We have to think about what land means.
– Robin Kimmerer
The sage does not collect precious things.
He does not hold on to ideas.
He brings men back to what they have lost.
– Lao Tzu
He amused himself by thinking about a time with two speeds, one very slow, in which the movement of people and objects was almost imperceptible, and the other very fast, in which everything, even inert objects, glittered with speed. The first was called Paradise, the second Hell, and Archimboldi’s only wish was never to inhabit either.
– Roberto Bolaño
Casting an eye on the education of children, from whence I can make a judgment of my own, I observe they are instructed in religious matters before they can reason about them, and consequently that all such instruction is nothing else but filling the tender mind of a child with prejudices.
– George Berkeley
How heavy is a common glass of water?
The weight doesn’t matter. It depends on how long I hold it.
If I hold it for a minute, it’s no biggie.
If I hold it for an hour, I’ll have an ache in my arm.
If I hold it for a day, my arm will feel numb and paralyzed.
In each case, the weight of the glass doesn’t change, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.
The stresses and worries in life are like that glass of water.
Think about them for a while and nothing happens.
Think about them a bit longer and they begin to hurt.
And if you think about them all day long, you will feel frozen – incapable of doing anything.
So surrender your tears and let go. The more you cry the more evolved you will become.
Remember water is the sacred gift of life and its where we came from.
– Glass of Water Theory
LIBERTY
by Robert Hunter
Saw a bird with a tear in his eye
Walking to New Orleans my oh my
Hey, now, Bird, wouldn’t you rather die
Than walk this world when you’re born to fly?
If I was the sun, I’d look for shade
If I was a bed, I would stay unmade
If I was a river I’d run uphill
If you call me you know I will
If you call me you know I will
Ooo, freedom
Ooo, liberty
Ooo, leave me alone
To find my own way home
To find my own way home
Say what I mean and I don’t give a damn
I do believe and I am who I am
Hey now Mama come and take my hand
Whole lotta shakin’ all over this land
If I was an eagle I’d dress like a duck
Crawl like a lizard and honk like a truck
If I get a notion I’ll climb this tree
or chop it down and you can’t stop me
Chop it down and you can’t stop me
Ooo, freedom
Ooo, liberty
Ooo, leave me alone
To find my own way home
To find my own way home
Went to the well but the water was dry
Dipped my bucket in the clear blue sky
Looked in the bottom and what did I see?
The whole damned world looking back at me
If I was a bottle I’d spill for love
Sake of mercy I’d kill for love
If I was a liar I’d lie for love
Sake of my baby I’d die for love
Sake of my baby I’d die for love
Ooo, freedom
Ooo, liberty
Ooo, leave me alone
To find my own way home
To find my own way home
I’m gonna find my own way home
I went to one of Jung’s grandchildren, Dieter Baumann for analysis to begin with and then, at one point, we became very friendly. He said, ‘let’s visit Jung’s house in Bollingen’, and so he and I went there, and we opened the door of the little Stone House and went in, and I saw this funny book called the Dao De Jing where he had lived and where he had eaten, on his little table. That’s how I started to practice and learn about Taoism from Jung’s book, that he left behind Taoism for me is very very, very, very close to physics, nobody knows that. It’s about what’s happening, it’s about throwing a coin for example and watching it, that’s the essence of process work: watching what’s happening spontaneously and following it. So Taoism, from Jung and Dao came process working.
– Arnold Mindell
after IHF
When I have watched football
for ninety minutes I feel lousy –
Not so when I have played for an hour:
The players inherit the party
While the watchers wear themselves out and
sit on sofas alone, and glower.
– Alec Finlay
Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?!
– Jack Kerouac
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
– Marshall McLuhan
If wokeness is un-American, then everything I have is not because of America, but in spite of it.
– Christopher Newman
Look carefully around you and recognize the luminosity of souls. Sit beside those who draw you to that.
– Rumi
The old dreams were good dreams; they didn’t work out, but I’m glad I had them.
– Robert Kincaid
He who learns but does not practice is like he who ploughs but does not sow.
– Saadi Shirazi
THE BRITISH PHONE BOOTH
I’m stuck inside one of those old red British phone booths from the past. In fact, the only time I hear about phone booths nowadays is when I’m watching boxing and the announcer says, “it’s been one hell of a phone booth fight.” Outside of the phone booth is rain and fog. No one notices me inside the phone booth. Maybe I like it, after all? Nevertheless, I pick up the phone to call for help. My mother in California answers on the other line. “Try to smash the glass with your fists,” she says. I smash the glass, and London fog bleeds into the booth. I crawl out of the phone booth, like a snake. I transform into a Shakespearean marionette, tights, trunks, facial hair and all. I recite the famous sonnets to the eager crowd that has gathered. I’m visible again. I take a bow.
– Jose Hernandez Diaz
Always know when to let go. When a thought is bringing you more misery than peace, let go the thought; when a person is bringing more pain than joy to your life, let go… You cannot be your best if you lack joy and peace.
– Brigitte Nicole
The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
– Albert Einstein
There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we’ll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it’s been. Until then there is a lugubrious seriousness I love in all of this.
– Jack Kerouac
The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.
– Aravind Adiga
Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the senses.
– Lao Tzu
Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.
– Aimé Césaire
At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
– Toni Morrison
As we learn to bow,
we discover that the heart holds more freedom
and compassion than we could imagine.
– Jack Kornfield
All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope.
– Winston Churchill
I am larger, better than I thought, / I did not know I held so much goodness.
– Walt Whitman
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
– John Adams
You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.
– John Steinbeck
Spirit is indeed non-rational; but it is trans, not pre. It transcends but includes reason; it does not regress and exclude it.
– Ken Wilber
LIVINGSTON SUITE
in memory of T.J. Huth
Shorn of nature,
here but in small supply,
townspeople adore their dogs.
Our dogs have never lived
in a town. Neither have I
since 1967. I adore
the puzzlement of our dogs.
Each morning I walk four blocks
to this immense river,
surprised that it’s still there,
that it won’t simply disappear
into the ground like the rest of us.
In the burnt July air
the strange cool odor
of sprinkler water
creating its own little breeze
in the Livingston Park
where there are twelve rings for playing
horseshoes built before the fathers of lies
built the clouds above our heads.
In 1968 when I was first here
there was a cool scent of pines
and melting snow from the mountains
carried by a southwind through the river’s
canyon. The scent is still here,
the sure fresh odor of the West.
A concert in the park on the 4th of July sponsored
by the networks in New York. Someone named Sheryl Crow, Hank Williams Junior not Senior, and my old favorite, Los Lobos. As a claustrophobe I can’t walk the four blocks into the crowds but from my studio I can hear the Latino music wafting through maple trees, imagining I’m at our winter casita near Patagonia, Arizona, on the Mexican border, the music so much closer to love and death than our own, the heart worn on the sleeve, the natural lament of flowers, the moon visible. Smiling skeletons are allowed to dance and the gods draw closer to earth, the cash registers drowned out in the flight of birds, the sound of water.
– Jim Harrison
A Murmuring was heard above the Spheres of Fine Matter, it quivered through the Great Pillar, and branch by branch, under the World Tree.
– Ronald Johnson
As long as you accept the criteria of the system, you are its prisoner.
– E.F. Schumacher
Once you have met a true human being, let him not disappear from the horizon of your heart.
– Rumi
Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.
– Sylvia Plath
What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that it has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry.
– Matsuo Bashō
If your ancestors could see you now,
they would probably stare for a while.
Not because of the phone in your hand, or the car on your drive, or the light that appears with the flick of a switch.
But because of the things that make you ache.
They would watch you stand in front of a mirror, pulling at your clothes, studying your reflection and finding fault in a face that carries every one of them.
They would wonder why you apologise for taking up space, why you hide parts of yourself, and why you measure your worth against strangers.
They would not understand why you call yourself ugly when your body is doing exactly what bodies have always done: carrying you through another day.
These were people who woke before sunrise to find food. Who feared winters that lasted too long. Who worked with cracked hands and tired bones, hoping simply to make it through.
Some fought wars. Some fought for causes that let you live. Some crossed oceans. Some crossed bridges so you never had to cross them. Some built dreams for the future and some buried dreams so their children could have chances they never did.
And all of them, whether they knew it or not, were passing a torch.
Through hunger and hardship. Through success and sacrifice. Through every impossible thing they survived.
They carried it forward until it reached you.
And now here you are.
Worried about wrinkles. About numbers on scales. About whether people like you. About whether you’ve achieved enough by now.
And perhaps they would place a hand on your shoulder and gently remind you:
We did not come this far for you to spend your life at war with yourself.
We fought for warmth, so you could rest. We searched for food, so you could be nourished. We demanded rights, so you could be free. We endured, so you could live.
Not perfectly. Not beautifully. Not impressively.
Just fully.
So if your ancestors could see you now, I think they would be proud.
Not because you have everything figured out.
But because after thousands of years of storms survived and battles endured, their story is still breathing.
Breathing.
Breathing.
Breathing.
Through you.
– Becky Hemsley
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden
To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.
– George MacDonald
If there was ever a reason for a judge to sanction prosecutors, it’s prosecuting someone with a felony charge for touching paint.
– Andrew Gatto
There are many similarities between being an American and being a Buddhist. Both call upon us to take responsibility for our thoughts, our speech, and our actions.
– Reverend Earl Ikeda
Maybe I’m not making big changes in the world, but if I have somehow helped or encouraged somebody along the journey, then I’ve done what I’m called to do.
– Sr. Thea Bowman
Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.
– Marshall McLuhan, Take Today
You see no beauty in the parched parade,
The quivering, heat-glazed highways mile on mile,
The fields where beauty holds a debt unpaid,
The gray, drab barracks in monotonous, grim file.
You take no joy when dust wraiths dimly curl
Above the winding column crawling on far hills.
You see but short beyond the present whirl
Of circumstance, your little wrongs and petty ills.
But when it all has passed and you have lost
The swinging rhythmic cadence of the marching feet,
Then you will reck as paltry small the cost,
And memory will purge the bitter from the sweet.
– Robert Penn Warren, Prophecy
A beautiful and profound post on the practice of “Tonglen”
– as taught by Chögyam Trungpa
notes taken by Ken Friedman
“JUST DO IT VERY NAIVELY”
…….”We’ve been introduced to the sitting practice of meditation. And, as we “sit and sit and sit and sit” [Trungpa Rinpoche’s words], at some point, we begin to settle down. Whew! What a relief! But, that’s just the beginning. Because, when we walk out of our shrine room, the phenomenal world will present itself, and frequently in ways that are unsettling. When that happens, our experience of peace and calm may be threatened, and we might feel awkward, irritated and confused. And, despite all of the dharma talks we’ve heard, despite all of our training, we might recoil from what’s in front of us: we make a face, we hold tight, we try to reject our world.
According to the “Backwards Ati teachings”, we could take a different approach. Since what’s in front of you couldn’t possibly be otherwise at that moment, instead of rejecting your world, you could invite the phenomenal world to come in; you could allow yourself to be touched by the pain and the suffering of others. When you do that, you see that there’s nothing to be afraid of; you could let go and fill the entire space with tenderness, affection and love. Trungpa Rinpoche once said [to me]: “Learning to love is the most difficult thing to do. But, to begin with, you don’t have to be so touchy.”
Of course, we’re now talking about the practice of tonglen.
As students on the path, we try to possess, to hold on to, our experience of basic goodness. Just like in our Red Cross training, we try to take in the good and breathe out the bad. Here, in tonglen, you apply the reverse logic: you take in the pain and the confusion of others, and you give others the best of what you’ve experienced – rigpa, mere knowing – right up to this very moment today. When you live in that way, you never let people down.
In the practice of tonglen, you breathe in the problems, the anger, the anguish of others; you take in their grudge, their resentment, completely. When you do that, said the Vidyadhara, “something happens; it works.” There’s a switch, which Trungpa Rinpoche called “the great switcheroo.” Your samsaric mind, your projections, fall apart, and there’s a “direct experience of luminosity, innate wisdom mind…The darkness that we live in, which comes from grasping at the dharmas of self and others, can collapse, like the knots of a coiled snake releasing themselves.” Therefore, we can radiate a sense of freedom, a sense of liberation, to others. That is the essence of tonglen.
The Secret to Tonglen Practice: Just Do It Very Naively.
Trungpa Rinpoche called tonglen, “Getting the inner scoop on Buddha’s mind at its best.” “Just do it very naively,” he said, “and you will find out.” That is the secret to tonglen practice – to do it very naively. The bringing in, the dissolving of other people’s problems into oneself, is complete and thorough, and the sending out is also complete. There’s complete letting go, just like with the outbreath in the sitting practice. You breathe in any sense of problem, of me-ness; and, when you breathe out, you drop any sense of pettiness, your concern for “what’s in it for me.” When you do that, you discover a golden world, a whole world of richness you can share with others.
Why? Because, at this point on the path, “others” are still just your version of others; “Joe Schmidt” is just your version of Joe Schmidt: “There is no Joe Schmidt. There is just your version of ‘Joe,’” your projection of “other, which is something we use to maintain the illusion of a so-called “self.” When you take in the pain, the confusion, the torment, of others, it is actually your projections about those people that are coming back to you. And, when you take your projection all the way in, back to the source, so to speak, what you discover is emptiness of concept – shunyata! Why? Because it was just your projection; it was your projection of Joe as being “evil,” as being your enemy. When you see that, the whole game of “this and that,” “friend and enemy,” falls apart; your conceptual world dissolves, and you see Joe’s buddha-nature. Therefore, you can see the situation more clearly; you can see how to practice the paramitas bluntly on the spot.
How to Practice Tonglen
Here’s how to do the practice:
First, take good head and shoulders; sit up straight with good posture.
Then, you flash absolute bodhichitta: There’s a short glimpse of openness, which you can use as a launching pad. You’re not trying to manufacture a compassionate state of mind; you’re not trying to cultivate a particular type of experience. But there’s very short, abrupt sudden gasp, which cuts through any tendency toward spiritual materialism. [If you have received the nature-of mind transmission, this is where to apply those instructions.]
One very important point: You continue to flash throughout the practice – that’s very important. Any time you notice that your mind has wandered, if you realize that you’ve been dwelling on thoughts, take head and shoulders, look out, and open your eyes just a little bit wider. And then come back to applying the instructions on tonglen.
You start by taking in black and sending out white: At the beginning, you’re not visualizing or working with a particular person or situation, but you take in the feeling, the texture, of all-pervasive blackness and sludge. You breathe in black, hot and heavy, and it dissolves into you. You’re not just watching the blackness from a distance; instead, you identify with the blackness – it’s very thorough; it’s very blunt. The feeling of blackness, of hopelessness, comes in from everywhere. You take it in; you are completely black from head to toe. You take in whatever is uncomfortable and disgusting. There’s a quality of nausea or revulsion.
Then, there’s a gap, and you breathe out basic goodness, a sense of freedom from obstacles. The outbreath is actually the same as the outbreath in the sitting practice: there’s a complete letting go. There’s out-dissolve, and then gap, shunyata. The Vidyadhara said: “There’s no me-ness in there anymore.” Why not? Because your projection, your make-believe world, fell apart. You dropped your tight preoccupation with yourself, and therefore you can give out.
The Vidyadhara (Trungpa) said: “You are changing the atmosphere; [it’s] like suddenly turning on the air conditioner or opening the window in the wintertime.” So, there’s hot and heavy (taking in) and cold and light (giving out). You should have a tangible feeling, an actual visual sense of it: Rinpoche said this was very important. You personally, physically feel it. You experience the texture, the heaviness, with the in-breath, and the coolness, the fresh breeze of delight, with the out. You take in the blackness through all of your pores; there’s a feeling of claustrophobia, imprisonment, no relief. Then you breathe out basic goodness; you expand out as much as you can.
So, you begin by working with texture: you do that for about one-third of your tonglen session, so for about the first ten minutes of a 30-minute session of tonglen. Then, you begin to pick up on specific content. You breathe in Joanne Schmidt’s suffering, and you breathe out the absence of that suffering to Joanne. You might think that Michael is depressed: you breathe in Michael’s depression, and you breathe out the absence of depression to Michael. If you know someone that is sick with the flu, you take in that person’s virus, and breathe out the absence of any kind of illness to that person.
One other important point: you can and should do tonglen for yourself. When you see yourself as being a problem, you are actually experiencing yourself as “other.” So, you can breathe in your own problems, your own neurosis, and you breathe out a complete absence of conflict to yourself.
But there’s still more to go: after a brief period of focusing on a specific person’s problem, you switch from doing tonglen for just one person, and you begin working with all sentient beings. So, for example, you might breathe in Martha’s financial difficulties, and then breathe out freedom from financial problems to Martha. Then, after a few moments, you switch from focusing only on Martha, and you breathe in the money problems of all sentient beings and you breathe out freedom from money hangups to everyone. You keep switching back and forth between a particular person’s problem and then working with the same problem as experienced by all sentient beings. Then, at the very end of your session, you take in all of the suffering experienced by sentient beings, and you breathe out the complete freedom from suffering to others.
Tonglen is the Simplest Practice
You can choose anyone and anything. You don’t have to worry about whether your perception of a person is accurate; you don’t have to worry about whether that person is really an aggressive person or not. Remember, what you’re actually doing is breathing in your perception of that person as aggressive. And then, once again, the outbreath is always the same. The absence of jealousy or the absence of aggression or money hangups—they are all the same. There’s always out-dissolve-gap. You take in the problems and obstacles of others and send out buddha nature, rigpa, complete open space.
Another key point: You never run out of content. Tonglen is the simplest practice. If you feel it’s a problem because you can’t think of anything to breathe in, you breathe in “not being able to think of anything to take in,” and breathe out a complete lack of difficulty with the practice. If I feel that I’m doing it wrong, I would take in “doing it wrong” to myself and breathe out a complete mastery of the practice to “Ken.” So, you never run out of “material.” You work with whatever arises in your mind – if it seems like a problem, there’s no evaluation; you just take it in.
– via Dugald Sinclair and Jangchup Garma
The uselessness of the word is evident. I would like to make this piece of paper shriek and dance and laugh but the keys just strike it harmlessly and we settle for just a fraction of the whole.
– Charles Bukowski
The white expanse of the page is terribly and exquisitely silent. It lies before us like a frozen lake, completely indifferent to the brilliant chaotic skater of human consciousness. We approach it with the grandest and most predatory intentions. We wish to split the frost. We seek a phrase that shriek with the magenta tint of an agonized sunset, dance with weightless grace, and laugh with the cruel silver chime of a clock in an empty ballroom. We long for the text to become a living breathing canvas of nerve.
Look closely at the result. The heavy iron arms of the machine, those rigid mechanical pedants, strike their uniform rhythmic blows. They are harmless. They merely stain the sheet. What emerges is a pale pressed flower, a dry specimen pinned down by a clumsy grammar. We are forced by the very nature of this flat medium to settle for a mere fraction, a ghost, a dusty silhouette of the magnificent whole.
The writer remains an eternal exile stranded on the shore of a monochrome vocabulary, forever watching the vivid unwritten world wave from across an impassable sea of ink.
To you, dear reader, I pose this: When you close a truly magnificent book, do you feel that the author successfully made the paper dance, or are we all simply haunted by the beautiful untouchable specter of what they were forced to leave behind?
– Olesia Alexandrovna Manakova
What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself. Reality itself is gorgeous, it is the plenum, the fullness of total joy. Wowee!
And all those stars, if you look out in the skies, is a fireworks display, like you see on the 4th of July, which is a great occasion for celebration. The universe is a celebration. It is a fireworks show to celebrate that existence is. Wowee.
This is the real secret of life: to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now, and instead of calling it “work,” realize that this is play.
– Alan Watts
I am, at heart, a gentleman.
– Marlene Dietrich
I am a place, a place where things come together,
then fly apart.
Look at the fields disappearing,
look at the distant hills,
look at the night, the velvety, fragrant night,
which has already come,
though the sun continues to stand at my door.
– Mark Strand
Being attentive unlocks a sphere of reality that no one suspects. If, for instance, I walked along a path without being attentive, completely immersed in myself, I did not even know whether trees grew along the way, nor how tall they were, or whether they had leaves. When I awakened my attention, however, every tree immediately came to me. This must be taken quite literally. Every single tree projected its form, its weight, its movement—even if it was almost motionless—in my direction. I could indicate its trunk, and the place where its first branches started, even when several feet away. By and by something else became clear to me, and this can never be found in books. The world exerts pressure on us from the distance.
The seeing commit a strange error. They believe that we know the world only through our eyes. For my part, I discovered that the universe consists of pressure, that every object and every living being reveals itself to us at first by a kind of quiet yet unmistakable pressure that indicates its intention and its form. I even experienced the following wonderful fact: A voice, the voice of a person, permits him to appear in a picture. When the voice of a man reaches me, I immediately perceive his figure, his rhythm, and most of his intentions. Even stones are capable of weighing on us from a distance. So are the outlines of distant mountains, and the sudden depression of a lake at the bottom of a valley.
This correspondence is so exact that when I walked arm in arm with a friend along the paths of the Alps, I knew the landscape and could sometimes describe it with surprising clarity. Sometimes; yes, only sometimes. I could do it when I summoned all my attention. Permit me to say without reservation that if all people were attentive, if they would undertake to be attentive every moment of their lives, they would discover the world anew. They would suddenly see that the world is entirely different from what they had believed it to be.
– Jacques Lusseyran
There is no whole truth, but this is what we have,
And it goes on
Beyond impact, beyond reach, beyond recall…
– James Dickey
This Land Is Your Land
by Woody Guthrie
This land is your land, this land is my land
From the California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me
As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
And saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me
I roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me, a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me
When the sun comes shining, then I was strolling
In the wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling
The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting
This land was made for you and me
This land is your land and this land is my land
From the California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me
When the sun comes shining, then I was strolling
In wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling
The voice come chanting as the fog was lifting
This land was made for you and me.
A poet is a fellow who
spends his time thinking
about what it is that’s
wrong, and although he
knows he can never quite
find out what this wrong
is, he goes right on
thinking it out
and writing it down.
A poet is a blind optimist.
The world is against him for
many reasons. But the
poet persists. He believes
that he is on the right track,
no matter what any of his
fellow men say. In his
eternal search for truth, the
poet is alone.
He tries to be timeless in a
society built on time.
– Jack Kerouac
Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of ‘moral right,’ back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of ‘necessity.’ Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south—let all Americans—let all lovers of liberty everywhere—join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.
– Abraham Lincoln
The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.
– Thomas Jefferson
What is the rule of honor to be observed by a power so strongly and so advantageously situated as this Republic is? Of course I do not expect it meekly to pocket real insults if they should be offered to it. But, surely, it should not, as our boyish jingoes wish it to do, swagger about among the nations of the world, with a chip on its shoulder, shaking its fist in everybody’s face. Of course, it should not tamely submit to real encroachments upon its rights.
But, surely, it should not, whenever its own notions of right or interest collide with the notions of others, fall into hysterics and act as if it really feared for its own security and its very independence. As a true gentleman, conscious of his strength and his dignity, it should be slow to take offense. In its dealings with other nations it should have scrupulous regard, not only for their rights, but also for their self-respect.
With all its latent resources for war, it should be the great peace power of the world. It should never forget what a proud privilege and what an inestimable blessing it is not to need and not to have big armies or navies to support. It should seek to influence mankind, not by heavy artillery, but by good example and wise counsel. It should see its highest glory, not in battles won, but in wars prevented. It should be so invariably just and fair, so trustworthy, so good tempered, so conciliatory, that other nations would instinctively turn to it as their mutual friend and the natural adjuster of their differences, thus making it the greatest preserver of the world’s peace.
This is not a mere idealistic fancy. It is the natural position of this great republic among the nations of the earth. It is its noblest vocation, and it will be a glorious day for the United States when the good sense and the self-respect of the American people see in this their “manifest destiny.”
It all rests upon peace. Is not this peace with honor? There has, of late, been much loose speech about “Americanism.” Is not this good Americanism? It is surely today the Americanism of those who love their country most. And I fervently hope that it will be and ever remain the Americanism of our children and our children’s children.
– Carl Schurz
—What! To prolong our lives must we submit
to the rule of these defilers of our house?
—No, it is not to be endured. No, death would be better,
for that would be a milder lot than tyranny.
– Aeschylus
Some things are unchangeably wild, others are stolidly tame. The tiger is wild, and the coyote, and the owl. I am tame, you are tame. There are wild things that have been altered, but only into a semblance of tameness, it is no real change. But the dog lives in both worlds.
– Mary Oliver
People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The thing we must do intensely is be human together. People are more important than things. We must get together. The best thing humans can have going for them is each other. We have each other. We must reject everything which humiliates us. Humans are not objects of consumption. We must develop an absolute priority of humans ahead of profit — any humans ahead of any profit. Then we will survive… Together.
– Frank Herbert, New World or No World
Breath
by Philip Levine
Today
in this high clear room
of the world, I squat
to the life of rocks
jewelled in the stream
or whispering
like shards. What fears
are still held locked
in the veins till the last
fire, and who will calm
us then under a gold sky
that will be all of earth?
Everything is connected to something. But not everything is connected to everything. The differences are vital.
– Sophie Strand
You cannot separate peace and freedom. Because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
– Malcolm X
I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.
– Abraham Lincoln
…but they say extreme fear drives the fearful to deep and continual slumber. Sleeping, she sleeps; waking, she sleeps; walking, she sleeps; and eating, she sleeps.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Under the seams runs the pain.
– Anne Carson
Grace happens when we act with others on behalf of our world…
– Joanna Macy
Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.
– G.K. Chesterton
The feeling of emptiness is the most fundamental experience of human existence, and yet it is the one we most desperately seek to avoid.
– Lacan
We’re all so desperate to be understood, we forget to be understanding.
– Beau Taplin
Today I am tempted to begin life in a new language.
– Canetti
Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
There remains the unforeseen. And the unforeseen is never negligible.
– Georges Bernanos
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.
– Virginia Woolf
…I have always found Americans by far the politest people in the world.
– G.K. Chesterton
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
– Doris Lessing
Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.
– Victor Frankl
Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.
– Gore Vidal
A sense of humor, especially a capacity to laugh at one’s own idiosyncrasies, has long been considered a core element of mental health.
– Nancy McWilliams
A mind that is full of conclusions is a dead mind, it is not a living mind. A living mind is a free mind, learning, never concluding.
– Krishnamurti
Remember always, that most of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
July’s grass burnt over
the gardens are factories.
It is the inexpressible sadness
of a family sitting down to dinner
at a card table under the shade tree
behind their house. This is not enough
and it is not too much.
The screen door slams as the children
go indoors to watch television.
Their parents sit smoking
and talking over the dishes
hardly noticing the buses
rushing past them on the highway.
It is that moment where everything will stay
but never long enough.
– William Corbett, This Is Not Enough
What an age! Every one is dying,
everything is dying, and the earth is
dying also, eaten up by the sun and
the wind. I don’t know where I get
the courage to keep on living in the
midst of these ruins. Let us love
each other to the end.
– George Sand
It was always accounted a virtue in a man to love his country. With us it is now something more than a virtue. It is a necessity, a condition of survival. When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.
– Adlai Stevenson
I am flowing again—I have lost my fears,
my anguishes. I have multiple desires,
curiosities, interests.
I can be everywhere.
– Anais Nin
Whiskey, wine, beer
tonight. Expected sleep
I don’t want to go home
wherever that is.
August before you know it.
– Bill Corbett
It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
A lot of people keep it real intellectual as a way of avoiding the deeper parts of themselves.
– Nika Solé
How much of our literature, our political life, our friendships and love affairs, depend on being able to talk peacefully in a bar!
– John Wain
Have patience with yourself, for you are your only obstacle. The way leads through yourself beyond yourself.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
[In the modern world] … the outer chains have simply been put inside man. The desires and thoughts that the suggestion -apparatus of society fills him with, chain him more thoroughly than outer chains. This is so because man can at least be aware of outer chains but be unaware of inner chains, carrying them with the illusion that he is free.
– Erich Fromm
Prayer, meditation, chanting, singing, dancing, and drumming are all wonderful ways to free yourself from the limited world of the mind, and enter into a silent and dynamic communion with God. Be creative. Find your own way of relating to God.
– Leonard Jacobson
Today, we constantly produce ourselves. This production of self is noisy. Creating stillness means withdrawing.
– Byung-Chul Han
Whenever you step out of the noise of thinking, that is meditation, and a different state of consciousness arises.
– Eckhart Tolle
We are already in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.
– Richard Rohr
I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.
– Carl Jung
More people crazy in love doing revolutionary things. That’s what the world needs.
– Nika Solé
Your book knowledge is useful to begin with, but soon it must be given up for direct experience, which by its very nature is inexpressible. Words can be used for destruction also; of words images are built, by words they are destroyed.
– Nisargadatta
There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.
– Matt Haig
What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood?
– Lin Yutang
Stillness is the altar of Spirit. When the mind is still, God speaks.
– Sri Ramakrishna
When anyone has too much, he can’t desire anything. Or he ends up wanting the few things he cannot have.
– Costanza Casati
A people who lose their own framework for understanding reality often begin interpreting themselves through the categories and values of those who dominate them.
– Dr. Amos Wilson
When you feel the suffering of every living thing
within your own heart, that is true Consciousness.
– Bhagavad Gita
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
– Bertrand Russell
Understanding depends on the way one listens.
– Krishnamurti
Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, so that so that you will not be dependent on anyone.
– Thessaloniki
I am not a word of America.
I am not an object of missionary charity.
I am one of the people who built the country.
– James Baldwin
In late-stage capitalism that fetishizes productivity while actively producing health poverty, no amount of institutional access is enough.
– Daisy Lafarge, On Illness and Disability in Contemporary Art
True beauty is the radiance of a soul that has found its center; it is a light that does not fade with age, but grows brighter with every year.
– G.I. Gurdjieff
What is bad for the heart is good for the art. The terrible irony of our lives as artists.
– Jandy Nelson
Creativity is an ode to life. It is not a form of entertainment. It is a form of joy.
– Wynn Bullock
It’s time to start dreaming and working towards the impossible dream – the dream of freedom not oppression, the dream of assimilation not discrimination, and above all, the dream of ascension not descension.
– Abhijit Naskar
One would like one’s life to be borne on the onward wave and not the receding one —the flow and not the ebb.
– George Eliot
It is very important to accept your own darkness when you want to grow in the light.
– Pradip Bendkule
We are not to take lightly the growth of our minds, and the forming of our beliefs.
– Abraham Lincoln
I lift up my face to the summer sky
The sound of larks And the feel of dirt
To all that keeps making sense
In senseless times.
– Carrie Newcomer
fuck fireworks.
i’ve seen galaxies in her eyes
after she howls my name
like a war cry
and collapses
into the kind of freedom
the founding fathers never dared
to imagine.
– Christopher Sexton
philosophers talk about god.
poets taste her.
– Christopher Sexton
Just a reminder that Mary Oliver’s
own answer to her question,
“What is it you plan to do with
your one wild and precious life?”
was to stroll idly through the fields
noticing things.
The question out of context could
appear to be about achieving
more — it’s not.
– Jessica Kantrowitz
A hand full of sand is an anthology of the universe.
– David McCord
The greatest crisis in our lives is a crisis of imagination. We get stuck, and we bind ourselves to the wheel of repetition, because we refuse to reimagine our situation. We cling to the familiar, not daring to give up what we are or have been for what we are meant to become. To address our challenges, we need to draw on extraordinary sources of information and invest our energy and attention in a form of active imagination that dares to re-vision everything.
– Robert Moss
When we refuse the Whole of Life, we create darkness.
– Mark Nepo
It is better to get rid of the problem and keep the person than to get rid of the person and keep the problem.
– Harville Hendrix
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
– William Wordsworth
You’re Not A Poet Til
the State Betrays You
by Darius Simpson
writing a poem is to punching a cop
what punching a cop is to voting blue
it’s like comparing apples to punching a cop
unc, this whiskey is callin me your name again
blood in the august sun dares me to jump
dirty knife in the sink sings about vengeance
untouched ammo screams about loneliness
am i a punk for writing the state’s mortality
can an empire bent on death ever die
do pigs fly to hell or is hell already in them
will angel wings make me a better fugitive
devil on both shoulders says squeeze
we all somebody’s child tryna get home
you’re not a poet til the state betrays you
Reality as a whole — past or present — just isn’t a good place to hang out, in my opinion.
– Jason Mott, Hell of a Book
Detach yourself from everything that makes your mind restless. Renounce everything that disturbs its peace. If you want peace, make yourself worthy of it.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Do not look at my outward poverty; look at the treasure hidden in my soul.
– Rumi
What is divine deserves our respect because it is good; what is human deserves our affection because it is like us.
– Marcus Aurelius
Literature and art, which are sometimes seen as the realm of the superfluous (…) are part of the symbolic, and the symbolic brings with it the quality of communicating and showing us the beautiful and the terrifying.
– Ana Luísa Amaral
It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place, and perhaps because of this I was, in the eyes of my colleagues, cool, by virtue of not being like them.
– Zadie Smith
Find someone who embraces your light yet doesn’t fear your darkness.
– Dahi Tamara Koch
The mind is a magician; it creates a world that does not exist.
– Shams Tabrizi
Love does not arise out of light, out of consciousness. It bypasses these safer grounds. Love is an earthquake of the soul that precedes our frail attempts at order, always threatening to destroy our illusions of control…
– Veronica Goodchild
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
– George Santayana
Nothing is more evident than that modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical; both of their ideals are qualitatively identical, including the premises connected to a world the centre of which is constituted of technology, science, production, “productivity,” and “consumption.”
And as long as we only talk about economic classes, profit, salaries, and production, and as long as we believe that real human progress is determined by a particular system of distribution of wealth and goods, and that, generally speaking, human progress is measured by the degree of wealth or indigence—then we are not even close to what is essential…
– Julius Evola, Work – The Demonic Nature of Economy
Originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism.
– George Henry Lewes
I always like to repeat the beautiful saying of Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist of the 20th century: “My definition of demon is an angel that was not recognized as so. Rather, it is a power, which you denied expression, and you repressed. So, with all of its’ energy repressed, it starts to grow and becomes extremely dangerous”.
– Roberto Lima Netto
If you have a golf ball size consciousness, when you read a book, you’ll have a golf ball size understanding… but if you can expand that consciousness, then read the book: more understanding.
– David Lynch
When they no longer love you, you will know it, even if they don’t tell you. You will feel it deep within your soul, because indifference never goes unnoticed.
– Julio Cortázar
At Last the New Arriving
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Like the horn you played in Catholic school
the city will open its mouth and cry
out. Don’t worry ’bout nothing. Don’t mean
no thing. It will leave you stunned
as a fighter with his eyes swelled shut
who’s told he won the whole damn purse.
It will feel better than any floor
that’s risen up to meet you. It will rise
like Easter bread, golden and familiar
in your grandmother’s hands. She’ll come back,
heaven having been too far from home
to hold her. O it will be beautiful.
Every girl will ask you to dance and the boys
won’t kill you for it. Shake your head.
Dance until your bones clatter. What a prize
you are. What a lucky sack of stars.
All the books of the world will not bring you happiness, but build a secret path
toward your heart.
– Hermann Hesse
THE RIVER AGAIN AND AGAIN
If I could show you how repetition
helps us to understand the truth.
If we stayed with each other long enough
to see the seasons return, to see the young animals
and the opening of peonies and summer heat.
Then we could make sense of the hawk’s calm
or the deer all lowering their heads
again and continuing to eat.
And we would know each other sometimes
with a love that touches indifference.
– Linda Gregg
As Planned
by Frank O’Hara
After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don’t you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?
Often we tell ourselves, “Don’t just sit there, do something!” But when we practice awareness, we discover that the opposite may be more helpful: “Don’t just do something, sit there!”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Anger is the guardian of
something alive longing for presence.
– Matt Licata
The darkness was so complete that it might have been mahogany.
– G.K. Chesterton
Each one of us is
a triumvirate being-at once
the union of body, soul, and
all that lies within.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO
After Mary Oliver
leave your city, your job, your life and eat,
pray, love yourself into oblivion to be happy.
You do not have to burn it all to the ground
and bossbitch, exodus, manifest your way
into a life worth living. You only have to let
the swell of what is most true spill from you
not as a tsunami, but a bayou: a slow-moving
arrival, poorly defined yet lush with soul.
– Elise Powers
The dictionary is based on the hypothesis – obviously an unproven one – that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.
– Jorge Luis Borges
The silence of the night was profound, and the shadows of the houses seemed to take on strange, fantastic shapes.
– Edgar Allan Poe
However, please note, when we talk about crossing from the shore of suffering to the shore of enlightenment, we are talking about duality—two opposite shores—which we have said is not really wisdom.
Prajna accepts no duality. As we will see later, in prajna, when we reach the other shore, we see that the true nature of all things is emptiness, and in emptiness there was/is/will be no river to cross. All the crossing is just a fleeting phenomenon of the mind.
– Trần Đình Hoành
I don’t want to write stories where I know the answer from the beginning, or where I know what the argument is going to be. I like to really feel uncertain until the piece is done.
– Rachel Aviv
the gentle architecture of staying
you didn’t fix me.
you didn’t need to.
you just held the shattered pieces
like they weren’t broken.
like they were art.
– Justin Hatchett
I’m reading on the couch
when she calls, asks for me by name.
I smile at her scripted intimacy,
imagine her cubicle with photos of pets,
the long bend of light
on her lacquered nails.
– Brett Garcia Myhren, Telemarketer
He who is persistent will realize God.
So try your best to make meditation
a regular experience in your life.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
The greatest minds are the most tormented because they cannot unsee what they have seen.
– Friedrich Nietzsche.
Islanders the world over are born for exile. Islands give you a privileged childhood and then, once they’ve made you what you are, leave you with no place to express it.
– Donald Macleod
Buddhists say that life is a river, and that we navigate it on a raft toward our final destination. The river has its current, speed, reefs, eddies, and other obstacles that we cannot control, but we have an oar to steer the vessel across the water. The quality of the journey depends on our skill.
– Isabel Allende
Surrender will always feel like dying, and yet it is the necessary path to liberation.
– Richard Rohr
Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.
– Marcus Aurelius
Intelligence alone is not nearly enough when it comes to acting wisely.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Elitism is an enemy of socialism and of the working class.
– Kwame Nkrumah
The sage is like the ocean; he is deep, calm, and full of treasures.
– Ashtavakra
The flower doesn’t dream of the bee. It blossoms, and the bee comes.
– Mark Nepo
Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.
– Orson Scott Card
For me fiction is a way of asking: what if things were other than they are? And a central component of that is to ask: what if I was different than I am? I have always found the practice of writing fiction far more an escape from self than an exploration of it.
– Zadie Smith, The I Who Is Not Me
In a philosophical dispute, he gains most who is defeated, since he learns most.
– Epicurus
All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.
– Baruch Spinoza
The pursuit of power is the denial of love and the source of all violence.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
And so there is no reason for you to think that any man has lived long because he has grey hairs or wrinkles; he has not lived long – he has existed long.
– The Stoics: The Philosophy of Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius
I wander alone, and ponder. I muse, I mope, I ruminate.
– John Adams
The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble… they can only be outgrown.
– Carl Jung
Your ancestors didn’t become powerful by escaping the body.
They learned to listen to it until it became an antenna.
– Nagomi
Poetry isn’t a place of answers and easy solutions. It’s a place where we can admit to an unknowing, own our private despair, and still, sometimes, practice beauty.
– Ada Limón
The world is a shadow that vanishes when the Sun of the Spirit rises in the heart.
– Rumi
Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.
– Paulo Coelho
[America is] lucky that what Black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.
– Kimberly Jones
You boldly settle all the important questions. But tell me, my dear boy, isn’t it because you are young and the questions of the world have not hurt you yet?
– Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
A person who is escaping from reality will always feel the terror of it.
– Alan Watts
Die to one pleasure, to one enchanting remembrance, without argument, without motive, just to drop it. Do it sometime and you will see what is involved in it, how frightened you are to have a mind that is constantly renewing itself.
– Krishnamurti
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?
– Henry James
The World is burning – data centers being built – so many people functioning at the lowest spectrum of frequency – not realizing that this is a War we have to personally win from within. We could overthrow the Deep state and dismantle the dark tech and weaponization of frequency, if we could raise our own and realize we are Elemental beings in a physical vessel with access to the Multi-dimensional, just like this Earth.
The Deep state wouldn’t bother with social engineering (mirroring geo-engineering), if all they needed to control humans was dark tech. They require our consent, our loosh, our panic, our dependency on the system. They want us to be in divide and conquer and love seeing us pit against each other and wasting our time posturing our egos cause we might get some things. I don’t see us truly coming together or doing what is necessary. I am so grateful for my close friends, animals and children and those who really get it.
There is a place in each and every one of us, that knows how to heal and what these times are demanding and who know the true power we hold. Ego needs to be humble enough to allow the true power to shine through. When ego thinks its the power, it actually blocks the solution, because it acts arrogant and believes its right and others are wrong ~ it falls into competition and a war like mentality. When ego becomes the vehicle for the Soul to express itself through, the control matrix crumbles.
The system wants you to either abuse power and seek to control or belittle others, or feel powerless and in total self doubt, looking for a savior, or having a false sense of security. Ego needs to allow something greater to shine through – like the virtues of what it means to be a Christed being. Being assimilated into AI is for those who literally abandon that calling ~ void of being truly Soul centered.
Our Soul knows the way home, humans must learn to listen. That is why Souless and evil go hand in hand. False light, negative ego, service to self is what any negative agenda is made of. ITs not that complicated.
– Laura Eisenhower
Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves “the good and the just,” do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had power.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
before sunrise
even the robins trust
what cannot be seen
– Aoki
Resting imperturbably like a mountain is the secret view itself.
There is no doubt, and mental stirring is automatically absent.
– Tantra Without Letters
Reality cannot be new. It must exist even now, and it does exist. There is in that state no present, no past, nor future. It is beyond time. It is ever there.
– Ramana Maharshi
I do not believe the Earth is divided into
East and West. I believe the Earth is
divided into those allowed to destroy and
those forced to bear the consequences.
– Karim Wafa-Al Hussaini
Everything is already perfect.
And if you can accept that everything is already perfect,
the imperfection is a part of the perfection.
What’s to worry about?
– Alice Walker
And so this brings us to the final formula of the Bodhisattava way, the way of the one who is grounded in eternity and moving in the field of time.
The field of time is the field of sorrow. “All life is sorrowful.” And it is.
If you try to correct the sorrows all you do its shift them somewhere else. Life is sorrowful. How do you live with that?
You realize the eternal within yourself. You disengage and yet, reengage. You—and here’s the beautiful formula—“participate with the joy in the sorrows of the world.” You play the game. It hurts, but you know that you have found the place that is transcendent of injury and fulfillments. You are there, and that’s it.
– Joseph Campbell
Do you think you can clear your mind by sitting constantly in silent meditation? This makes your mind narrow, not clear. Integral awareness is fluid and adaptable, present in all places and at all times. That is true meditation. Who can attain clarity and simplicity by avoiding the world?
– Lao Tzu
The single most liberating insight to come out of our collective work . . . [is that] the resisting or opposing force is never actually the problem to be overcome. Second force, or holy denying, is a legitimate and essential component in every new arising: no resistance, no new arising! That realization in and of itself radically rearranges the playing field, shifting the focus away from trying to eliminate the opposition and toward working collaboratively for a more spacious solution . . . The problem will never be solved through eliminating or silencing the opposition but only through creating a new field of possibility large enough to hold the tension of the opposites and launch them in a new direction.
– Cynthia Bourgeault
when the eye stops the heart
What then are we to do
with all those moments
when the eye stops
the heart
That gesture there, that glint
of beauty going by
And the thought, Who will remember
it if I don’t?
That daub of heaven
on a half-lowered eye-
lid
– Vasiliki Katsarou
INSOMNIA
All over the world people can’t sleep.
In different times zones they’re lying awake
Bodies still, minds trudging along like child laborers.
They worry about bills, they worry whether the shoes they just
bought are really too small.
One’s husband’s died, her son left for college
and she doesn’t know how to program the VCR.
Another was beaten by her husband
One is planning a getaway
One holding stolen goods.
One’s on the plaid couch in ICU.
His daughter, it turned out
Actually goes have a tumour
Even though the doctor said they’d do the MRI just to rule it out.
The woman on the other couch is snoring
which is strangely soothing
Evidence that people do sleep.
Some are lying on
Charisma sheets
Some in hammocks
Some in jail
Some under bridges
One is at the north pole studying the impact of pollution
A man in Massachusetts thinks about a lover he once had in Dar es
Salaam and the jasmine
blossoms she strung along the shaft of a silver pin fastened in her
hair at night.
Coincidentally, the lover, now in Rome, remembers looking out the
window over the sink
where she was washing dishes
And seeing him reading in the lawn chair
and she thought how perhaps for the first time she wasn’t lonely.
They’re all up.
some are too cold,
some too hot.
some hungry,
some in pain
Some are in hotels listening to people having sex in the next room
Some are crying
One the cat woke up and now she’s worried about the rash she
noticed in the evening and
wonders if her daughter who’s afraid to swim should be pushed
Some get up
Others stay in bed
They eat oreos, or drink wine
Or both
Many read
A few make Hallowe’en costumes
Some check their email
They try sleep tapes, hypnosis, drugs
They listen to their clocks tick
Smartly, as a woman in high heels
Those who can, cling to their mates
An ear pressed to those neighboring lungs
Like a stethoscope hoping to catch a ride on the steady sleep
breath of the other
to be carried like a seed on the body of one who is able.
Right now in Japan dawn is coming, and everyone who’s been up all
night is relieved;
they can stop trying
In Guatemala though the insomniacs are just getting started
and have the whole night ahead of them.
It’s like a wave at the baseball stadium,
hands around the world.
So here’s a prayer for the wakeful
The souls who can’t rest as you lie with your eyes open or closed
May something comfort you—a mockingbird, a breeze,
the smell of crushed mint rain on the roof,
Chopin’s Nocturnes your child’s birth a kiss, or even me—in my
chilly kitchen with my coat on—thinking of you
– Ellen Bass
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
I didn’t understand women at that period. I still don’t for that matter. Nor men either. Nor animals either. What I understand best, which is not saying much, are my pains. I think them through daily, it doesn’t take long, thought moves so fast, but they are not only in my thought, not all.
– Samuel Beckett
…I was my own
storm once, so young
and eager to raise the sail
of my wanting, and I just wanted
to tell you I love this old boat,
this settled-in thing.
– Keith Leonard
Ability is discounted without credentials, but the ability to purchase credentials rests, more often than not, on family wealth.
– Sarah Kendzior
If patriotism has to precipitate us into dishonor; if there is no precipice of inhumanity over which nations and men will not throw themselves; then why in fact do we go to so much trouble to become, or to remain, human?
– Jean-Paul Sartre
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.
– William Faulkner
If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
I had come to a small village on the edge of the desert to follow an unlikely clue. Years before, I had read an enigmatic mention of a ‘monastery in Persia’ where visitors were said to weep spontaneously on entering a particular room. I had often wondered whether such a place might really exist and was skeptical of the universality of the claim. There are no monasteries in Iran, but there are shrines raised to the saints of the Sufi tradition, whose followers dedicated themselves to the life of the spirit. In one such place, a kindly dervish showed me to the shrine-room of the saint. I could not have guessed that I had found the place until, sitting there alone, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably. Not with tears of either joy or pain, but of feeling in the grip of a presence, a force of unutterable goodness. Others have described a similar experience. Religious persuasion, or the lack of it, does not seem to be relevant. All testify to an encounter with an entity of overwhelming benevolence, and a feeling of having been overcome and reduced, momentarily, as if to dust.
– Jason Elliot, Mirrors of the Unseen
Teilhard believed that each person is a universe wherein the dust of experience is gathered into a unity.
– Ilia Delio
I spent much of the last year unable to write. When I tried to Listen to my interior, what I heard was a cacophony of accumulated voices telling me what a poem should be… should do — and, more disturbingly, what it shouldn’t.
– Leila Chatti
The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good.
– William Faulkner
Your memory
once vibrant
tenderly disappearing
– Rachel Newcombe
Experience life in all possible ways-good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light, summer-winter. Experience all dualities. Don’t be afraid of experience, because the more experience you have, the more mature you become.
– Osho
One must always be prepared to learn something totally new.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
What is normal is to digest with all the means that man has to digest.
– Gurdjieff
Fire
has no future. What a relief
for the fire.
– Selma Asotic
I’m so tired of wanting more.
– Tiana Clark
If you’re willing to recognize your mistakes, you massively tilt the odds in your favor.
– Shane Parrish
Memory blurs, that’s the point. If memory didn’t blur you wouldn’t have the fool’s courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
– Joyce Carol Oates
In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as “dazzling obscurity”, “whispering silence”, “teeming desert” are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth.
Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions… Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them.
There is a verge of the mind which those things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.
– William James
It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
– Anne Carson
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
Sometimes the people around you won’t understand your journey. They don’t need to. It’s not for them.
– Joubert Botha
In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him.
– John Stuart Mill
Buddhist ritual’s are for overcoming pride and egotism. But clinging to ritual is a hindrance to awakening.
– @Buddhism_Now
all of us who are alive
have one life that is lived
and another life that is imagined,
and the only life we have
is this one that’s divided
between truth and error.
that said, nobody knows
how to explain which is truth
and which is error
– fernando pessoa
I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasure of my mind.
– Flann O’Brien
We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if ever we wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it’s time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it’s time to break our necks for home.
– Annie Dillard
In the land of elves…
“You are the many-petalled
melting point of repeating decimals …”
– Andrew Joron
Tolkien believed that the building of imaginary worlds is one of our highest callings as image-bearing children of God, and he bore that image well.
– Andrew Peterson
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
– David Foster Wallace
If you meditate for a few minutes every day and live in harmony, you will always live in heaven, and will carry your own portable paradise within you wherever you go.
– Paramhansa Yogananda
Some texts explain that emptiness is the ‘great seal’ or ‘Mahamudra’, but ‘Mahamudra’ is simply a name given to emptiness. The real Mahamudra is the union of great bliss and emptiness.
– Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
All energy is vibration. Every cell in your body, every thought in your mind. Every feeling you have, every action you choose to take, is vibrating at a certain frequency and you can change the vibration.
– Chunyi Lin
Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market.
He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his “personality package” with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange.
Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.
– Erich Fromm
Grace is within you; if it were external it would be useless. Grace is the Self; you are never out of its reach. Is there a moment when Grace is not operating in you?
– Ramana Maharshi
It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.
– Søren Kierkegaard
This is the message of your life and my life – it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children – nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is.
– Terence McKenna
When you only value what’s beyond your reach, all your friends are worthy of contempt.
– Kenneth Folk
Today on the Fourth, I am not waving the flag like a clean thing.
I am holding it like a shirt pulled from the river,
wrung out by mothers outside the Whipple building in January,
by aunties with thermoses,
by my boys who had to learn the vocabulary of riot gear
before they learned anything about girls.
I am celebrating the America that Minneapolis wore this winter.
You can keep the America that combs its hair for the cameras.
The brass-band America whose anthem just got botox.
You can cheer for the textbook eagle
that poses over a field of erased bones.
But as for me and my house, we are celebrating the America
that stood in the cold and would not stop saying “human.”
The America with Lake Street salt
crusted on the hem of its jeans.
The America with chapped hands
passing out cold coffee in paper cups.
The America with a Haitian grandma holding her blanket closed
like she was protecting the last ember
from the first fire God ever made.
I am celebrating the neighbors who became doors.
The bodies who became bridges.
The people who stared at the empire with its paperwork face
and said No.
Not here. Not this mother. Not this child.
Not while there is soup in the church basement.
Not while Minneapolis still has enough breath
to fog up the glass between cruelty and the beloved.
I am honoring the America
that gets kept from the postage stamps:
Somali mothers wearing winter like a second migration.
Mexican fathers holding their babies names
in their mouths like candles.
Black elders who hear the old machine revving up
before it even starts.
White neighbors learning that
solidarity left to a sign is not solidarity at all.
That’s why I bought fireworks and will get wild
and light up the sky in colors tonight.
Not for the empire that asks for papers.
But for the love that asks if the kids have eaten.
– Matt Moberg
The natural state of the relaxed brain is multidimensional attention. It does not need viewpoints, data, opinions, memory to be alert. When all the directions cease, an organic, non-directed watchfulness remains. This is the threshold of ‘I am.’
– Jean Klein
This is how I live: on a small street high up a hill. To the left of my house is a glacial erratic, to the right an empty house. In short: stone, me, emptiness.
– Gunnhild Øyehaug, (tr. Kari Dickson)
There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.
– Richard Powers
half moon
not everything unfinished
is incomplete
– Akari
Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If our civilization goes on like this, only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.
– G.K. Chesterton
I walked into the ocean. Not to
drown but to be held by something reluctant
to let go.
– Leila Chatti
There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform.
– Thomas Merton
Not knowing a precondition for being able to imagine. To imagine is not to figure out a solution to an emotional problem; it is to change the very terms of the dilemma.
– Thomas Ogden
bright stars
the smallest wish
feels seen
– Akari
‘Ambulator nascitur, non fit.’ [A walker is born, not made.]
– Henry David Thoreau
Quiet people always know more than they seem. Although very normal, their inner world is by default fronted mysterious and therefore assumed weird. Never underestimate the social awareness and sense of reality in a quiet person; they are some of the most observant, absorbent persons of all.
– Criss Jami
There’s no governmental system that can correct evil as long as people remain as they are now.
– Leo Tolstoy
The next frontier for intelligent machines is to say, “I don’t know.”
And to stand there silent in that sacred humility.
– Kenneth Folk
Growing up, we say, as though we were trees, as though altitude was all that there was to be gained, but so much of the process is growing whole as the fragments are gathered, the patterns found.
– Rebecca Solnit
What silence around a god! Wow do you hear within it
every change in the upwelling of the fountain’s jet
on the lingering water of the marble basin.
– Rilke
Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one’s self from enslavement by the earth.
– Anais Nin
”I have no desire to walk on water,” said Siddhartha. “Let the old Samanas satisfy themselves with such arts.”
– Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
All paranoids and fundamentalists lack a sense of humor, for humor is a chaos flux and flexibility, of ambiguity and multi-dimensionality, and that kind of erotic liveliness is precisely what the fundamentalist is trying to eliminate in holding rigidly to doctrine.
– William Irwin Thompson
Your greatest hallucination wasn’t on mushrooms. It was believing forty years at a desk was normal.
– Sileo Cael
I’ve experienced so much good and bad in my life that I can write forever.
– Bert McCracken
I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.
– Zora Neale Hurston
Capitalism isn’t in the constitution.
But “promote the general welfare” is.
– Jay Perry
Worldly affairs are all deceptive;
So I seek the Truth Divine.
Excitements and distractions are illusions;
So I meditate on the Non-dual Truth.
– Jetsun Milarepa
The Mosquito Knows
by D. H. Lawrence
The mosquito knows full well,
small as he is he’s a beast of prey.
But after all
he only takes his bellyful,
he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.
… I feel that anyone who has encountered the dharma is the most privileged person in the world, and that’s more true as the world looks bleaker and bleaker. I think we’re living through pretty bleak times, and I don’t think they’re going to get better in the immediate future.
But to have the dharma just strikes me as being so extraordinary. I mean, what an extraordinary privilege to know that you have within you a refuge that nobody can ever touch. Nobody can take it away from you. It doesn’t matter how bad things get. That we have something inside that is really true refuge – to have that in my life makes my life extraordinary.
– Helen Tworkov
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you think. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, difficult as it is…
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
– Henry David Thoreau
Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.
– Francis Bacon
We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow,’ his name is today.
– Gabriela Mistral
Unexpressed creativity…is poison to the human psyche. The malady that our species is collectively suffering from is, in essence, the fact that we are not connecting with, mobilizing and expressing our creative nature, which turns against us in self-and-other-destruction.
– Paul Levy
Sometimes an idea needs
10 years to figure itself out.
– Courtney Barnett
There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.
– Howard Thurman
The idea that we do not have to do anything on our own is extremely wishful thinking.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The most divinely feminine thing a woman can do is destroy the patriarchy,
dismantle capitalism and eviscerate fascism.
– Nikita Gill
The interdependence of word and idea shows clearly that languages are not actually means of representing a truth already known, but rather of discovering the previously unknown. Their diversity is not one of sounds and signs, but a diversity of world perspectives… The sum of the knowable, as the field to be tilled by the human mind, lies among all languages, independent of them, in the middle. Man cannot approach this purely objective realm other than through his cognitive and sensory powers, that is, in a subjective manner.
– Wilhelm Von Humboldt
I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
– Hilary Mantel
I’ve noticed something about people who make a difference in the world: They hold the unshakable conviction that individuals are extremely important, that every life matters. They get excited over one smile. They are willing to feed one stomach, educate one mind, and treat one wound. They aren’t determined to revolutionize the world all at once; they’re satisfied with small changes. Over time, though, the small changes add up. Sometimes they even transform cities and nations, and yes, the world.
– Beth Clark
Causes & Conditions
We’ll never know why, or how, the aspen tree
near the retreat center grew horizontally across
the creek, dug itself into the other side of the bank.
Or how the hostile man with the ink of enmity in
his heart became just that, and of who did or did
not love him. What happened so that some people
grew stone cold, so that they woke into their bodies
with a malicious discontent. So many things happen
in a life, so many ways a seed can grow, or not grow.
I have lived enough to know as much— each is a
world, a universe, a constellation of pains and joys.
Each is a suffering being worthy of our compassion,
regardless. So, what is left to do but forgive everybody,
and I mean everybody, by which I mean everybody.
Do not stoop to hateful accusations, no matter the
circumstance. Don’t become a victim of ugly language.
Do not let the causes of ignorance create conditions
that corrode your loveliness. Instead, say beautiful
things, say true things, speak wisely. Love everyone,
remembering; no such thing as other. There is only
the part of you that can react or respond. There are
the causes of ignorance or the conditions of awareness.
It doesn’t matter just how you arrive at this insight;
a poem, a prayer, some difficult loss. All that matters
is that you awaken, that you become someone who
speaks the language of wholeness.
– Moudi Sbeity
True education doesn’t bend children to our mold; it nurtures their wildness and lets them bloom.
– Sofo Archon
With its cliques and caucuses
The world grew
Stunned and stupid.
Don’t belong to any side,
Adore the One,
Joining the family
Of the kind and wise.
– Andrew Harvey, Engoldenment: A Year with Kabir
The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It’s followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.
– Nora Ephron
The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Maybe I write because it is a way of thinking that has no possible match. It is a very active way of thinking. You think more clearly when you have to put something down in words.
– Javier Marías
Rivers don’t drink their own water;
Trees don’t eat their own fruit.
The Sun doesn’t shine for itself,
and Flowers don’t spread their
fragrance for themselves.
Living for others is a law of
nature.
Life is good when you are happy,
but life is even better when
others are happy because of you.
– Dalai Lama
He who has freed him-
self of the disease of
“tomorrow” has a
chance to attain what
he came here for.
– George Gurdjieff
Belonging is our intrinsic state when we are woven together as a village of differences in harmony. We can take the village as a metaphor for the internal life, with its wild cast of characters, as well as literally referring to the community of living things on earth. A sickness felt by even one organism in the ecosystem is felt, at some level, by all. The well-being of all, even those who aren’t immediately visible to us, is necessary to our collective prosperity.
– Toko-pa Turner
At times, we are asked to bear witness to a shattering. To the death of an old dream – me and my life and the way it was all supposed to turn out.
In mourning what has fallen away, a previously hidden threshold begins to appear.
Grief is not something we “make it through” and emerge from unchanged. We don’t finish it, but stand in awe as it takes us apart and pieces us back together.
It is a faithful companion of the unknown, moving not by way of the straight line, but by circle and spiral.
It holds us through the darkness as well as the light, until another life begins to gather itself.
– Matt Licata
Grief is
the midwife
of new life.
– Matt Licata
One of the First Psychedelic Rock Songs Ever Recorded Was Actually a Romantic Transcontinental Message to an Old Flame
There are many ways to get the attention of an old flame in the hopes of rekindling a spark, but Donovan might’ve taken the cake for most creative and culturally significant in the summer of 1966. On July 1, the Scottish singer-songwriter released what would become one of the first notable psychedelic rock records, “Sunshine Superman”.
But Donovan didn’t have genre pioneering on the brain when he wrote it. He had someone on his mind.
In the mid-1960s, Donovan met a woman named Linda Lawrence while on the set of Ready Set Go! The pair struck up a relationship, but it was short-lived. Lawrence had recently gotten out of a relationship with The Rolling Stones’ multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones. She had a baby to look after. The two parted ways. Donovan never stopped thinking about her.
“I wrote ‘Sunshine Superman’ knowing she’d hear the lyrics and realize I still loved her,” Donovan explained in a 2016 interview with The Guardian. “I sang, ‘It’ll take time, I know it / but in a while / You’re gonna be mine, I know it / We’ll do it in style.'” Donovan sent out his musical message in a bottle, so to speak. But this was the 1960s, and Lawrence had moved from the United Kingdom to the United States. The musician would have to wait quite a while before knowing if she heard the song and realized he was singing about her.
It took four years in total. In the late 1960s, Donovan bumped into Lawrence again after she returned to the U.K. with her American friend, Lorey. Somehow, Lorey put two and two together and realized that Donovan, the musician from whom she was renting a cottage during her visit, was Lawrence’s old flame.
“To this day, I don’t know if Lorey was setting us up,” Donovan said. “But she told Linda, ‘I’m renting a cottage. Want to see it?’ I met them when they came round, and Lorey said, ‘Oh, do you two know each other?’ We were married a few weeks later and have been together ever since.”
Speaking to Jeff Tamarkin in 2016, Donovan recalled a full-circle moment with Linda Lawrence, his “Sunshine Supergirl.” The married couple was riding in the car together when Donovan noticed a song on the radio that sounded a lot like “Sunshine Superman”. “I said, ‘Hey, listen to that. It’s another band that was influenced by what we did,'” he said. “And she said, ‘Don’t be stupid, Don. That is you!’ It was ‘Sunshine Superman’. I was listening to it at such a low level that all I could hear was the essence of the track.”
From hoping Lawrence would notice his song on the radio from across the pond to her being the one to remind Donovan that it was, in fact, him singing on the radio, this psychedelic love story is certainly among the sweetest in 1960s rock ‘n’ roll lore.
– American Songwriter News
People are not
beautiful for how
they look or speak.
They’re beautiful for
how they love,
care, and treat
others.
– Dalai Lama
You can’t measure the mutual affection of two human
beings by the number of words they exchange.
– Milan Kundera
The Soul should always stand ajar
That if the Heaven inquire
He will not be obliged to wait
Or shy of troubling Her
Depart, before the Host have slid
The Bolt unto the Door
To search for the accomplished Guest,
Her Visitor, no more
– Emily Dickinson
We are moving from unconscious evolution through natural selection to conscious evolution by choice.
– Barbara Max Hubbard
Strength of mind rests in sobriety; for this keeps your reason unclouded by passion.
– Pythagoras
If God should have no more mercy on us than we have charity to one another, what would become of us?
– Thomas Fuller
Psychologically you develop in a spiral, you always come over the same point where you have been before, but it is never exactly the same, it is either above or below.
– CG Jung
You say ‘amateur’ as if it was a dirty word. ‘Amateur’ comes from the Latin word ‘amare’ which means to love. To do things for the love of it.
– Mozart in the Jungle
For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.
– Immanuel Kant
In America, calling someone a “communist” is the political equivalent of shouting “witch!” in the 1600s. Different century, same panic button.
– James Richie
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?
– Søren Kierkegaard
Anyone who looks at something special, in a very original way, makes you see it that way forever.
– George Cukor
What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours—that is what you must be able to attain.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.
– Oscar Wilde
Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The truth is so simple that it is regarded as a pretentious banality.
– Dag Hammarskjold
To an under-appreciated extent, many of the pioneers of psychedelic therapy in the 1950s were women …. Female scientists like Luisa de Toledo in Argentina and Betty Eisner in California, working behind the scenes as they struggled against ever-present misogyny, have not made their way into the mainstream history of psychedelics.
– Benjamin Breen
In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech… Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of everyman….
– Benjamin Franklin
The Matrix is not eternal. It was never meant to be permanent. It is a temporary construct, a highly advanced soul-training system created by higher intelligences to accelerate evolution through the most extreme form of forgetting and separation possible. From the higher perspective, this realm is a cosmic university for advanced souls who volunteered to experience the deepest contrast so they could emerge with unparalleled wisdom and creative power.
– @homi3kh
Walk gently, love fiercely, and find your abundance in the stillness.
– James Phillips
Any understanding of the world or even of Buddhist practice is a construct of the mind. Paradoxically, for practitioners, Buddhist teachings are constructs of mind that point beyond themselves.
– Gil Fronsdal
People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
– George Santayana
I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.
– Rosalía de Castro
Anger is most useful as a diagnostic tool. When anger erupts, it is a signal that something is wrong. Something isn’t working right….What anger fails to do, though, is tell us whether the wrong is outside or inside us. We usually begin by assuming that the wrong is outside.
– Eugene Peterson
Only two levers move people: fear and personal interest.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. So breathe in and be aware of your body. Look deeply into it and realise you are the Earth and your consciousness is also the consciousness of the earth.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
The older I get, the more I believe happiness lives in the ordinary. Pets. Plants. A quiet morning coffee. Blue sky. Cotton clouds. Birds singing. The gentle breeze through the trees. A clean, cozy house. Good food. Good hearted simple people. So much of life’s beauty is quiet, gentle, and already here. And somehow, one of the sweetest feelings is knowing I get to wake up and meet it all again tomorrow.
– Karun Pal
What is going on in the lower reaches of society is probably very much more potent and effective than what happens in intellectual circles.
– Ekkehard Hieronimus
The sage is like the space; he is untouched by everything.
– Ashtavakra
At last we create some Space between this and that, which liberates us tremendously.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The thing to do is to concentrate on the seer and not on the seen, not on the objects, but on the Light which reveals them.
– Ramana Maharshi
Stop searching for phrases and chasing after words.
Take the backward step and turn the light inward.
Your body-mind of itself will drop
off and your original face will appear.
If you want to attain just this,
immediately practice just this.
– Eihei Dogen
In many so-called primitive cultures it is a requirement of tribal initiation to spend a lengthy period alone in the forests or mountains, a period of coming to terms with the solitude and non-humanity of nature so as to discover who, or what, one really is—a discovery hardly possible while the community is telling you what you are, or ought to be. He may discover, for instance, that loneliness is the masked fear of an unknown which is himself, and that the alien-looking aspect of nature is a projection upon the forests of his fear of stepping outside habitual and conditioned patterns of feeling. There is much evidence to show that for anyone who passes through the barrier of loneliness, the sense of individual isolation bursts, almost by dint of its own intensity, into the “all-feeling” of identity with the universe. One may pooh-pooh this as “nature mysticism” or “pantheism,” but it should be obvious that a feeling of this kind corresponds better with a universe of mutually independent processes and relations than with a universe of distinct, block-like entities.
– Alan Watts
Christianity never succeeded in America. Most Americans think of themselves as Christians. But the only religion in America that ever flourished was America… Our religion is a kind of Orphic post-Christian mystery religion based on wealth, power and one’s personal relationship with a kind of gnostic Jesus.
– David Bentley Hart
Almost all our so-called ‘modern’ is not yet new. It is merely novel by imitation or indirection; or pretense by imported picture.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.
– Clay Shirky
Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it.
– Meister Eckhart
Your consciousness is actually experiencing your mental model of reality, not reality itself.
– Michael A. Singer
Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.
– Jonathan Swift
No poem is just its autobiographical content. No poem is just its embroidery of language. As a reader, I favor poems that have multiple textures, moving freely from plain-speech, to silken […] But all poetic language must be soaked in the oil of human feeling.
– Henri Cole
Your inner growth is completely dependent upon the realization that the only way to find peace and contentment is to stop thinking about yourself.
– Michael A. Singer
Writing and reading are gentle actions, that create subtle tides of gentleness in an ungentle world.
– George Saunders
The purpose of spiritual practice is to become free, not to forge golden chains of limitation.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Usually the poetry of the memory is destroyed by confrontation with its origin.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Invisible Fish
by Joy Harjo
Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock. Soon the fish will learn to walk. Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the dying stone. Then later, much later, the ocean floor will be punctuated by Chevy trucks, carrying the dreamers’ descendants, who are going to the store.
It’s almost as if poets
are offering a religion
of noticing things.
– Ada Limón
It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of paradox; apparently the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox.
T. S. Eliot said that in poetry there is ‘a perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations.’ It is perpetual; it cannot be kept out of the poem; it can only be directed and controlled.
The tendency of science is necessarily to stabilize terms, to freeze them into strict denotations; the poet’s tendency is by contrast disruptive. The terms are continually modifying each other, and thus violating their dictionary meanings.
– Cleanth Brooks
Your insecurity has something joyful, carefree and confident about it. One worries about you, but wouldn’t want you any other way.
– Franz Kafka, 1920.
Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
– William Shakespeare
I have been singularly fortunate in having such generous and perceptive friends to buck and bolster me up!
– J.R.R. Tolkien
There is the subtler music, the clear light
Where time burns back about th’ eternal embers.
We are not shut from all the thousand heavens:
Lo, there are many gods whom we have seen,
Folk of unearthly fashion, places splendid,
Bulwarks of beryl and of chrysoprase.
– Ezra Pound
That is one of the problems with reading great writing: you can lose sight of the fact that you really don’t like it.
– Kay Ryan
Once more, once more
I am
Your star.
Woe to the sailor with level
And compass
Whose angle is false.
He will wreck on rocks
And hidden shoals.
Woe to you without love
Or compassion
Who angled me false.
You will wreck on rocks
And the rocks will laugh
at you the way you did
at me.
– Paul Schmidt
I stand in the presence
of the destroyed god:
a rubble of tendons,
knuckles and raw sinews.
Knowing that the work is mine
how can I love you?
– Margaret Atwood
Humility leads to compassion. Compassion for the mineral kingdom, for the animal kingdom, for the vegetable kingdom, for the human kingdom and for everything else. Everything is sacred. Have reverence for all of life.
– Robert Adams
A human being is a creative force thirsting for conscious realization. Our creativity isn’t as a mere hobby, a sideline, something that we should just indulge in on our days off. The creative spirit is an essential part of our being, the life-giving oxygen for our soul.
– Paul Levy
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
– John Lubbock
She who did not want—To renounce her peace; the happiness of finally having become the desert, the contentment of a dune in the sun; the triumph of renunciation; did not want to renounce renouncing; at the moment in which she had just made solitude her fiancée; to renounce the endless, barely rippled, bright, dry happiness of not being unhappy. All she did not want to do, with good reason, with every reason and no madness at all, everything she had learned from having soared and having crashed, from being broken and getting back up and soaring
again.
– The Book of Promethea, Hélène Cixous, (tr. Betsy Wing)
By themselves neither pleasure nor pain enlighten, only understanding does. Once you have grasped the truth that the world is full of suffering, that to be born is a calamity, you will find the urge and the energy to go beyond it.
– Nisargadatta
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
– Bertolt Brecht
…and make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed.
– Hebrews 12:13
O deodar tree
I haven’t learned how to live
Both of us far from the mountains
I have not adjusted, not adapted
No one must blame you
– Philip Whalen
Exaggerate the green blood in grass;
the music of leaves scraping space;
Multiply the stillness by one sound;
by one syllable of your name…
And all that is little is soon giant,
all that is rare grows in common beauty
– Kenneth Patchen
A useful basket definition of the shadow is: that which I do not wish to be, that within myself with which I least desire to associate, that which I find frightening, anarchic and threatening to my self-image.
– James Hollis
There is no hope of joy except in human relations. If I summon up those memories that have left with me an enduring savor, if I draw up the balance sheet of the hours in my life that have truly counted, surely I find only those that no wealth could have procured me.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.
– Ray Bradbury
Don’t tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.
– Antonin Artaud, (tr. Eshleman & Bador)
The world will not be saved by more thinking. It will be saved by a shift in consciousness.
– Eckhart Tolle
Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.
– Bernard DeVoto
a dragonfly
crosses the creek
without a sound
– Ogawa
Food was never intended to be used as fun. Food was intended to be used as nourishment. When you use food as fun, your body has no fun at all. It works harder, and it ultimately can’t fight off the effects of mistreatment.
– Neale Donald Walsch
I love the men that never ventured
to love me the most. I love the men who
saw me as myself before I did.
– Kaylen Rae Candrilli
Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August.
– Jenny Han
Social life is based on consciousness, not science. If there’s no honesty, no respect for truth, no respect for responsibilities, no love of one’s neighbor—in a word, if there’s no virtue—everything is in danger, everything crumbles.
– Leo Tolstoy
Nature knows more than a hundred doctors.
– Gurdjieff
To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
The soul doesn’t live at home in the body but like a wanderer on a journey to a distant refuge.
– Leo Tolstoy
July is hot afternoons and sultry nights and mornings when its joy just to be alive. July is a picnic and a red canoe and a sunburned neck and a softball game and ice tinkling in a tall glass. July is a blind date with summer.
– Hal Borland
one candle
outlasting
a conversation
– Ogawa
I must change my life so
that I can live it,
not wait for it.
– Susan Sontag
Solitude is the therapy others often mistake for loneliness.
– Noor Shirazie
As long as we delude ourselves by what we imagine ourselves to be, to know, to have, to do, we are in a sad plight indeed. Only in complete self-negation is there a chance to discover our real being.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
To be right is the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in.
– Frank O’Hara
Spirituality is not religion. It is a path for us to generate happiness, understanding, and love, so we can live deeply each moment of our life.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Having a spiritual dimension in our lives does not mean escaping life or dwelling in a place of bliss outside this world but discovering ways to handle life’s difficulties and generate peace, joy, and happiness right where we are, on this beautiful planet.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Defiance
There needs some rushing force
for any defiant push-back;
like the way a planted flag
can only properly live
and breath
if aroused by a challenging wind.
– Julian Cason
They’re sending you all that negative energy. Not realizing that all they can do to an alchemist like you is fire you up.
– Nika Solé
BAD ASS
A novel can’t be as strong,
a play as obscene,
sculpture as dangerous
as me.
– Joseph Ceravolo
We spend so much time trying to look beautiful on the outside, yet the people who leave the deepest impact on us are often the ones with kind hearts, pure intentions, and a peaceful presence.
– Brahma Kumaris
I paused instead of searching for the way.
I found nothing and nothing
never felt so good.
I return sometimes. Sometimes I like it.
I like the smells, the psalms, the bells for prayer
at midday and at six,
the feeling of the beads between my fingers,
the touch of skin to lips when someone
puts a story in my mouth.
– Pádraig Ó Tuama
cool breeze
a pine shadow
crosses the sand
– Basho
But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple-or a green field-a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing-an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness-wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak-to be company.
– Mary Oliver
Literature enlarges the mind and opens the heart, and is a precious gift of culture, both a doorway to understanding and the occasion of instructive aesthetic pleasure. In the present critical climate, I believe that we need to be reminded of that.
– James W. Tuttleton
tree hollow
the ins and outs
of another world
– Simon Hanson
I believe that sometimes
you have to look reality
in the eye and deny it
– Garrison Keillor
Let your teacher be Love Itself.
– Rumi
We wished to extinct our grief, but grief was the one thing in endless supply.
– Elizabeth Robinson
Our inner lives are every bit as astonishing, baffling, and mysterious as the infinite vastness of the cosmos. For we are each individual expressions of conscious being, and we contain the vastness of the cosmos within us, as much as we are contained within it.
– Adyashanti
summer evening
your favorite song
finds you first
– Aoki
People, people, people —
an ocean of people, but I
can’t find even a drop of
humanity.
– Sadia Hakim
Education is paradoxical in that it is largely composed of things that cannot be learned.
– Roberto Calasso
summer rain
the street forgets
its hardness
– Akari
“O Conversation, the staff of life, shall I get any at Oxford?” wrote the always wise and prescient T.S. Eliot to his old pal Conrad Aiken.
– Pico Iyer
I’ve been able to work for so long because I think: next time, I’ll make something good.
– Akira Kurosawa
NIGHT DAMPNESS
I am sick and tired of the river, the stars
that strew the sky, this heavy funereal silence.
To while away the time, I talk to my coachman, who
looks like an old man…. He tells me that this dark, forbidding river
abounds in sterlet, white salmon, eel-pout, pike, but there is no one
to catch the fish and no tackle to catch it with.
– Anton Chekhov, Across Siberia
before dawn
the stars grow
generous
– Aoi
You cannot know yourself through bliss alone, for bliss is your very nature. You must face the opposite, what you are not, to find enlightenment.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.
– Novalis
Life and death are in the power of the tongue, as is success or failure and lack or abundance, for words and thoughts are a form of radioactivity.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
You’ll often find that the most spiritually grounded people have a wonderful sense of humor. They don’t just reflect deeply. They laugh deeply too and are often seen as jokers. They embody the playfulness and lightness that are just as much a part of reality as its depth.
– @VexKing
sunset picnic
the strawberries
steal the conversation
– Akari
When there are thoughts, watch the awareness, not thoughts. When there are no thoughts, watch the awareness. Thoughts or no thoughts, continue to observe awareness itself, not thoughts. Continue to relax in and be aware of your awareness. Remain there. Be there.
– Michael Langford
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
– Henry Wadsworth
To see the poor as ourselves we must want for the poor what we want for ourselves.
– bell hooks
We are very, very small, but we are profoundly capable of very, very big things.
– Stephen Hawking
The universe does not behave according to our preconceived ideas. It continues to surprise us.
– Stephen Hawking
There are some sprouts that fail to flower, just as surely as there are some flowers that fail to bear fruit!
– Confucius
Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.
– Malcolm Muggeridge
Life gets harder simply because there’s some higher force that sees what you’re capable of and what you’ve achieved. And then, it sends you a harder challenge.
– Bill Murray
We take delight in reading Nabokov and Shakespeare using a primate brain originally designed for life in the African Savannah.
– Stanislas Dehaene
Sins are not all committed at once, nor all discovered at once; they grow by degrees and are discovered by degrees… but God has his times to discover and make them known to the sons of men.
– William Greenhill
For fantasy to have depth, it must have detail.
– Susan Sontag
The truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end.
– Harriet Beecher Stowe
The prophetic task is to grieve what the empire tells you to celebrate.
– Walter Brueggemann
To be truly remarkable, a man must possess a “something” that is entirely his own and not borrowed from others.
– Lahiri Mahasaya
Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
Writing is like a sport, it’s like athletics. If you don’t practice, you don’t get any better.
– Rick Riordan
When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom.
– Arthur C. Brooks
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
– Eric Hoffer
But today, of all days it is brought home to me: it is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.
– Bilbo Baggins
To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.
– Marilyn vos Savant
Here is a suggestion for all of us who may feel lonely: Maybe we should seek a medicine for our loneliness not only among people, but in nature and amid things that also can have a personality.
– Thomas Moore
The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.
– James Baldwin
When I talk about solitude I am really talking also about making space for that intense, hungry face at the window, starved cat, starved person. It is making space to be there.
– May Sarton
I learned long ago that you do not tell creative people how to solve the problem, but you share the desired outcome.
– Gene Columbus
Then there is the listening at the gates of the heart which has been closed for so long, and waiting for that mysterious inner voice to speak. When we hear it, we know it is the truth to which we must now surrender our lives.
– Beth Ferris in Finding What You Didn’t Lose by John Fox
I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy.
– William Blake
A translated document hidden in an archive is not dissemination. It is a museum object. An idea becomes alive only when people can hear it, share it, teach it, question it, and use it.
– Daniel Che
And I thought of how my mother and brother and friends
would visit me, day after day, hoping I would be better. Then
their visits would slacken off, and they would give up hope.
They would grow old. They would forget me.
– Sylvia Plath
Cry about the simple hell people give other people—without even thinking.
– Harper Lee
By not contemplating external pleasures, by keeping them outside, by fixing the gaze between the eyebrows, and by equalizing the breath and the breath flowing through the nose, such a sage, who has conquered the senses, mind, and intellect, becomes free from desire, fear, and anger, and is eternally free.
– Bhagavad Gita
Our movement does not give blind people beauty and power. We come to the movement with those qualities.
– Mark Riccobono
‘She wants to be everything.’ I wanted to be a poet.
– Sylvia Plath
We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
– Paul Valéry
That might be the most important thing to understand about humans. It’s the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly searching, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions.
– Benjamin Sisko
Future generations deserve bees.
Future generations deserve butterflies.
Future generations deserve wolves.
Future generations deserve whales.
Future generations deserve biodiversity.
– @pejtjer
Every species that goes extinct is a page quietly torn from the greatest Biology textbook ever written.
– Scholastica Muogbo
Enjoyment comes from the non-discrimination of the soul.
– Swami Vivekananda
Leaders think and talk about the solutions. Followers think and talk about the problems.
– Brian Tracy
Like people are always ready with arms and weapons before war , an individual should always be ready with their philosophy in the war of life.
– Marcus Aurelius
The real threat to America today, Trump’s hysteria notwithstanding, isn’t communism: it’s the new American form of fascism that’s centered in the Trump regime, the Republicans on the Supreme Court, ICE, and is pushed heavily across the rightwing media empires that neofascist billionaires have set up over the past 40 years.
– Thom Hartman
GUIDED MEDITATION
Sit in a way that allows you to be comfortable
and relaxed. Do not let this hot and humid morning
enter your mind. Empty your mind, even if you
were up until 3am trying to forget what
your doctor told you yesterday afternoon. Now
take three deep breaths allowing yourself
to savor the mysterious gift that you
are breathing. You are breathing here
during this one moment, the only moment
that the benevolence of the earth gives
during this moment. This is your moment
even though we do not yet know
what a moment is. I often wonder what
the moment is just prior to the moment.
But that is a thought. And this is a yoga
meditation, and we are to accept each thought
as simply something that passes through us
and goes on its merry, or often un-merry, way.
Take another breath counting to four on the inhale
while picturing a gnome strolling up your nostrils
lugging a bag of gentle breezes, then count to six
on the exhale as the gnome cascades ass over
essential oils on an avalanche of air. Feel
your whole body fully relaxed. Continue breathing.
Picture a candle in a cave. Do not ask why in the
whole wide world there is a candle in a cave. If
you do, see in the question a yogi smiling as he
searches for the matches. Continue breathing.
And now imagine a field of lotus flowers. Or
if you are from the midwest and unfamiliar
with lotus flowers you can always substitute corn.
Now picture rain on a roof. Listen to it. Listen
to the distant cough of thunder. Just listen. Don’t
think about what you left out to ruin the last time
it rained. Continue breathing, and as you do, allow
any image to appear on the multiplex of your mind.
Be sure not to fixate on any one image. If a lover
old or new comes at you with a flame thrower, just
sit, watch, let it all pass, be glad your ego’s been emulsified.
Stay relaxed. Continue breathing. Feel the comfort
of your whole body as you repeat the mantra, “I am
at peace. I am totally at peace. I am really, totally at peace.”
Now that you are at peace, feel your feet, palms, pelvic floor
fully at rest in the room. Come to Sukhasana. Bring your hands
to your heart, and join me for one long peaceful Om.
– Jack Ridl
Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?
– Roland Barthes
“As I stood in contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space,” Milosz writes, “I had the feeling that I was looking into the ultimate depths, the most secret regions of my own being; and I smiled, because it had never occurred to me that I could be so pure, so great, so fair! My heart burst into singing with the song of grace of the universe. All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outside your love they have no reality! How terrible the world seems to those who do not know themselves! When you felt so alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or the night’s own solitude in a universe without end!” And the poet continues this love duet between dreamer and world, making man and the world into two wedded creatures that are paradoxically united in the dialogue of their solitude.”
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as “dazzling obscurity”, “whispering silence”, “teeming desert” are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth.
Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions… Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them.
There is a verge of the mind which those things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.
– William James
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 pre-established 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
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
Trauma
was not being
able to get
the hands
of the clock
off of me.
Healing
was learning
no one has ever
laid a fingerprint
on the part of me
that’s infinite.
– Andrea Gibson
In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets. One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one’s foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness.
– Jean Cocteau
To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.
– Martha Nussbaum
This is the school, isn’t it? The magic place? The world. Here. And you don’t realize it until you look.
– Terry Pratchett
He could understand that the creatures, the fish and the owls, should feed and frolic at moon-rise, at moon-down and at south-moon-over, for these were all plain marks to go by, direct and visible. He marveled, padding on bare feet past the slat-fence of the clearing, that the moon was so strong that when it lay the other side of the earth, the creatures felt it and stirred by the hour it struck. The moon was far away, unseen, and it had power to move them.
– Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
One’s real life is often the life that one does not lead.
– Oscar Wilde
I know I look bizarre, totally artificial, but inside, I’m very real.
– Dolly Parton
There is no person without a world.
– Anne Carson
The Way Things Have Been Going Lately
I’ve been thinking of moving someplace
warm, buying a pick-up and keeping the radio
turned to the highest level. Everyone thinks that
now and again, right? I hope they do it. My friend,
Ms. Red did it. (She lives in New Orleans now
with two turtles and some boy I’ve never met.
She signs every letter on the outside with the date
and the temperature. The letter I got today
said, May 11th, 88 degrees in the shade.)
There’s a restaurant in my hometown called,
The Ranch House, serves Mexican food.
It’s right off the highway and if you sit in
the window you can read all the large billboards
welcoming people into town. The food’s
pretty awful and it’s dirty, but for some reason
I want to go there right now. I want to be welcomed.
Sometimes I think I am angrier than
most people, but when I think of this river
up in the Northwest that I once walked
and swam in for miles, I think I could be
so full of light that it would be hard
to hold me back from missing even where
I am right now, but how do you hold
a river in your head before it turns
straighter and black, unfolds into asphalt,
into some mean road rolled out before you.
– Ada Limón
Always breathing-in this pre-life, exhaling this post. Something goes away, something comes back. But through you. Leaving no trail but self. As trails go not much of one. But patiently you travel it. Your self.
– Jorie Graham
People think intimacy is sex. But intimacy is about Truth. When you realize that you can tell someone your Truth, when you can show yourself to him/her who you really are, and their response is, “You are safe with me”, that is intimacy.
– Christiane Singer
The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose at everybody else’s business.
– Marshall McLuhan
The little things that you saw with a child’s eye and that will never go away. That’s what consciousness is all about.
– Derek Mahon
Instructions to an Actor
Now, boy, remember this is the great scene.
You’ll stand on a pedestal behind a curtain,
the curtain will be drawn, and then you don’t move
for eighty lines; don’t move, don’t speak, don’t breathe.
I’ll stun them all out there, I’ll scare them,
make them weep, but it depends on you.
I warn you eighty lines is a long time,
but you don’t breathe, you’re dead,
you’re a dead queen, a statue,
you’re dead as stone, new-carved,
new-painted and the paint not dry
– we’ll get some red to keep your lip shining –
and you’re a mature woman, you’ve got dignity,
some beauty still in middle age, and
you’re kind and true, but you’re dead,
your husband thinks you’re dead,
the audience thinks you’re dead,
and you don’t breathe, boy, I say you
don’t even blink for eighty lines,
if you blink you’re out!
Fix your eye on something and keep watching it.
Practice when you get home. It can be done.
And you move at last – music’s the cue.
When you hear a mysterious solemn jangle
of instruments, make yourself ready.
Five lines more, you can lift a hand.
It may tingle a bit, but lift it-
slow, slow –
O this is where I hit them
right between the eyes, I’ve got them now –
I’m making the dead walk –
you move a foot, slow, steady, down,
you guard your balance in case you’re stiff,
you move, you step down, down from the pedestal,
control your skirt with one hand, the other hand
you now hold out –
O this will melt their hearts if nothing does –
to your husband who wronged you long ago
and hesitates in amazement
to believe you are alive.
Finally he embraces you, and there’s nothing
I can give you to say, boy,
but you must show that you have forgiven him.
Forgiveness, that’s the thing. It’s like a second life.
I know you can do it. – Right then, shall we try?
– Edwin Morgan
The states of mind or feelings that art can excite have been helpfully distinguished in Sanskrit aesthetics, where they are called rasas, from a word meaning ‘juice’ or ‘essence’. A fully achieved work of art should flow with all nine of them: their names might be transposed into English as wonder, joy, sexual pleasure, pity, anguish, anger, terror, disgust and laughter.
– Marina Warner
When we lose a loved one, we need to grieve that loss and yet consciously value what we have internalized from that person. The parent who suffers the empty nest syndrome, for example, suffers less the loss of the child than the implicit identity which went with being that child’s parent. The energy invested in that role is now available for a different direction. So, we honor best those we have lost by making their contribution to our lives conscious, living with that value deliberately, and incorporating that value in the on-going life enterprise. This is the proper conversion of inescapable loss into this evanescent life. Such conversion is not denial but transformation. Nothing which is internalized is ever lost. Even in loss, then, something soulful remains.
– James Hollis
Interaction with an egoist leads to our own corruption, because in defending ourselves, we risk falling into his errors.
– Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
However apparently insignificant the event, whether it be the ring of tobacco ash surrounding the table, the direction from which the wild geese first appeared, or a series of seemingly meaningless human movements, he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off it and must note it all down, since only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day and fall a silent captive to the infernal arrangement whereby the world decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of self-construction.
– László Krasznahorkai
i’m reliving it, neutralizing it, and transforming it into an inoffensive past that i can keep in my heart without either disowning it or suffering from it. that’s not easy. it’s at once painful and poetic.
– simone de beauvoir
At present the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid-of-the Year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests.
– William Arrowsmith
We are the bees of the invisible.
Nature, the things of our intercourse and use, are provisional and perishable; but they are, as long as we are here, our property and our friendship, co-knowers of our distress and gladness, as they have already been the familiars of our forbears. So it is important not only not to run down and degrade all that is here, but just because of its provisionalness, which it shares with us, these phenomena and things should be understood and transformed by us in a most fervent sense. Transformed? Yes, for it is our task to imprint this provisional, perishable earth so deeply, so patiently and passionately in ourselves that its reality shall arise in us again “invisibly”.
We are the bees of the invisible. We collect the honey of the visible and store it up in the golden hive of the invisible. The Elegies show us at this work, at the work of these continual conversions of the beloved visible and tangible into the invisible vibrations and excitation of our own nature, which introduces new vibration-frequencies into the vibration-spheres of the universe. (Since different elements in the cosmos are only different vibration-exponents, we prepare for ourselves in this way not only intensities of a spiritual nature but also, who knows, new bodies, metals, nebulae and constellations.)
– Rilke
Sensations, from the beginning, involve a sort of doing. This means that, in an important sense, it is your doing self that brings your core self into being. You are responsible at the very deepest level for what it feels like to be you. But then, for your next trick, well, how about spreading some of that soul dust onto the things around you? Remember, too, that it is your mind that projects phenomenal qualities onto external objects. If you only knew it, you yourself are responsible for the feel of the world.
– Nicholas Humphrey
The most important thing in all human relationships is conversation, but people don’t talk anymore, they don’t sit down to talk and listen. They go to the theater, the cinema, watch television, listen to the radio, read books, but they almost never talk. If we want to change the world, we have to go back to a time when warriors would gather around a fire and tell stories.
– Paulo Coelho
A focus on linear, abstract, declarative knowledge alone not only fails to create complex connectivity but damages the mind. We are biologically punished for this destructive behavior with a neurochemical rush of lethargy and discomfort that most people call boredom. Extended periods of this affect a person’s mental health, resulting in bouts of rage, depression, and worse. In centralized knowledge institutions today, this illness is called misbehavior or misconduct. Without the spark of creation in your neural system, the mind-body system stagnates and falls apart, affecting not only your ability to learn but your health and relationships as well, leading to increasingly destructive behaviors.
If you are an Aboriginal person living in Australia, this will almost certainly lead to incarceration and/or a decreased life span. The creative spark is a process that allows us to solve seemingly impossible problems. It involves representing real-life elements with metaphors, which transform tangible things into spirit, images in an abstract space. That is the action of the line at the top of the symbol. In that Dreaming space, the abstract entities can be manipulated and reorganized to find solutions to real-life problems. This is how the thought experiments in this book have been conducted. For a simple example of this Turnaround process, consider the way four apples and two hungry people can be translated into the abstract symbols of 4/2. The solution (=2) may then be found in the abstract space, transferred back to reality and applied to share the apples equally. If one person has more nutritional requirements than the other, then the abstract of 3:1 might be applied.
– Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
AI artwork looks the way Christian rock sounds.
– @emilypopcast
The world, I’ve come to think is like the surface of a frozen lake. We walk along, we slip, we try to keep our balance and not to fall. One day there is a crack, and so we learn that underneath us is an unimaginable depth.
– James Joyce
The pain of being a working person in an America — where Republicans have all but destroyed the union movement and bipartisan neoliberalism has moved millions of jobs overseas — is genuine: but the villain is manufactured. And it’s manufactured by the same people quietly emptying working people’s wallets.
– Thom Hartmann
I do not study to know more, but to be less ignorant.
– Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
You can’t go against the grain of the universe and not expect to get splinters.
– C. S. Lewis
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
– Ray Bradbury
Impossible to imagine dying anywhere else than in the silence of the desert. Of all things, not to pass away amid sound and fury. To recover the only freedom, which is that of space and emptiness.
– Jean Baudrillard
I’ve always been happiest when I can sit in the dark, when I can turn off my own life and watch a story unfold.
– Rebecca Makkai
The hermit said:
Because the world is mad,
The only way through the world is to learn
The arts and double the madness. Are you listening?
– Robert Bly
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
– Leo Tolstoy
To be a published author is not to be given a key to the ivory tower, though many people will have you believe that it is. You don’t have to choose the isolated writing life; you can choose togetherness. You can choose to share and participate and join.
– Brooke Warner
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a warm, tender heart is not at the core of our compassion, then our sense of responsibility can feel more like obligation. Our concern for others can turn into an unpleasant burden that weighs us down without benefiting anyone else. When our compassion doesn’t come from its most natural and effective source – tsewa – it becomes artificial and overly conceptual. Even though we are thinking about the well-being of others, there is a strong sense of self: this is what I want, what I think is good and right for the situation. So much attachment to our own view leaves us little room to see things as they really are and to act in ways that are truly beneficial. Instead, we can become pessimistic, heavy-handed, and dreary.
Among the greatest examples of compassion in my life are His Holiness the Dalai Lama and my principal teachers: His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, Trulshik Rinpoche, and Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. When I look at any of these people, I don’t see any dreariness. The Dalai Lama has lost his country and spent most of his life in exile. He has witnessed tremendous suffering and feels personally responsible for the welfare of many beings – not just Tibetans, but even those who might be considered his enemies. Yet he continually exudes cheer and warmth, which is felt palpably by all who come in contact with him. This is because his heart is always open, day and night, expressing and receiving tsewa.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Training in Tenderness
in a world
of only thistles
no flower could be
more beautiful
– Alec Finlay
WORDS
What is one to make of a life given
to putting things into words,
saying them, writing them down?
Is there a world beyond words?
There is. But don’t start, don’t
go on about the tree unqualified,
standing in light that shines
to time’s end beyond its summoning
name. Don’t praise the speechless
starlight, the unspeakable dawn.
Just stop.
Well, we can stop
for a while, if we try hard enough,
if we are lucky. We can sit still,
keep silent, let the phoebe, the sycamore,
the river, the stone call themselves
by whatever they call themselves, their own
sounds, their own silence, and thus
may know for a moment the nearness
of the world, its vastness,
its vast variousness, far and near,
which only silence knows. And then
we must call all things by name
out of the silence again to be with us,
or die of namelessness.
– Wendell Berry
Any Common Desolation
by Ellen Bass
can be enough to make you look up
at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few
that survived the rains and frost, shot
with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep
orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird
would rip it like silk. You may have to break
your heart, but it isn’t nothing
to know even one moment alive. The sound
of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant
animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.
The ruby neon of the liquor store sign.
Warm socks. You remember your mother,
her precision a ceremony, as she gathered
the white cotton, slipped it over your toes,
drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath
can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,
the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything
you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves
and, like a needle slipped into your vein—
that sudden rush of the world.
Time’s Thought
by Fanny Howe
The ordeal of dying must be memory, so much seeing and losing forms.
Friends whacking at invisible ankles and you.
The action is done in a dream. Who did what?
The closed book, the feet
asleep.
Proof that you lived is that you kept notebooks.
Are you collecting material for dreams, she asked the audience.
None of them remembered collecting or dreaming.
Nothing specific, that is.
For a book, no.
They lay down that night not looking for a real thing but for a way back.
A dream broke time apart.
You’re allowed to fear the coming hallucinations, she added.
You met me at the subway
where tracks led east to
North Station and on
up to Cape Ann.
We were almost romantic
Not knotted but erect
side by side passively waiting
for an apocalyptic collision to rupture
the grave tension between wholly conscious
ontological thinking
and the steel pebbling motion of tracks
sparked into action by a fiery touch.
We smiled our way forward perfectly even.
To be described as a note that separates from a song and blows away.
When you are down to nothing more to call onOR you can say I
walked Manhattan from sundown to dawn.
So I have traveled the world.
I walked by foot all over dungeons to see a film starring friends—Americans.
The ceiling collapsed from heavy rain and artificial colors condensed
along the sidewalk.
One puddle looked just like the world-marble.
Time had thinned for gravity and a speeding apple
Since time was lightweight and invisible.
Manifest, unbelievable.
A faraway land
And a hotel I never visited
In a ghost-book half-erased
You could tell I was in love with a non-entity.
This was the hardest part assigned to me.
During my brief tenure I loved loving best
One who didn’t exist.
In the early days, it was the opposite.
Nature (all of it)
Did exist and loved itself.
Clouds doted on the sea, amorousness
Was in the air returning every wave and sigh.
The squirrels told the oak
To shake its acorns down
For the poor dirt to eat.
A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.
– Robert A. Heinlein
Men rarely (if ever) managed to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
– Robert A. Heinlein
I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy … censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything – you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
– Robert A. Heinlein
Gratitude rewires your brain. Laughter is anti inflammatory. Crying helps regulate your nervous system. Releasing anger can free the body from tension it was never meant to carry.
Feeling isn’t weakness. It’s how you heal.
– Anthony Goldsmith
I’m afraid to write. It’s so dangerous. Anyone who’s tried, knows. The danger of stirring up hidden things-and the world is not on the surface, it’s hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it’s a terribly dangerous void: it’s where I wring out blood. I’m a writer who fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others- Which? maybe I’ll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well.
– Clarice Lispector
There’s a huge amount of suffering that is generated not by the actual challenges of life but by the fictitious problems that the mind creates.
– Eckhart Tolle
Psychotherapists and psychoanalysts have to be “silence experts.” Through their training and with their third ear, they try to listen to the symphony of what is not being said.
– Henry Abramovitch
There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces.
– May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
It’s harder than it used to be to talk to people.
– Ralph Adamo
I’ve been trying to go home
my whole life.
– Chelsea Dingman
summer heat–
today, all day
playful clouds
– Kobayashi Issa
dragonflies writing
quick blue letters
to the pond
– Ogawa
Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second.
– William James
There’s a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in doing something, you do it only when it’s convenient. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses – only results.
– Ken Blanchard
What I’m going through
at this very moment
can never be changed.
It cannot be arrested.
It feels like the sun in your chest.
– Franz Wright
The most beautiful things cannot be written, unfortunately. Fortunately. We would have to be able to write with our eyes, with wild eyes, with the tears of our eyes, with the frenzy of our eyes, with the skin of our hands.
– Hélène Cixous
The love that you search for everywhere is already present within you. It may be evoked by any number of people or events. But finally, you must realize you are this Love. The source of all Love is within you.
– Gangaji
morning fog
confidence arrives
one step at a time
– Akari
It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. There’s almost no such thing as ready. There’s only now.
– Hugh Laurie
I deserted the world and sought solitude because I became tired of rendering courtesy to those multitudes who believe that humility is a sort of weakness, and mercy a kind of cowardice, and snobbery a form of strength.
– Khalil Gibran
Come out into the broad light of day, come out from the little narrow prisons, for you are the whole world.
– Osho
He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
– Cormac McCarthy
Between the great things we cannot do and the small things we will not do, the danger is that we shall do nothing.
– Adolph Monod
Good must triumph over evil. It usually does in life and in any case it’s bad for young people to believe it doesn’t.
– Barbara Cartland
Contentment is the greatest wealth; without it, one remains a beggar.
– Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji
Pride is spiritual cancer; it eats up the very possibility of love or contentment or even common sense.
– C. S. Lewis
No change, however, can take your neighbor from you, for it is not your neighbor who holds you fast – it is your love which holds your neighbor fast.
– Kierkegaard
The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.
– Lee Iacocca
In any kind of normally functioning political system, in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are themselves crazy, to say okay this guy is non compos mentis.
– Paul Krugman
That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions.
– Virginia Woolf
If we do not understand the paradoxes of our age, we will continue to be confused by the outcomes.
– Victor David Hanson
In each of us there is a spark that can reverse the trends of violence and depression spiraling within us and in the world around us. By setting in motion the spiral of gratefulness we begin the journey toward peace and joy.
– Br. David Steindl-Rast
Remember: if you have an irrational fear, every time you avoid it, you are reinforcing the fear. So… make a plan to face it! Fears are conquerable!
– Dr. Henry Cloud
I came to be a man of letters in a world that prefers numbers.
– Vladimir Nabokov
The Omnipresent God of the universe cannot be seen until He is reflected by these giant lamps of the earth, the prophets, the man-gods, the incarnations, the embodiments of God.
– Vivekananda
You can see only a little way ahead, but that is enough to carry you all the way.
– C.S. Lewis
Having a soft heart in a cruel world is courage, not weakness.
– Katherine Henson
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
– Oscar Wilde
A friend may be waiting behind a stranger’s face.
– Maya Angelou
The world sometimes want to shake us with its urgency but I want you to know that you can be steady, wise, sober, and sure-footed because you are better prepared when you can see the truth and importance of that situation.
– Minjin Lee
I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…
– Albert Einstein
There’s a little immaturity stuck away in the crannies of even the most judicious of us, and we should treasure it.
– Roger Ebert
Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can.
– William Feather
Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you’ve even survived,
But what torments of grief you’ve endured,
From evils which never arrived?
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war.
– Walter Mosley
That behavior went all the way…all the way back to the prototype.
– Avalokiteśvara
It is not Communism. It’s accountability. Politicians should be accountable to their voters. Billionaires should be accountable to the workers they exploit. A world without accountability is nothing more than chaos and violence.
– Ehren Fournier
Every choice you make today is either building your future or stealing from it.
– Naresh Choudhary
Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the ‘new, wonderful good society’ which shall now be Rome, interpreted to mean ‘more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.’
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
Everyone’s wisdom path is different. You’ve got to find your own.
– Sundee T. Frazier
And while the ache and tragedy of the world persists, there are still the daffodils, and the cherry blossoms, and the plums that will open soon.
– Emory Hall
Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame… at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me.
– Goethe
He had read and thought a good deal, and, owing to a somewhat unhappy marriage, had evolved a complete philosophy of life.
– E.M. Forster
The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.
– Marcel Proust
Envisioning the end is enough to put the means in motion.
– Dorothea Brande
To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.
– Clifton Fadiman
Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone-but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
– Bette Davis
The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ‘what is already known’. Those great books don’t need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.
– Susan Sontag
The entire teaching of Buddhism can be summed up in this way: Nothing is worth holding on to.
– Jack Kornfield
If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
The friendship institution is as old as the marriage institution. In an age of singlehood, however, the friendship institution will come to the fore to fill the void that marriage can no longer fill. For many, meaningful friendships will become a life goal just as important, if not more so, than getting married.
– Elyakim Kislev
If you want to know your purpose, pay attention to what stays with you – the ideas you can’t forget, the things you return to even when they’re difficult, the work that refuses to let you go. That’s your soul speaking.
– Joseph Campbell
Our own country is more provincial with every passing day—more provincial and more self-important, as though it had shut its eyes.
– Borges
Self condemnation is not humility.
It’s another form of deception.
– Bill Johnson
No Society that forgets the art of questioning can expect to find answers to the problems that afflict it.
– Zygmunt Bauman
Authenticity is not about saying whatever pops into your head. It’s about sharing what reflects who you want to be.
Healthy self-expression doesn’t mean no filter. It involves weighing whether your current thoughts and emotions are aligned with your lasting values.
– Adam Grant
Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
– William of Bakersfield, Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
There is no new dawn without a dark night beforehand.
– Clarice Lispector
So you know that when you look at something and you applaud it or say ‘Yes!’ to it, that you included in your vibration?
But in the same way when you look at something that you would vote vehemently against, you shout ‘NO!’ at it, you’re still are including it in your vibration?
There’s no such thing as ‘No’ in a vibrational universe because attention to anything is an activation of it within you, which is an invitation of it.
– Abraham-Hicks
I do not believe in, never have believed in, any “transcendental” spirit above Nature; but there is a spirit in Nature, a cosmogenic spirit, which commands my respect and love; and it is this, perhaps most deeply, which serves to “explain” life, give it “meaning.”
– Oliver Sacks
I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.
– Sherwood Anderson
The devotion to personal contentment is the depression machine, it generates the depression. It makes the depression inevitable which of course obliges you to work harder to be happy and there we are. But how does it do that? Because it whispers to you that happiness should be the discernible consequence of you winning, of you trying hard, of your best intent being in the forefront of all your design. And a lot of people in the world, ancestrally, knew long ago that being content or that sense of well-being, that’s a consequence of your willingness to help the world live. That your happiness is actually a corollary—let me change happiness—that your health is a corollary of the health of everything around you.
– Stephen Jenkinson
As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination.
– Thomas Merton
Awareness is all about restoring your freedom to choose what you want instead of what your past imposes on you.
– Deepak Chopra
Metaphor catalyzes movement by overriding old and familiar patterns of thought with fresh ways of seeing. This is why art and poetry are so important to culture.
It is the job of the artist to catalyze consciousness on behalf of the collective. They must be courageous enough to enter the imaginal in order to find living metaphors to bring back to this world and in doing so, redeem culture. It is an act of overcoming.
As the poet Louise Glück says, art removes “the misery of inertia.”
A metaphor unrecognized will do nothing to shape us, and so in turn we can do nothing differently to shape our world. What’s needed is a true encounter in the imagination to shift one’s gestalt.
– Toko-pa Turner
The mouth opens and fills the air with its vibrant shape
Until the air and the mouth become one shape
And the first word
your own word
Spoken from that fire
Surprises burns
Grieves you now because you made that pact
With the dark presence in your life
He said, “If you only stop singing
I’ll make you safe”
And he repeated the line,
“I’ll make you safe”.
Knowing you would hear it as the comforting sound
Of a door closed on the fear at last
But his darkness slipped under your tongue and became the dim cave
Where you sheltered and grew in that small place
Too frightened to remember the songs of the world
Its impossible notes
And the sweet joy that flew out the door
Of your wild mouth as you spoke
– David Whyte
Wisdom, like compassion, often seems to require of us that we hold multiple realities in our consciousness at once.
– Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche
MIND
How many of you believe you can
quiet the mind through effort?
You can’t do that.
It’s not the effort that makes you quiet your mind.
It’s the intelligent understanding
that you have no mind to begin with.
Then you just keep still and
everything takes care of itself.
– Robert Adams
Love causes magic.
It is the final purpose
Of the world story,
The Amen of the universe.
– Novalis
If you feel you ought to go, if I came to you at a moment when nothing could make you happy, if it’s necessary for you to leave me now so that you may some day come back to me at peace, then it is I who ask you to go…
– Alain-Fournier
Think what it would mean if you could love everybody — not because all persons in the world are so attractive and lovable that they awaken your love, but because an ever-present consciousness of Love exists within yourself and, like the sun, rays out in all directions on the “just and the unjust” alike… Those who have attained Love-Consciousness carry Love and Joy around with them wherever they go, for it is withIN themselves instead of withOUT. Enter where they may, they find an atmosphere of Love, because it is they who bring that atmosphere… Love beautified everything.
– Cyril Scott, The Initiate In The New World
During the Age of Glass, everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile. For some it was a hand, for others a femur, yet others believed it was their noses that were made of glass. The Age of Glass followed the Stone Age as an evolutionary corrective, introducing into human relations a new sense of fragility that fostered compassion. This period lasted a relatively short time in the history of love-about a century-until a doctor named Ignacio da Silva hit on the treatment of inviting people to recline on a couch and giving them a bracing smack on the body part in question, proving to them the truth. The anatomical illusion that had seemed so real slowly disappeared and-like so much we no longer need but can’t give up-became vestigial. But from time to time, for reasons that can’t always be understood, it surfaces again, suggesting that the Age of Glass, like the Age of Silence, never entirely ended.
– Nicole Krauss
I’m coming back to you, the real world, crowded, dark, and full of fate—
– Wisława Szymborska
All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. My problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
– Ralph Ellison
The election of the first anti-American president was caused neither by electoral whim nor by the good fortune of a charismatic madman. His rise was made possible by a coterie of criminals who do not want to be punished but delight in being caught. Flaunting their criminal impunity is part of the thrill. Their belief that they would never be held accountable is logical since they had never faced serious consequences despite spending decades committing illegal acts. In fact, they had reaped ample rewards. Now, finally, they had the greatest reward of all: the power to rewrite law itself.
– Sarah Kendzior
You begin to have nostalgia for disappointment, because at least that means you had expectations.
– Sarah Kendzior
But there is a difference between expecting an American autocracy and accepting it, and I refuse to accept it. Every loss we endure is a reminder of the gifts we still hold, and of our obligation to fight for a better future for the next generation.
– Sarah Kendzior
I don’t want my children to chase American illusions marketed as American dreams, but I want them to understand why things went wrong, to appreciate everyday miracles and not think them small, to have reverence for the good that endures and work to protect it, a republic if you can keep it, a family that would remain American whether or not America remains. We would love America out of defiance, and defy America out of love.
– Sarah Kendzior
The Great Work
There is no absolute distinction between the alchemist and nature, between the inner and outer worlds. All are part of one creative, evolutionary process. Because of this alchemy has always possessed a spiritual dimension, since it is not possible to participate in the Great Work of Nature without experiencing a self-transformation. In order for the work to be successful, total participation is required. Alchemy is a comprehensive science of the cosmos in which both humanity and the larger universe are implicated.
– David Fideler
People with a wealth of authenticity and talents don’t usually feel comfortable with curating & manipulating images for public consumption. In fact, it makes them feel uncomfortable because they live inside of a real offering, one that speaks for itself. But those who have risen to public notoriety on the wings of transactionality and artifice (fake names, staged rhetoric, nepotism) live and die by the sword of presentation. This makes the show they put on difficult to interpret. It appears to be one thing, when it could have a very different intention. Those who speak from their souls never have to worry about this, but those who don’t, do. Because all they have is theatrics and a bottomless quest for validation. When left alone, away from the public eye, they live tormented lives. The best thing we could do for all of them is to ignore them. A little time alone with their unhealed longing is their only hope.
– Jeff Brown
WONDER WOMAN
Standing at the swell of the muddy Mississippi
after the urgent care doctor had just said, Well,
sometimes shit happens, I fell fast and hard
for New Orleans all over again. Pain pills swirled
in the purse along with a spell for later. It’s taken
a while for me to admit, I am in a raging battle
with my body, a spinal column thirty-five degrees
bent, vertigo that comes and goes like a DC Comics
villain nobody can kill. Invisible pain is both
a blessing and a curse. You always look so happy,
said a stranger once as I shifted to my good side
grinning. But that day, alone on the riverbank,
brass blaring from the Steamboat Natchez,
out of the corner of my eye, I saw a girl, maybe half my age,
dressed, for no apparent reason, as Wonder Woman.
She strutted by in all her strength and glory, invincible,
eternal, and when I stood to clap (because who wouldn’t have),
she bowed and posed like she knew I needed a myth—
a woman, by a river, indestructible.
– Ada Limón
What the book does as a technology is shield us from distraction.
– Nicholas Carr
Some Advice
Travel light, always leaving room
in your suitcase for a few surprises.
Learn the names of things, and feel
more at home wherever you are.
Say: ground squirrel, goldenrod,
anemone. A field, a forest, or body
of water: these are all communities
of which you too are an integral part.
Don’t trust anyone who’d ruin a meadow
of bluebells just to add a few more
coins to their coffers, and don’t ever
become one of those people.
– James Crews
All Your Apple Seeds
Bright red apple in your hand
Looks like you’re holding my heart
You take one bite and throw it in the bin
Before picking another from the cart
You say one’s too sweet and one’s too soft
Too crisp too dry too tart
Next you’re rejecting apples with caramel coating
I remember the time you said I was too doting
Soon I’ll be tossed out
Like all your apple seeds
Love trees cut down before growth could start
– Kaylee Baucom
It never stops being INSANE to me that people who buy in to the idea that immigrants are taking their jobs also worship the billionaires like Elon developing AI that is literally and measurably in real time taking their jobs. Some people have been so easy to con. And most of them are men, embarrassingly
– Matt Haig
Canada Lily
A hidden gate swings open
in the humid air when I see
a rare Canada lily blooming
in the understory of our woods—
because we protected it,
wrapped a wall of wire mesh
around the thick-stemmed plant
to keep the deer from feasting on it.
Four orange blossoms still stippled
with dew now hang like bells
peeled back from their clappers,
announcing the joy of their own
slow unfolding. And isn’t this
the reward for any form of love?
You make a safe place for someone
or something to flower,
and in that quiet keeping,
in that selfless tending,
some part of you ripens, too.
– James Crews
There are forms of awakening
that bring extraordinary clarity.
But clarity is not always
intimacy.
Sometimes consciousness
becomes bright
before it has become warm.
The soul is still waiting for us
in the moonlight.
– Matt Licata
Writing is medicine. It is an appropriate antidote to injury.
It is an appropriate companion for any difficult change.
– Julia Cameron
I liked the idea that
a poem was small enough
that it could get inside of
you and stay.
– Tracy K. Smith
distant galaxy
all wound up over nothing
the same everywhere
– clark strand
The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving nothing in the way of trails, they are blown over, grasses shoot up, life disturbing life…
– Jorie Graham
I’m coming back to you, the real world, crowded, dark, and full of fate—
– Wisława Szymborska
It is not the body that is important but the atmosphere around it. The atmosphere becomes permeated with this finer vibration, in the stillness. And another quality is there.
An axis begins to appear, of pure attention. There is a sensitivity.
This atmosphere, filled with energy. The body, like an envelope.
Respect this atmosphere, this energy contained in the body. And then, even subtler energies can come into you—the Light can come into you.
All my thoughts, feelings, ideas are nothing compared to this precious treasure, this quality of energy that is not mine but what I am.
More and more, with attending to presence, allowing higher forces to enter, staying collected, returning, we can live in a new way.
You can serve this energy. And the energy can heal. From it can come my best action in the world, my best action for others. Help each other through living in this pure Attention.
– Michel de Salzmann
A day will come in which zealous research over long periods of time will bring to light things that still now lie hidden. The life of a single man , even if he devotes it entirely to the heavens, is insufficient to fathom so broad a field. Knowledge will thus unfold only over the course of generations .But there will come a time when our descendants will marvel that we did not know the things that seem so simple to them. Many discoveries are reserved for future centuries, however, when we are long forgotten. Our universe would be deplorably insignificant had it not offered every generation new problems. Nature does not surrender her secrets once and for all.
– Seneca
Let’s drop the notion that we can manage our planet for our own comfort and profit — or even that we can now be its ultimate redeemers. It is a delusion. Let’s accept, in its place, the radical uncertainty of our time, even the uncertainty of survival.
In primal societies, adolescents go through rites of passage, in which confronting their own mortality is a gateway to maturity. In analogous ways, climate change calls us to recognize our own mortality as a species. With the gift of uncertainty, we can grow up and accept the rights and responsibility of planetary adulthood. Then we know fully that we belong, inextricably, to the web of life. Then we can serve it and let its strength flow through us.
Uncertainty, when accepted, sheds a bright light on the power of intention. That is what you can count on: not the outcome, but the motivation you bring, the vision you hold, the compass setting you choose to follow.
– Joanna Macy
Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn’t matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one.
– Henry Miller
God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are black, creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being transparent.
– Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history is in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.
– Chuck Palahniuk
Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
– Kurt Vonnegut
This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions.
– Ai Weiwei
…all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past un-recallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth not out of it, and that, since once could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable, there was nothing anyone could do except to get a tenacious grip on anything that was still tangible…
– László Krasznahorkai
What is required to come to an inner sensation, an inner feeling of reality? We need to know the way, the process, accepting that as we are today we have no means to open to reality amid the activity of life. I must know the road I am traveling—the way up and the way down. I learn first to withdraw from activity in order to find this Presence, something real in me. Afterward, I will again go toward manifestation.
– Jeanne de Salzmann
I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
– Louise Erdrich
Carl Jung once wrote: “Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as before. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”
You have arrived at the afternoon.
Don’t set sail!
Tomorrow the wind will have dropped;
And then you can go,
And I won’t trouble about you.
– Nicole Krauss
Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.
– Ray Bradbury
Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?
– Ray Bradbury
What’s it like to wear an eternal Olympian overall
held up by the burning straps of
mortal shortfall?
– Anne Carson
A translator is someone trying to get in between a body and its shadow.
– Anne Carson
…the world will open the arms of God to us. It is for us to throw ourselves into these arms so that the divine milieu should close around our lives like a circle.
– Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu
What does it mean to be “spiritual?” It means putting your feet on the ground. It means finding stillness, not only when you sit, but when you stand, and walk, and whirl. It means finding silence, not only between your thoughts, but in your words, in your laughter, in your tears. It means that you do not call yourself a “teacher.” Yet you teach with your Being.
– John Butler
Perhaps God made me a painter for people who are not yet born.
– Vincent van Gogh
No escape from paradox: Wisdom manifests itself, and is yet hidden. The more it hides, the more it is manifest; and the more it is manifest, the more it is hidden. For God is known when apprehended as unknown, and is heard when we realize that we do not know the sounds of God’s voice. The words uttered are words of full silence, and they are bait to draw us into silence. The truths manifested are full of hiddenness, and their function is to hide us, with themselves, in God from whom they proceed. If we hide the precepts of wisdom in our heart – precepts of humility, meekness, charity, renunciation, faith, prayer – they themselves will hide us in God. For the values which they give to us, are completely hidden from our eyes. They bring us to the source of a life that is unknown to the natural wisdom of the world, and yet from this source of nature itself proceeds, is nourished, and is sustained.
– Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration
Lord, give me victory,
help me defeat my enemies,
the skin on my body, the verge,
the hours, the years.
– Nichita Stanescu
It is the opening of eyes long closed. It is the vision of far off things seen for the silence they hold. It is the heart after years of secret conversing speaking out loud in the clear air. It is Moses in the desert fallen to his knees before the lit bush. It is the man throwing away his shoes as if to enter heaven and finding himself astonished, opened at last, fallen in love with solid ground.
– David Whyte
They Speak
by Dorothy Walters
They speak of enlightenment.
Can darkness
dispel Darkness?
light illumine Light?
O, My Invisible,
you and I know the secret way
If you’ll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn’t experience ‘the sixties’ until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties–or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.
– Julian Barnes
“First, my child,” said Old Turtle, “remember that there are truths all around us, and within us. They twinkle in the night sky and bloom upon the earth. They fall upon us every day, silent as the snow and gentle as the rain. The people, clutching their one truth, forget that it is a part of all the small and lovely truths of life.”
– Douglas Wood
Zen Master Dogen has pointed out that anxiety, when accepted, is the driving force to enlightenment in that it lays bare the human dilemma at the same time that it ignites our desire to break out of it.
– Roshi Philip Kapleau
Your brain is not designed to make you happy. That’s your job.
– Anthony Robbins
We have drunk wine and discussed literature.
Our hearts have beat together
With the same emotions.
– Ch’iu Chin
Many people are seeking deeper meaning in their life and looking for what they value most. By relying on body awareness, an avenue to inner knowledge of the emotions and the spirit is created. This helps people find their true direction and purpose in life.
– Marion Rosen
A city built on the most correct architectural plan may be shaken suddenly by the uncontrollable force of nature. Humanity is living in such a spiritual city, subject to these sudden disturbances for which neither architects nor mathematicians have made allowance. In one place lies a great wall crumbled to pieces like a card house, in another are the ruins of a huge tower which once stretched to heaven, built on many presumably immortal spiritual pillars. The abandoned churchyard quakes and forgotten graves open and from them rise forgotten ghosts. Spots appear on the sun and the sun grows dark, and what theory can fight with darkness?
– Wassily Kandinsky
I thought my dance alone through worlds of odd and eccentric planets that no one else knew would sustain me.
– Jo Harjo
Give me illusion, hope, desire and don’t forget me.
– Frida Kahlo
By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.
– George Saunders
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid—
Weak masters though ye be—I have bedimm’d
The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,
And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck’d up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure; and, when I have required
Some heavenly music,—which even now I do,—
To work mine end upon their senses, that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
– Shakespeare
All I have is the nostalgia that comes from a mistaken life.
– Clarice Lispector
I ONCE DID A BAMBOO PAINTING FOR SOMEBODY –
NOW HE WANTS ME TO DO ANOTHER. I HAVE WRITTEN
THIS TO ANSWER HIM.
This bamboo I painted a long time ago.
Now you want me to do another?—Impossible!
When the sparrow grows old
it becomes a clam in the sea.
You ask it to turn back into a sparrow,
but how can it fly again?
– Xu Wei, (tr. Jonathan Chaves)
Strongest minds are often those whom the noisy world hears least.
– Wordsworth
Never let the world defeat you in that most tragic of ways: by making you cynical and making you think your cynicism is wisdom.
– Joseph Fasano
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.
– Franz Wright
Hysterical self-deceivers, and ordinary ones too, have at all times understood the art of misusing everything so as to avoid the demands and duties of life, and above all to shirk the duty of confronting themselves. They pretend to be seekers after God in order not to have to face the truth that they are ordinary egoists.
– Carl G. Jung
I believe…that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it. Just think of the work you’ve set yourself to do, and do it as well as you can.
– Chinua Achebe
Organic Bloom
The brain constructs its systems to enclose
The steady paradox of thought and sense;
Momentously its tissued meaning grows
To solve and integrate experience.
But life escapes closed reason. We explain
Our chaos into cosmos, cell by cell,
Only to learn of some insidious pain
Beyond the limits of our charted hell,
A guilt not mentioned in our prayers, a sin
Conceived against the self. So, vast and vaster
The plasmic circles of gray discipline
Spread outward to include each new disaster.
Enormous floats the brain’s organic bloom
Till, bursting like a fruit, it scatters doom.
– Stanley Kunitz
Sometimes I want to scream but screaming is not in my nature, so I shut down and sleep for days and days and days until I wake up and feel completely
silenced.
– Juansen Dizon
Not magic as a bending of existence to your will, but magic as the capacity for wonder and trust in a God that can do all.
– Martin Shaw
But what was family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time. If he had learned anything it was the family was not so much what you were given as what you were able to maintain.
– Anthony Doerr
The opposite of depression is expression. What comes out of your body will never make you ill. What stays in there will.
– Edith Eger
How can we know the intentions of another? We can only project. And in our wisest moments, question our own projections.
– Kenneth Folk
I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels. Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth.
– Michelle de Kretser
Anybody can run away and survive, the trick was to stay and survive.
– Philip Roth
fireflies
the meadow
wearing constellations
– Aoi
If you enjoy the opinions you possess, if they give you a glow, be suspicious. They may be possessing you. An opinion should be treated like a guest who is likely to stay too late and drink all the whiskey.
– William H. Gass
What I liked about the rainbow is that it fits all of us. It’s all the colors. It represents all the genders. It represents all the races. It’s the rainbow of humanity.
– Gilbert Baker
Seeing God as the underlying Reality is the way to solve the problem of being caught up in the delusive distortions of our material experiences.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
I haven’t abandoned you,
my little ally, my heart.
I kiss you with all my soul.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Logic is no doubt unshakable, but it can’t withstand a person who wants to live.
– Kafka
I don’t think I was built for a love that is comfortable or uncomplicated. There is a restlessness in me that will always be drawn to dark, madly passionate things. The intoxicating highs and devastating lows. The chaos and the conflict.
– Beau Taplin
Whatever you’re doing is always to yourself. Whatever you do to another human being, good or bad you’re only doing it to yourself. For there is one energy. And we’re all endless atoms and all energy.
– Robert Adams
I want to explain how exhausted I am. Even in my dreams. How I wake up tired. How I’m being drowned by some kind of black wave.
– Elizabeth Wurtzel
summer stars
every wish
starts quietly
– Akri
Inner awakening is not an experience you have once.
It is a way of meeting life again and again with more awareness and less reaction.
– Remez Sasson
I have survived,
but I have not been
spared.
– Catherynne M. Valente
Truths are not truths to you unless you realize them within yourself. Without realization, they are just ideas. For spiritual perception, spiritual consciousness, lies not in vague theological ideas, but in the acquisition of Self-realization.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
summer clouds
nothing beautiful
stays one shape
– Akari
Isn’t it strange that we talk least about
the things we think about most?
– Charles Lindbergh
Innkeepers never looked for anything better than tantrums from the people fate compelled them to entertain.
– C. S. Forester
nighttime rain
stripes down the window
no stars to be seen
– Mueder Krieger
People do not see
you, / They invent you
and accuse you.
– Hélène Cixous
Can the absence of words tell a story? Like a pattern in lace, the holes as important as the threads?
– Eden Robins
The saddest truth is realizing you have fallen madly
in love with what can never be.
– Michael Faudet
And then it finally occurred to me, you were never going to live up to the person I made you out to be.
– Vivi Dale
summer shower
a paper lantern
goes dark
– Basho
We are all One, all children of the same loving Source, all brothers and sisters on the journey back home.
– James Blanchard Cisneros
midlife —
still wasting time
on side quests
– Mueder Krieger
I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait ’till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.
– Isaac Newton
I know I’ll always think of you with something like
hurt and nostalgia – and a great deal of love.
– Sylvia Plath
True silence doesn’t put you to sleep. It jolts you awake so that you’re suddenly alive to the world.
– Pico Iyer
I melt at your glances and become music.
– Mahmoud Darwish
I’m neither beautiful nor admirable. I’m tired and I’m bruised.
– Martha Gellhorn
Our children can be our greatest teachers if we are humble enough to receive their lessons.
– Bryant McGill
How amazing it is to find someone who wants to
hear about all the things that go on in your head.
– Nina LaCour
I feast on solitude, I will never miss the crowd. I could read the great books but the great books don’t interest me.
– Charles Bukowski
We talk so much of light,
please let me speak on behalf
of the good dark. Let us
talk more of how dark
the beginning of a day is.
– Maggie Smith
Although the very essence of being is utterly lucid and unobscured, it appears to be obscured. This is similar to the sun being covered by clouds. It is due to the influence of adventitious distortions that the natural manifestation of dharmakaya is not evident.
– Longchenpa
blueberries
little victories
taste sweeter
– Aoi
It’s July and I
have hope in who
I am becoming.
– Charlotte Eriksson
Beautiful. Crushingly
so. You look like the rest
of my life.
– Beau Taplin
My body was suddenly becoming uninhabitable and, for a few instants, I couldn’t see anything.
– Antonio Moresco
It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour.
– G. I. Gurdjieff
When someone is properly grounded
in life, they shouldn’t have to look
outside themselves for approval.
– Epictetus
fireflies
every tiny light
keeps its promise
– Akari
I think Cognitive Behavioural Therapy has caused the entire world to disconnect with our bodies. It’s our bodies where we feel at home, or like a stranger, not the mind. The mind follows what happens in the body. When the body is regulated we are good, when it’s not we are not.
– Christine Forner
Even if someone did offer me this unconditional, total, all-embracing love, I would not be able to accept it since it would force me into an infantile dependency which I, as an adult, cannot tolerate.
– Henri Nouwen
It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have an admittedly idealistic attachment to kindness, because kindness and kindliness means that you are acting on a natural instinct towards your kin…I think one really has to hang on to that.
– Tom Stoppard
Information is the food
of the mind. But more
information isn’t always
good for you. It’s actually
good, occasionally,
to take time for
information fasts.
– Yuval Noah Harari
Heaven is where you’ll be when you are okay where you are.
– Sun Ra
The world was fucked up. It was hard to say how exactly, but we could feel it. There was injustice, lots of it, we saw it as a dull shape coming into focus.
– Michelle Tea
Life is shapeless, but art, as everybody knows, is shaped.
– Stanley Elkin
We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half-opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.
– Aldous Huxley
Great things to the great,
depths to the profound,
subtleties to the subtle,
and rarities to the rare.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Meanwhile, out in what is fondly called ‘the real world’ by people who often don’t know very much about reality, you are living in a metastasising machine which is closing in around you, polluting your skies and your woods and your past and your imagination. If you have the kind of sensibility which prefers Lothlorien to Isengard, this means that you are a character in a tragedy rather than a heroic epic. Most of the things you like are fading away. The great forests and the stories made in and by them. The strange cultures spanning centuries of time. The little pubs and the curious uninhabited places. The thrumming temples and dark marshlands and crooked villages and folk tales and conviviality and spontaneous song and old houses which might have witches in them. The possibility of dragons. The empty beaches and wild hilltops, the chance of getting lost in the rain forever or discovering something that was never on any map. A world without maps, a world without engines.
– Paul Kingsnorth
Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.
– Russell Kirk
Realization must be amidst all the turmoils of life.
– Ramana Maharshi
Do not be misled by my eating and smoking, reading and talking. My mind is not here, my life is not here. It is your private dream-world and my only reaction to it is to ask you to stop dreaming. I do not even perceive it, except through what you tell me about it.
– Nisargadatta
It is a general popular error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.
– Edmund Burke
I have come to realize that men are not born to be free.
Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom
nature endowed with minds higher than the mass of men.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
LIFE EQUATION
My daddy was a bass line, and mom
an anthology of Newark nights—
her arm a high-rise poem
he would run his baritone blue cipher over,
over and over again.
They loved in translation, grew apart,
grew to love me from different homes—
leaving me an adulteration of the blues,
of the absence and question they live.
– Kyle Dargan
Pursue the authentic—decide first / what is authentic, / then go after it with all your heart.
– Louise Erdrich
PART OF ME WANTING EVERYTHING TO LIVE
This New England kind of love reminds me
of the potted chrysanthemum my husband
gave me. I cared for it faithfully,
turning the pot a quarter turn each day
as it sat by the window. Until the blossoms
hung with broken necks on the dry stems.
Cut off the dead parts and watched
green leaves begin, new buds open.
Thinking the chrysanthemum would not die
unless I forced it to. The new flowers
were smaller and smaller, resembling
little eyes awake and alone in the dark.
I was offended by the lessening,
by the cheap renewal. By a going on
that gradually left the important behind.
But now it’s different. I want the large
and near, and endings more final. If it must
be winter, let it be absolutely winter.
– Linda Greg
If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.
– Anton Chekhov
Granada
by M. Cynthia Cheung
Here, a thin silk canopy,
avenues where orange blossoms bruise
under sun. We sit in the courtyard, distant
mountains gleaming behind your wasted face.
How long since your tongue could taste
iron in meltwater, your fingers deft
enough to pluck a pomegranate seed
without bursting? What I imagine
is vanishing-language
you will take beyond the peaks.
I should not blame silence
on the dead—nor ruin of pleasure-
but who else to blame?
For all the pain in this world, you say,
I love this life. Light traverses
your face, translucent.
We hold stillness in our hands, listen
to fountains speak.
the crowd is the gathering place of the weakest
what are called remarkable individualities
are often only well-known nonentities. isolation is the gift.
– Charles Bukowski
An aspiring writer without knowledge, experience, and support is a person who most needs the empathy and guidance of those who are farther down the road.
– Ellen Notbohm
It makes me sad to think about a young person who might never cultivate the process of self-discovery that takes place in writing, which is inseparable from thinking.
– Meghan O’Gieblyn
The human psyche, like human bones, is strongly inclined towards self-healing.
– John Bowlby
I detest the man who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks for another.
– Homer
Very early in my life it was too late.
– Marguerite Duras
That’s what writers, especially immigrant writers, struggle with, to write about ourselves, our families, our countries, knowing that the outcome can bring us both joy and pain.
– Rebecca Morrison
It’s not a shame if a man learns something from a woman’s heart, which makes him more gentle and human.
– Nizar Qabbani
Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
new moon
the whole forest
starts over
– Aoki
I have seen greatness and power, wealth, prosperity and incomparable development. I was never sad that we are a small and unfinished part of the world. To be small, unsettled and uncompleted is a good and courageous mission.
– Karel Čapek
in sky and sea
whites and blues adrift …
years in exile
– Chen-ou Liu
Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.
– Aldous Huxley
You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you. Things can’t shape our decisions by themselves.
– Marcus Aurelius
The human mind is so constructed that it cannot begin to understand the new until it has done everything in its power to relate it to the old.
– Henri Bergson
You are the changeless reality in which the world of changes appears.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
But there was something magical about my idea. I had to admit, I felt better and happier when it was around.
– Kobi Yamada
We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.
– Aldous Huxley
The stealthy purpose of studying history is to get you comfortable with changing your mind.
– Charles King on Edward Gibbons
Software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible.
– Zadie Smith
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. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.
– Umberto Eco
Watching the water pass through on a river during the sunset is a great reminder that nothing is permanent. “There is nothing permanent except change.
– Heraclitus
The poor are expected to live with less and are socialized to accept less (badly made clothing, products, food, etc.), whereas the well-off are socialized to believe it is both the right and necessity for us to have more, to have exactly what we want when we want it.
– bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters
Dualism… Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.
– Aldous Huxley
The richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself; and … the poorest personality is everything when he has chosen himself, for the greatness is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and every human being can be this if he so wills it.
– Søren Kierkegaard
For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation-the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing-is essential for high levels of creativity.
– Daniel H. Pink
The results of our actions are experienced right here. There is no other field in which they could possibly bloom.
– the Buddha
The two evening stars were now shining side by side. The smaller one had moved over to the big one. They were very close now, almost touching, and then they went together and become one very large star. I don’t know if things like that are fair or not.
– Richard Brautigan
The moment a police force becomes the judiciary, the executive, and the legislature, that police force has ceased to be a protecter of the people and has become a threat to the people.
– Malcolm X
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
– Aldous Huxley
Let a person lift themselves by themselves; let them not degrade themselves. For the self alone is the friend of the self, and the self alone is the enemy of the self.
– Bhagavad Gita
Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.
– Malcolm Muggeridge
The nation is imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.
– Benedict Anderson
In warfare every opportunity must be seized; for fortune is a woman; if you miss her today, do not expect to find her tomorrow.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
There’s all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.
– John Dewey
We are likely to look too far away for the mainsprings of democratic society. Democracy rests on you and me, and not on the man who holds office. This demands the highest personal development of every citizen, of every age and in every range. It means popular education.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
King Crimson is what progressive music is all about. It’s not reproducing something that was radical 30 years ago, but the more difficult route of putting aside old ways of playing to try to come up with meaningful new music. It’s a noble quest, whether you achieve it or not.
– Tony Levin
You strive to please others, to fit in, and feel accepted. In spite of that, you still don’t feel accepted, and not because others don’t accept you, but because you haven’t accepted yourself as you are.
– Dragos Bratasanu
Toughness and empathy are not incompatible.
– Robert Greene
I have felt for a long time that our idea of what a human being is has grown oppressively small and dull.
– Marilynne Robinson
The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work… Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.
– C.S. Lewis
If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.
– William James
No poem is ever written for it’s story line’s sake only, just as no life is lived for the sake of an obituary.
– Joseph Brodsky
Ethics is, above all, an invitation to live with humanity.
– Fernando Savater
Love all, serve all.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
They who truly come to God for mercy, come as beggars, and not as creditors: they come for mere mercy, for sovereign grace, and not for anything that is due.
– Jonathan Edwards
I see a poem as a multicolored strip behind peeling plaster, in separate shining segments. I try to connect hands and horizons, glances and the objects imprisoned in them. That’s how it is in daylight. At night … poems are like spiraling curves that grow to completeness by themselves. The hardest thing is to hold onto them through waking into consciousness.
– Stanisław Lem
To anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them the land they live on is like their mother. It’s the only thing that lasts, that’s worth working for, worth fighting for…
– Alexandra Ripley
If you chase butterflies, they will fly away, but if you build a garden, they will come to you, and even if they don’t, you will still have a beautiful garden…
– German saying
Instead of looking to other humans for love, we need to align with our own love, because it’s not the love of other humans that will make us happy.
– Don Miguel Ruiz
From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.
– Annie Ernaux
Nothing was spoken, it was just mutually understood.
– Patti Smith
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.
– Beryl Markham
I accept that I am affected by the things that affect me. I am independent and I am free.
– James Constable
But here’s the thing: true piercing kindness will ruin your life. It will wreck your schedule. It will screw with your politics. It will force you to unlearn your cleverness and confront your cowardice and care about people who do not care about you. And it will hurt. And it will be the holiest thing you’ve ever done…
– David Gate
If you are identified with the form of the world, you are identified with change, because all life is programmed to evolve.
– Richard Rudd
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundation under them.
– Henry David Thoreau
Creative people need quiet because everything speaks to them.
– unknown
There are nights we seem to ride
With cross and crown
Forth under them, through fumes,
Coils, the whole rattling epic-
Only to leap clear-eyed.
From eiderdown,
Asleep to what we’d seen.
– James Merrill
Be a perfect flow of energy in whatever you chose to do. This is perfect action.
– Frederick Lenz
When people want to love you, let them. When people open a door like that, never close it, not even to hide.
– Kim Zarins
We’re creative. We’re gonna sit at our desks typing while the walls fall down around us. Because we’re the least important, most important thing there is.
– Donald Draper
It is not selfish to be happy. It is your highest purpose. Your joy is the greatest contribution you can make to life on the planet. A heart at peace with its owner blesses everyone it touches.
– Alan Cohen
People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning.
– W. Edwards Deming
I understand it now. You can’t shut anything out. You have to open yourself completely and just receive. Let it get close to you, everything that is, and love it.
– Ebba Haslund
Good people are dying from taking on other people’s drama.
– James H Kithcart
If life had a second edition, how I would correct the proofs.
– John Clare
Christ is not merely a harbor of refuge, but a port for all weathers.
– Charles Spurgeon
The reconnection of society, economy and ethics is a project we cannot postpone.
– Michael D. Higgins
What I learned from my parents is that it all matters. What’s going on in the world, in the courts, the government, the councils, the prisons, the villages, the school, the woods, the farms, the rivers. What’s being said in books and plays and poetry and scientific journals and television shows and films and newspapers. All of it matters.
– Helen Kingston
The heart is a throne; let the King sit.
– Hafiz
O Lord you are from everlasting to everlasting; I turn my thoughts to you as the hours of darkness and of sleep begin. O sun of my soul, I rejoice to know that all night I shall be under the watchful eye of the one who dwells in eternal light. Into your care, Father, I now entrust my body and soul.
– John Baillie, A Diary of Private Prayer
The difficulty, in sociology, is to think in a completely astonished way about things you thought you had always understood.
– Pierre Bourdieu
When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew.
– William Shakespeare
Anything that just cost money is cheap.
– John Steinbeck
Above all, don’t fear difficult moments. The best comes from them.
– Rita Levi Montalcini
Necrocracy. Rule by the dead. We have members of Congress dropping dead in office, running while dying, signing bills while nearly comatose, vanishing for months at a time, and a president who is “leaving instructions” for what to do if he passes.
– Mike Rothschild
Live amongst people in such a manner that if you die, they weep over you, and if you are alive, they crave for your company.
– Imam Ali
There’s no trail in space,
no outside contemplative,
no eternal fabrications,
no wavering in the Awakened
– Dhammapada 255
The heart grows
brutal from feeding
on fantasies.
– Robert Pinsky
The understanding of what you are, whatever it be—ugly or beautiful, wicked or mischievous—the understanding of what you are, without distortion, is the beginning of virtue. Virtue is essential, for it gives freedom.
– Krishnamurti
Then, for instance, your passions which seemed so real, more real than God, show their illusory nature to you and sort of dwindle away.
– Henri Nouwen
If you want to know a person, discuss politics, religion and women with him.
– Albert Camus
Forgive me, for all
the things I did
but mostly for the ones
that I did not.
– Donna Tartt
People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.
– Leo Tolstoy
Working on a problem reduces
the fear of it.
It’s hard to fear a problem when
you are making progress on it—
even if progress is imperfect and
slow.
Action relieves anxiety.
– James Clear
FORAGING
Picking berries from the brambles
that line the local park would
have been more romantic without
the road construction across the way.
I was hoping for bird song
and maybe the scent of mown grass
rather than jack hammers
and the reek of asphalt.
For that matter, it would have been
nicer if the sun were not so blazing
and the thorns a bit less grabby,
or at any rate if I had the sense
to wear close-toed shoes.
Whatever. The vines were full
of fat, black berries and amiable bees.
And isn’t that what it all comes
down to anyway – being grateful
for what we are given,
and turning it into pie?
– Lynn Ungar
Septihambre
translated from the Spanish by Carina del Valle Schorske
Between August and surf season
is dead time in Rincón. Most shops shut down.
There’s a ban on catching grouper, crab, and conch.
The fishermen spend Sundays singing
karaoke salsa classics on the public beach,
their voices trained by salt and resignation.
The reef rests, regenerates. The seafloor is a neon feast.
Elkhorn corals celebrate, turtles come close to shore.
But the people suffer scarcity.
Luckily, the fruit trees flourish.
Locals trade bananas, breadfruit, green plantains.
This year the avocado harvest was abundant.
At any moment a hurricane might strike.
– Nicole Cecilia Delgado
Ambition and the thermometer move in opposite directions.
– Mary Wilson Little
Malignant normality [is] the imposition on a society of a set of expectations that are highly destructive but are rendered ordinary and legal.
– Dr. Robert Jay Lifton
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
– Aldo Leopold
People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you’re going to see just about all that you can handle.
– Paul Auster
It’s not a happy place, America, and I wasn’t happy there. I’m interested in the condition of America now. It beggars belief what’s happening there now. When you hear a slogan like Make America Great Again, it makes a sort of weird sense because America could be great again, but at community level. Not with sort of strange billionaires making weird decisions.
– Sam Neill
Writing is my way of paying attention—of insisting that this business of living and dying (and everything that happens between) actually matters.
– Dinah Lenney
The center of me is always and eternally a terrible pain. A searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfiguring and infinite.
I do not think it is to be found — but the love of it is my life.
– Bertrand Russell
I Have Built A Garden…
by Diana Bellessi
Translated from the Spanish by Leo Boix
I have built a garden, as one makes
the right gestures in the wrong place.
Misplaced—not an error, but a being elsewhere,
like speaking with the mirror’s reflection
and not with the one who looks through it.
I have built a garden to speak there,
elbow to elbow in beauty, with death—always mute
yet active—working at the heart.
Leave the luggage behind, she repeated, now that your body
glimpses both shores—there is nothing,
the precise gestures
to let oneself go, to care for it,
and to be, the garden.
Treasure what you lose, she said—this death
speaking in flawless, distant Castilian.
What you lose, while you still have it, is the sole companion
that draws you close to the far shore of death.
Now language may loosen itself to speak.
She who never could wield the scalpel of horror,
though furnished with tools for doing, marvellous
from ominous. Terror is only digestible to the eye
if beauty bears it. Look at the blind hole:
precise and loving gestures, without reflection,
before the mirror in which all operations
are emptied of meaning.
To have a garden is to let oneself be had by it,
and by its eternal movement of departure. Flowers, seeds, and
plants die forever or renew themselves. There is
pruning, and there are moments, in the sweet dusk of a
summer afternoon, to see it exceeding itself,
while the shadow of its fall announces itself
in the dense brightness of March, or in the
dreamless sleep of the subject when it dies, while
the species that contains it never ceases to forge itself.
The garden demands, of its gardener, that she watch it die.
It demands her hand to cut back and to reshape
the naked earth, turned over in the beds
beneath the frozen night. The garden kills
and asks to be killed, in order to be a garden. But to make
correct gestures in the wrong place
dissolves the equation, uncovers páramo.
Love reclaimed through difference, like
dark blue sky against sorrow. Royal
drop of the storm in whose embrace you reach
the farthest shore. I wish you
were here, love, but you are—a gardener and not
a garden. You unearthed my heart from your bed.
Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable, and life is more than a dream.
– Mary Wollstonecraft
Material existence is temporary, illusory and full of miseries. There is no happiness at all. There is just the futile attempt to get rid of the miseries, and temporary cessation of misery is falsely called happiness.
– Prabhupād
There is nothing that I may decently hope for that I cannot reach by patience as well as by anxiety.
– Wendell Berry (The World-Ending Fire)
Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms, you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.
– Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
and butterflies, for all their graces, are merely caterpillars who persevere.
– guillaume apollinaire
It is in order to give rise to a complex instant, brimming with simultaneities, that a poet shatters the simple continuity of shackled time.
– Gaston Bachelard
There were only the great diamonds and sapphires and emerald mists and velvet inks of space, with God’s voice mingling among the crystal fires.
– Ray Bradbury
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
– Iris Murdoch
He who has mastered the true nature of life does not labor over what life cannot do. He who has mastered the true nature of fate does not labor over what knowledge cannot change.
– Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
I’D LIKE
to meet someone who
hasn’t let the world
rub the wonder off them,
a person whose mind is
neighborly with my own,
someone who knows how
to drink up sound, a
woman who’s eyes are
filled with the depths
of her, someone whose
life is sunlight touching
crystal prism, thousands
of images flying wild
into the world, a writer
who’s become the stories
he’s told, an archeologist of
mourning, a digger of first things,
a man who carries inside himself
the silences of his father
and doesn’t mind,
a storyteller whose words
throw sparks from every
thing they touch, who’s able
to cry all the tears I can’t,
a person whose thoughts don’t
smell musty, someone who’s
heard the land sing to itself
late in the night
when the Pleiades rise
above dark mountains, a
person whose feelings
bear witness to what the
world’s telling them, some
one who’s willing to be
innocent over and
over again, and thinks it
would be a good thing
to love me.
– Stephen Harrod Buhner
What if I were not to die! What if life were given back to me—what infinity! And it would all be mine! then I’d turn each minute into a whole age, I’d lose nothing, I’d reckon up every minute separately, I’d let nothing be wasted!
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A neurosurgeon makes about $750,000 a year after many years of education and training, making it one of the highest-paid professions in society. Yet even at that salary, it would take about 1.33 million years to earn $1 trillion.
– Matthew Facciani
People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say.
– Ann Patchett
The intellectual life is not the only road to God, nor the safest, but we find it to be a road, and it may be the appointed road for us. Of course it will be so only so long as we keep the impulse pure and disinterested. That is the great difficulty…we may come to love knowledge—our knowing—more than the thing known…
– C.S. Lewis
Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.
– Charles Dickens
What’s terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better.
– Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
To hear or read without reflecting is a useless occupation.
– Confucius
Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
– Kenneth Grahame
He learned to communicate with birds and discovered their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with windspeed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries.
– Douglas Adams
Words were dangerous when loosed. They were more powerful than cannon and more unpredictable than storms. They could turn men’s heads inside out and warp their destinies. They could pick up kingdoms and shake them until they rattled.
– Frances Hardinge
He is not my friend. He has abandoned me to a congress of louts.
– Mattie Ross
But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, madness, without tuition or restraint.
– Edmund Burke
Above all, tell them to practice an intimate presence to the beauty and wonder of the natural world through their intuitive awareness that recognizes the oneness of all life; tell them to stop and enlarge moments throughout their days to become aware of the mysteries and miracles of creation all around them – the movement of a squirrel, the sound of a bird, the pattern of a leaf, changing patterns of light, the sun, the rain, the stars, dawn and sunset. Tell them we are not ourselves without everything and everyone else.
– Thomas Berry
What is God? God is a motion – a perpetual motion. The spontaneous motion of the human body is always continuing.
– Sri Jibankrishna
Slowly I dance out of the burning house of my head.
– Mark Strand
I am dancing a single dance throughout my whole life. My dance is identical with the everlasting revolution. I recovered my language through dancing, and saw politics through dancing. I will live up to ethics through dancing, and perceive the map of history through dancing. I gained courage to stand against power through dancing. I am re-scrutinizing the ‘instinct’ through dancing. I want to know God through dancing. I want to encounter matter through dancing. A dancer, in essence, is an anonymous lightning, a medium of the place. This is how I want to be. The endless performance/dance. An attempt to verify dance from the minimal to the maximal by rendering my body as an example. Or an attempt to discover and initiate dance in all places.
– Min Tanaka
How can you dance and dance, in front of millions of people, for years, and still seem like a secret only I know? (And isn’t it the case that to be a Prince fan is to feel that Prince was your secret alone?) […] I saw him in stadiums with thousands of people, so have a rational understanding that he was in no sense my secret, that he was in fact a superstar. But I still say his shows were illegible, private, like the performance of a man in the middle of a room at a house party. It was the greatest thing you ever saw and yet its greatness was confined to the moment in which it was happening.
– Zadie Smith, Dance Lessons for Writers
We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest, tangled, pathless, in each; a snow field where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so.
– Virginia Woolf
In an interview given near the end of his life, Cioran is asked why most of his books are written in fragments and aphorisms. His reply: “Because I’m lazy. To write a book, one must be an active person. But I was born in the fragment. I’ve written fuller, more completed texts, but they’re not worth mentioning. These days I write only aphorisms: I’m a victim of my own ideas. Since all I’ve done as a writer is to attack literature, to attack life, to attack God, what’s the point of writing a book about it ? To prove what exactly ? There was an inexorable logic that brought me to this point, but it’s also just something that fits my temperament…” Cioran even adds to this a note on his method for writing aphorisms: you go to a restaurant, someone says something particularly stupid, then you go home and write it down. Eventually you have a book. “At any rate,” he concludes, “the advantage of the aphorism is that there is no point in proving anything. One throws out an aphorism – like an insult.”
– Eugene Thacker
In Buddhism, there are both peaceful and wrathful expressions of compassion. Sometimes true compassion can express itself as a powerful “NO” – saying no to activities that are harmful to oneself and harmful to others. Often this kind of expression cuts against the grain of deep habitual patterns and maintaining our comfort zone, but it is also free from aggression and manipulation.
– David Nichtern
To feel anything
deranges you. To be seen
feeling anything strips you
naked. In the grip of it
pleasure or pain doesn’t
matter. You think what
will they do what new
power will they acquire if
they see me naked like
this. If they see you
feeling. You have no idea
what. It’s not about them.
To be seen is the penalty.
– Anne Carson
There are certain emotions in your body that not even your best friend can sympathize with, but you will find the right film or the right book, and it will understand you.
– Bjork
I believe in mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness. Not caring doesn’t seem much different from not loving.
– Tom Stoppard
We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did – and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the mighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us.
– Roland Barthes
It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but. instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance’ is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.
– Roland Barthes
Do you realize that all great literature — “Moby Dick,” “Huckleberry Finn,” “A Farewell to Arms,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “The Red Badge of Courage,” “The Iliad and The Odyssey,” “Crime and Punishment,” the Bible, and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” — are all about what a bummer it is to be a …human being?
– Kurt Vonnegut
There are things of strange aspect in the world, things that you come upon without expectation, and they are the more meaningful for that.
– N. Scott Momaday
…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
Light gives me a feeling of spiritual atmosphere. Light is with you –you do not have to feel you are alone.
– Sven Nykvist
Use your own light and return to the source of light. This is called practicing eternity.
– Lao-Tzu
What guarantee is there that the five senses, taken together, do cover the whole of possible experience? They cover simply our actual experience, our human knowledge of facts or events. There are gaps between the fingers; there are gaps between the senses. In these gaps is the darkness which hides the connection between things.…
This darkness is the source of our vague fears and anxieties, but also the home of the gods. They alone see the connections, the total relevance of everything that happens; that which now comes to us in bits and pieces, the “accidents” which exist only in our heads, in our limited perceptions.
– Idris Parry
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion.
– Cyril Connolly
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
study the masters
like my aunt timmie.
it was her iron,
or one like hers,
that smoothed the sheets
the master poet slept on.
home or hotel, what matters is
he lay himself down on her handiwork
and dreamed. she dreamed too, words:
some cherokee, some masai and some
huge and particular as hope.
if you had heard her
chanting as she ironed
you would understand form and line
and discipline and order and
america.
– Lucille Clifton
Sometimes I dream of revolution, a bloody coup d’etat by the second rank—troupes of actors slaughtered by their understudies, magicians sawn in half by indefatigably smiling glamour girls, cricket teams wiped out by marauding bands of twelfth men—I dream of champions chopped down by rabbit-punching sparring partners while eternal bridesmaids turn and rape the bridegrooms over the sausage rolls and parliamentary private secretaries plant bombs in the Minister’s Humber—comedians die on provincial stages, robbed of their feeds by mutely triumphant stooges— —and—march— —an army of assistants and deputies, the seconds-in-command, the runners-up, the right-handmen—storming the palace gates wherein the second son has already mounted the throne having committed regicide with a croquet-mallet—stand-ins of the world stand up!—
– Tom Stoppard
There’s always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it’s with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it’s one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.
– Douglas Adams
Now listen for the pines, the bloom, its glittering, the wild hacking of sea, bend in each stream, eddy of bend—listen—hear all skins raveling, unending—hear one skin clamp down upon what now is no longer missing. Here you are says a voice in the light, the trapped light. Be happy.
– Jorie Graham
Star ceilings get their name from the clusters of stars painted or stamped in natural rock shelters. The stars are similar in shape, each an equal-armed cross, but may vary in size and color, black, red, or white, occasionally orange, yellow, or green. Some cave ceilings have a single star; some have a hundred imprints or more.
The stars are concentrated in the Canyon de Chelly area, but have been discovered throughout the Navajo heartland and the Four Corners area. Bernie hadn’t heard of any near Alamo, but here it was. The very place she’d admired in the photograph on Jones’s desk. The moonlight enabled her to see the cluster of black stars against the pale rock. She stood beneath the decorated overhang and closed her eyes a moment. The place reverberated with the power of the ancestors and the prayers and ceremonies that helped them stay strong.
– Anne Hillerman, Stargazer
I hope you get old.
I hope time is heavy on your bones, draped over you like an embrace from God.
I hope the backs of your hands become deep maps—
Of all the places you have been.
Dark stains where your fingers dipped into clay and dirt and mud.
I hope you get old. I hope time fills your heart with joy and triumph.
I hope you have enough obstacles to teach you character and empathy
and enough challenges to bestow you with uniqueness.
I hope pain shows you how strong you are and the value of a true friend.
I hope you’ve been alone enough to know yourself.
I hope you find quiet more than you find chaos.
I hope you get old.
That time wraps around your legs like a desperate lover.
I hope you can look into the faces of people you have loved and cherished
and that you leave behind echos of grief,
Because you were loved in turn.
I hope you give thanks for every waking moment,
For what you have and for what you have not.
I hope you get old.
I hope you make things that last.
I hope you’ve inspired people.
I hope you’ve helped someone.
I hope grace rests at your feet.
I hope.
You forgive everything,
You did.
Not
Get
Quite.
Right.
– Jann Arden
The things that mean something to you are incidental to them. Life, love, family, freedom, compassion, imagination, individuality—these are not understood in the same way. They are only possessions to steal from you to exert greater control. That is how mafias operate, and you live in a mafia state in a mafia world headed for the mother of all mergers. In a global autocracy, fear and foreboding transcend borders, hovering over the world like a black cloud. The cry of “what is happening?” is as raw in the United Kingdom and Hungary and Turkey and any other country lurching into authoritarian kleptocracy as it is in the United States.
– Sarah Kendzior
I see you my planet, I see your exact rotation now on my floor—I will not close these eyes in this my planet…
I don’t want the moon and the stars, I want to lie here arms spread on your almost eternal turn and on the matter the turn takes-on as it is turned by that matter—Earth—as my mind lags yet is always on you,
how huge you carrying me are—and there is never hurry— and nothing will posit you as you carry the positors—as you carry the bottom of the river and its top and the clouds on its top, watery, weak, and the clouds one looks up to to see as they too turn—
– Jorie Graham
Maslow was challenging the fundamental premise of modern psychology; that we can devise accurate theories about human nature by studying the mentally ill or the statistically average. Among the specific traits of self-actualizers that he listed and briefly discussed were greater self-acceptance of others, autonomy, spontaneity, esthetic sensitivity, frequent mysticlike or transcendent experiences, a democratic rather than authoritarian outlook, and involvement in a cause or mission outside oneself. Self-actualizing people, too, seemed to possess a good-natured rather than a cruel sense of humor and an earnest desire to improve the lot of humanity. In addition, they tended to seek privacy and detach themselves from much of the petty and trivial socializing taking place around them.
– Edward Hoffman
I tried to establish order over the chaos of my imagination, but this essence, the same that presented itself to me still hazily when I was a child, has always struck me as the very heart of truth. It is our duty to set ourselves an end beyond our individual concerns, beyond our convenient, agreeable habits, higher than our own selves, and disdaining laughter, hunger, even death, to toil night and day to attain that end. No, not to attain it. The self-respecting soul, as soon as he reaches his goal, places it still further away. Not to attain it, but never to halt in the ascent. Only thus does life acquire nobility and oneness.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
Think of the most beautiful person you have ever seen. Think of the exact moment you looked into his or her eyes, and for a fleeting second you were paralyzed: you couldn’t take your eyes off that vision. You stared, frozen in time, caught in that beauty. Now imagine that identical beauty radiating from every single thing in the entire universe: every rock, every plant, every animal, every cloud, every person, every object, every mountain, every stream—even the garbage dumps and broken dreams— every single one of them, radiating that beauty. You are quietly frozen by the gentle beauty of everything that arises around you. You are released from grasping, released from time, released from avoidance, released altogether into the eye of Spirit, where you contemplate the unending beauty of the Art that is the entire World.
That all-pervading Beauty is not an exercise in creative imagination. It is the actual structure of the universe. That all-pervading Beauty is in truth the very nature of the Kosmos right now. It is not something you have to imagine, because it is the actual structure of perception in all domains. If you remain in the eye of Spirit, every object is an object of radiant Beauty. If the doors of perception are cleansed, the entire Kosmos is your lost and found Beloved, the Original Face of primordial Beauty, forever, and forever, and endlessly forever. And in the face of that stunning Beauty, you will completely swoon into your own death, never to be seen or heard from again, except on those tender nights when the wind gently blows through the hills and the mountains, quietly calling your name.
– Ken Wilber
A mark was on him from the day’s delight, so that all his life, when April was a thin green and the flavor of rain was on his tongue, an old wound would throb and a nostalgia would fill him for something he could not quite remember.
– Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.
– Anne Carson
Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy and vain. To be a warrior one needs to be light and fluid.
– Carlos Castaneda
After a time I found that I could almost listen to the silence,
which had a dimension all of its own.
I started to attend to its strange and beautiful texture,
which of course, it was impossible to express in words.
I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence,
which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there.
Without the distraction of constant conversation,
the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self.
They were no long expressing ideas
that were simply interesting intellectually,
but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity.
– Karen Armstrong
In a fully functional organism, an emotion has a very short life span. It is like a momentary ripple or wave on the surface of your Being. When you are not in your body, however, an emotion can survive inside you for days or weeks, or join with other emotions of a similar frequency that have merged and become the pain-body, a parasite that can live inside you for years, feed on your energy, lead to physical illness, and make your life miserable.
– Eckhart Tolle
The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.
– Henri Bergson
Too many things present themselves to me at once as I write to you… There is in my head a storm of thoughts by which I am ceaselessly dazzled and enervated, years of dreams, projects, and anguish that long to be compressed into a phrase, into a single word.
– Gérard de Nerval
The best kind of future we can envisage is one in which we get rid of the idea of the future as an area of experience which solves problems. It doesn’t.
– Alan Watts
Of great limbs gone to chaos,
A great face turned to night-
Why bend above a shapeless shroud
Seeking in such archaic cloud
Sight of strong lords and light?
– G. K. Chesterton
To awaken means to awaken out of the self-talk in the head because the self-talk is a form of hypnosis—self hypnosis.
– Eckhart Tolle
Projection on the Ego Level is very easily identified: if a person or thing in the environment informs us, we probably aren’t projecting; on the other hand, if it affects us, chances are that we are a victim of our own projections.
– Ken Wilber
one day we rustle off
like dead leaves
and turn into dust
and change back into sparkles of stars
and sing and drift
blissful in cloaks of fire
– Jean Arp, (tr. Joachim Neugroschel)
The woundings of our lives can cause the withdrawal of our substance, the leaching of our spirits. Or we can choose to see them as the slings and arrows that fortune provides to gouge us sufficiently full of holes that we may yet become holy. “Wisdom through suffering”, Sophocles said, and millions have assented to this cold if accurate comfort. For it is in the trials of wounding that all our immature or shadowed parts rise to meet us, never to leave us until we are either flat-out defeated and ready to begin the path of wisdom or willing to take steps to redress our lesser selves.
– Jean Houston
I cannot rid myself of the dream. It is as if I have gone so far away that I find it difficult to return.
– Anaïs Nin
Certainty is the enemy of change.
– Salvador Minuchin
I’m nostalgic for the anger I once had.
– Takuboku Ishikawa, (tr. Tamae K. Prindle)
Rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief.
– Cormac McCarthy
The cage is open,
but I don’t know how to fly.
– Anais Nin
You are waiting for me to tell you what to do, and therefore you are puzzled. I am not going to tell you what to do.
– Krishnamurti
Where not everything is present, but each word, each look, each movement has things underlying.
– Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematography
RIVERRAIN
For Nancy
Whether the river smells of rain
or rain the river, the river
roars like rain, the way the rain
downpours making the trees a river,
green current turning under rain,
rivering, the scent of river
everywhere in the rush of rain,
in the curve of your sleep, a river,
here in your absence, a rain.
– Neal Bowers
departing flashes —
the redolence of rain
and cook out
– Mueder Krieger
Confronting our desire for the illusion of wholeness was something Lacan saw also as subversive to capitalism, since the wish to appear whole leads to greater and greater consumption.
– D.A. Luepnitz
He was the first person I had met who made me enjoy conversation, in the same irrational and sensuous way I enjoyed coffee or loud music.
– Sally Rooney
Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.
– Epictetus, (tr. Elizabeth Carter)
A thousand dreams are burning inside me, softly, under the smoke
– Arthur Rimbaud, (tr. Lehman)
What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?
– Gregory Bateson
In a morning solitude there seems to lie about our fields of thought an aerial wealth too plenteous to be completely gathered into the granary of language.
– Robert Alfred Vaughan
Everyone who becomes conscious of even a fraction of his unconscious gets outside his own time and social stratum into a kind of solitude.
– CG Jung
The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.
– Barry H. Gillespie
the cicada sings
never hinting
how soon it will be gone
– Basho
FLOWERS
I like it when people brake for squirrels.
When they scoop bugs onto napkins
and gently set them outside. I like it when
people put their shopping carts back and
smile at strangers and hold open doors.
I like the awkward run, the breathless
thank you. I like it when people share
appetizers and good news and book
recommendations. When they get so
excited that their hands become actors
and their story comes out as a spark.
I like it when people offer these bright,
little flowers. These tender, yellow bursts.
– L.E. Bowman
I found I had less and less to say until finally, I became silent and began to listen. I discovered in the silence, the voice of God.
– Søren Kierkegaard
The enormity of my desire disgusts me.
– Richard Siken
No particular thought can be mind’s natural state, only silence. Not the idea of silence, but silence itself.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
You cannot not communicate. Every behavior is a kind of communication. Because behavior does not have a counterpart (there is no anti-behavior), it is not possible not to communicate.
– Paul Watzlawick
In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.
– Aldous Huxley
There is a kind of loneliness that comes from being with people. The kind that is more about a recognition of the failure of communication.
The gaps.
– Suzanne Scanlon
Jung says: “If God is dead … then God appears in the place where one would expect to find him least, and that is in the shadow,” and the negative qualities of a god denied become the “armour of a new and more terrible god.”
– Russell Lockhart
Trying to remember you
is like carrying water
in my hands a long distance
across sand. Somewhere people are waiting.
They have drunk nothing for days.
– Stephen Dobyns, Grief
tiny mushrooms
magic prefers
humble places
– Akari
You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.
– Louise Glück
I’ve always enjoyed the ends of parties better than the beginnings.
– Charles Bukowski
To My Own Poem
Best case scenario —
you’ll be, my poem, read attentively,
discussed, remembered.
Worst comes to worst,
only read.
A third option –
actually written,
but tossed into the trash a moment later.
The fourth and final possibility —
you slip away unwritten,
happily humming something to yourself.
– Wisława Szymborska
I cared for others all my
life. And still I was
wrong.
– Alice Notley
Love is an unending journey into the deepest parts of your beautiful heart.
– Robert Clancy
Some of it is ugly, obscene
and bestial, some of it is
pure and holy and
spiritual: all of it is myself.
– James Joyce
I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.
– Brene Brown
morning thunder
flowers refuse
to panic
– Ogawa
I feel that when you look out into the world, the world is funny. And people are funny. And that people always try to make each other laugh…. If you’re going to ignore that, what are you doing?
– Lorrie Moore
All unhappiness is due to the ego; with it comes all your trouble.
– Ramana Maharshi
I’m learning love as an
act of mercy. Love as an
act of sacrifice.
– A.D. Lauren-Abunassar
Shame occurs when you haven’t been able to get away with the ‘who’ you want people to think you are.
– Carl Whitaker
Are we what we do with time, or are we what
time does with us?
– Mahmoud Darwish
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
– Philip K. Dick
I do mind, resent really, years wasted with my own neurotic living and my dull
mind.
– Anne Sexton
To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life. Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.
– Emil Cioran
The mind makes and makes,
spinning its web.
– Sylvia Plath
We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.
– Gregory Bateson
first coffee
the day becomes
more possible
– Akari
… a language, even a foreign language, is something so intimate that it enters inside of us despite the fissure. It becomes a part of our body, our soul. It takes root in the brain, it emerges from our mouths. In time, it nestles in the heart.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
Suddenly I began to cry for no reason at all, or perhaps for everything for which I had no name.
– Ghassan Kanafani
Human experience of identity has two elements; a sense of belonging and a sense of being separate. The laboratory in which these ingredients are mixed and dispensed is the family, the matrix of identity.
– Salvador Minuchinh
Instead of Depression
by Andrea Gibson
try calling it hibernation.
Imagine the darkness is a cave
in which you will be nurtured
by doing absolutely nothing.
Hibernating animals don’t even dream.
It’s okay if you can’t imagine
Spring. Sleep through the alarm
of the world. Name your hopelessness
a quiet hollow, a place you go
to heal, a den you dug,
Sweetheart, instead
of a grave.
As much as I would miss my wife if she were to die, I would miss what we are together even more. Our “we-ness,” our “us-ness.”
– Carl Whitaker
fresh peaches
summer believes
in second chances
– Ogawa
Only the family, society’s smallest unit, can change and yet maintain enough continuity to rear children who will not be ‘strangers in a strange land,’ who will be rooted firmly enough to grow and adapt.
– Salvador Minuchin
Inniskeen Road: July Evening
The bicycles go by in twos and threes —
There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight,
And there’s the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.
I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.
– Patrick Kavanagh
We all have an infant inside of us, but the infant doesn’t have to run the show.
– Murray Bowen
My heartbeat has reached the epitome of rottenness; It is no longer part of my heart. Time for the shadows to come and grab me by the brain. Dearest, I am asking you again: Just how far is the sky?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
– William Wordsworth
You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you’re dirty and rattled. Who knew?
– Anne Lamott
Wisdom is the intelligence of the system as a whole.
– Gregory Bateson
What you feel in your mind is always going to be projected outward. No one will hear your thoughts, but those who have strong awareness will feel your vibe.
– Yung Pueblo
seashells
the ocean
writing postcards
– Aoki
The revolutionary must not neglect guile.
– Bertolt Brecht
Nothing happens here
except that I write and
write, and curse and
burn.
– Virginia Woolf
garden herbs
healing begins
in small handfuls
– Oagwa
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 you shall begin to question your dream, awakening will be not far away.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
The belief that one’s own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions.
– Paul Watzlawick
Reality is a unified whole, but thought cuts it up into fragments… Love is the recognition of oneness in a world of duality. This is the birth of God into the world of form.
– Eckhart Tolle
The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, ‘Create silence’.
– Søren Kierkegaard
True inner peace isn’t about escaping the chaos; it’s about remaining calm in the middle of it. It’s a muscle you build day by day, choice by choice.
– Remez Sasson
little sparrow
wearing confidence
like sunlight
– Aoki
The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed. And it is entirely private. Take it to be a dream and be done with it.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
The planets did nothing
except
teach me to read
– Mahmoud Darwish, (tr. Jeffrey Sacks)
The Bible has no descriptions of Jesus’ appearance, yet his face is the most replicated and recognizable image in the world. What does that tell us about the nature of information?
– Yuval Noah Harari
To understand a thing is a bridge and possibility of returning to the path. But to explain a matter is arbitrary and sometimes even murder. Have you counted the murderers among the scholars?
– Jung
The man who does not face his shadow by 35 does not improve… he calcifies.
The defense becomes the personality.
– Carl Jung
If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don’t wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself.
– Epictetus
My vision grew cloudier and cloudier. But, then again, it wasn’t that it was getting cloudy, on the contrary, it seemed to be getting so sharp that I could no longer see.
– Moresco, The Beginnings (tr. Max Lawton)
The child has no need for one to give him toys in the strict sense of the word, since he makes them with everything that falls into his hands. These are transitional objects.
– Lacan
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.
– Mark Twain
Still, I refuse to regret
you. I hope the stars are
glowing wherever you
are.
– Jessica Therese
Many parents have brought their kids to me to get them fixed. 99% of the work is in the parents.
– Dr. Bob Beare
Nirvana is where you are,
provided you don’t object to it.
– Alan Watts
It is very important to be able to distinguish unpeaceful states of mind from peaceful states. States of mind that disturb our inner peace, such as anger, jealousy and desirous attachment, are called ‘delusions’. These are the principal causes of all our suffering.
– Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
The subjective thinker is continually striving, is always in the process of becoming.
– Søren Kierkegaard
It is possible to be wild and kind at the same time. It is possible to be both alone and be loved. I have known this to be true. In others. In me. To be loved. And to also still be alone.
– Anis Mojgani
A hateful heart is a wounded heart that has forgotten it is loved.
– Henri Nouwen
The attribution of reality to things which rise in thoughts is the cause of all bondage… There is no thought. There is only Consciousness… If this truth is always kept alive, thought will soon vanish and Consciousness will reign.
– Atmananda Krishna Menon
The more I paint, the more I like everything.
– Jean-Michel Basquiat
If You Have Had Your Midnights
by Mari Evans
if you have had
your midnights
and they have drenched
your barren guts
with tears
I sing you sunrise
and love
and someone to touch
At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that – the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance. That is, to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is… curiosity to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does. And if you have that, then I don’t think the talent makes much difference, whether you’ve got that or not.
– William Faulkner
One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.
– Wittgenstein
fresh rain
everything gets
another chance
– Akari
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is winged cupid
painted blind.
– William Shakespeare
The witch has as many
moods and as many
faces as the moon. Most
of all, she is
misunderstood.
– Kristen J. Sollée
A system that allows for an unlimited number of gods thereby allows not only for a plurality of cults dedicated to them, but also, and above all, for a plurality of customs, political and social systems, and worldviews of which these gods are so many sublimated expressions.
– Alain de Benoist, On Being a Pagan
My entire life changed when I realized action is the antidote to anxiety.
– unknown
The Lord in his wisdom gave money to very curious people, perhaps because they’d starve without.
– Steinbeck
The drama of life is a
psychological one, in which all
the conditions, circumstances
and events of your life are
brought to pass by your
assumptions.
– Neville Goddard
Pressure is a privilege. It means things are expected of you.
– Billie Jean King
I’ve never been very happy about the world. So what makes me tick is this obsessive need to figure out what isn’t here that I want to be here. I make plays — or whatever you want to call them — to try to fill that great big void.
– Richard Foreman
Make a list of the people in your life who live with purpose. Prioritize spending more time with them.
– Robert Greene
To accuse others for one’s own misfortune is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.
– Epictetus
The need for a body of common knowledge and common reference does not disappear when a society is pluralistic. On the contrary, it grows more necessary, so that people of different origins and occupation may quickly find familiar ground and, as we say, speak a common language. It not only saves time and embarrassment, but it also ensures a kind of mutual confidence and goodwill. One is not addressing an alien, as blank as a stone wall, but a responsive creature whose mind is filled with the same images, memories, and vocabulary as oneself.
– Jacques Barzun
If you become truly meditative, you will be beyond karma.
– Sadhguru
No, no, you’re not thinking; you’re just being logical.
– Niels Bohr
In truth, you are already liberated since all limitations and suffering are imagined.
– Brian Thompson
When you have emptied all the content – thoughts, desires, memories, projections, hopes – when all is gone, for the first time you find yourself, because you are nothing but that pure space.
– Osho
To live in regret is to argue with
time and expect it to answer back.
– Arianny Mercedes
Quiet Nights
I go to sleep on one beach,
wake up on another.
Boat all fitted out,
tugging against its rope.
– Raymond Carver
Spider
by Andrea Gibson
All of my pain is a spider
I’ve learned not to crush
with the heel of my shoe
but to guide with a page
of my journal
into an empty glass.
I ask questions about
its life, its purpose
as I walk careful
out to the garden and rest
it down on the earth.
My pain-how happy
it is to leave me
whenever I treat it
kind.
The human heart is strange.
It can be hurt a thousand times
and still search for a reason to love
Perhaps that is not weakness,
but the greatest proof that
we are still alive.
– Dostoevsky
Or perhaps it is the cruelest habit of being human
returning to the same door, hoping it will open differently,
even after it has already closed.
– Kafka
art is a companion mystery, that which meets your realest life in not only recognition but expansion.
– @chenchenwrites
Love yourself. Enough to take the actions required for your happiness. Enough to cut yourself loose from the drama-filled past. Enough to feed your mind and body in a healthy manner. Enough to forgive yourself. Enough to move on.
– Steve Maraboli
bees in lavender
busy hearts still
find sweetness
– Aoki
Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange.
– Thornton Wilder
I will live, even if life betrays me and I will dream, even if dreams abandon me.
– Mahmoud Darwish
I am both happy and sad at the same time, and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.
– Sylvia Plath
we’re just keys jangling in pocketdark.
– Chad Frame
I’m with you. No matter what else
you have in your head I’m with you
and I love you.
– Ernest Hemingway
Wild sings the bird of
the heart in the forests of our lives.
– Mary Oliver
& anything maintained is hard
work mistaken for miracle
– Yasmine Seale
The only effective solution against evil and violent people is good people more skilled in violence.
– Miyamoto Musashi
Psychologists cannot teach us how to control our minds, still less how to expand them. They themselves are not remarkable for their self mastery, even less for their vision.
– Gerald Heard
If you think of someone
enough, you’re sure to meet
them again.
– Haruki Murakami
The person who made the map…
Had no map.
– Adolfo Gutierrez
If only Ken Burns (The Odyssey meets Field of Dreams)
could get his hands on this footage. Telemachus,
aged eight years, already thickening, athletic
but still uncertain in his movements. The big neighborhood
ballgame against the brutes who would become
known forever as the suitors. Third inning,
towering popup to left. T. calls for it
the whole way, but Odysseus snares it barehanded
just inches above the boy’s outstretched glove.
Not hard to see how such a move might confirm,
I don’t really trust you, son. A boy can spit
into the dirt for comfort, rub at it with his cleated sandal,
but these are the moments that burrow deep,
that fester, only to surface once the boy becomes
a man, armed with a ninety-plus per hour sinker
that dives like a trained falcon — a gift honed alone
chucking rocks against rocky hillsides during long
and fatherless summers beneath the white Ithacan sun.
Odysseus. Broken king. PTSD. Bone-heavy, slower now
of wit and reflex, already an hour or two deep
into his cups. Does he understand his son’s words
carry more of a threat than an entreaty?
In his hands the prince carries two weather-beaten
lumps of broken cow-leather. Hey, Pops, he says,
what say you and me have a quick game of catch?
And holds the gloves out, not quite in offering.
– Justin Hamm
Maybe I’m not overthinking,
maybe I’m just regular
thinking about stuff that’s
overhappening.
– Jonathan Edward Durham
The Allowing
What trust it takes to meet a day,
to say to each new moment: Yes, you
too belong here. We carry a village
inside ourselves, and everyone
is welcome. Hello, fear and doubt,
those twins who often travel together
hand in hand; hello, delight in the
awakening of a daisy on this smoke-
hazed, broken morning. Hello, sorrow
for all those no longer with me,
for this precipice on which I stand
for as long as it takes to fall into
the abyss of tears and longing. Hello,
ragged breath of rebirth. Hello,
relief after the passing storm, growing
as green in me as moss over stone.
– James Crews
Deep Sea Fishing
by Leonora Speyer
Sometimes I cast my longing like a line,
Watch it sink deep and deeper in the blue
Immoderate waters that are dreams of you,
Flooding the parched land that is sleep of mine.
Impassively I float the pale hours through,
With quiet eyes upon the quivering twine,
Aware of lurking shapes that give no sign
Of rising, though they move as fishes do.
Your hands, your hands, a thousand multiplied,
Cool, slim, and wary, darting to and fro,
For every touch of yours I knew, a hand!
Then breaks the line along the failing tide,
I lean—to drown among them as they go—
Knowing I may not drown on waking sand!
He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary.
– Ursula Le Guin
Not all power is repressive, nor is all resistance liberating.
– Joseph Hill
if an individual in a position of political power is a psychopath, he or she can create an epidemic of psychopathology in people who are not, essentially, psychopathic.
– Andrzej Lobaczewski
You write poems because you need a place where you can be what you are not.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
How unjust it was, when people treated the actual as limiting proof of the possible! I felt that this was what I was fighting against, and always had been: the tyranny of the particular, arbitrary way that things happened to have turned out.
– Elif Batuman
There is an epidemic of indifference in our world today.
– Pope Leo XIV
We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
– Marshall McLuhan
The world is a forest of thorns; do not walk through it barefoot.
– Shams Tabrizi
Until you understand a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Everything you hold in your heart must be expressed before it’s too late.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
The world is a marketplace of illusions. Trade your illusions for a single drop of the Truth.
– Rumi
Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.
– Stephen Colbert
There is no surer way of evading the world than by art; and no surer way of uniting with it than by art.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To get the full value of a joy, you must have somebody to divide it with.
– Mark Twain
Whatever is not eternal is eternally out of date.
– Clive Staples Lewis
The pain in his throat was all over his face now, leaking out his eyes.
– Flannery O’Connor
Art is historical archiving in higher dimensions; a record of the living moment.
– @moonpond.studio
Sustained historical research is a dance with strangers I have come to love.
– Ian McEwan
Sometimes I think that the problem isn’t that the world hurts, it’s that we’ve learned to live with the pain of others as we live with the noise in the background.
– Chantal Vizcaíno
One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters…But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.
– Charles Baudelaire
Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose.
– Mary Shelley
I am all the words that I adore on my lips and books that I admire.
– Silvina Ocampo
What truly divides this country is treating anyone who thinks differently as if they don’t deserve to be heard.
– Kurt Russell
It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.
– Douglas Adams
Success is simple. Do what’s right, the right way, at the right time.
– Arnold H Glasgow
it was a song of all the promises i failed to keep.
– odysseus, the odyssey (2026)
the most we want is what the most we can’t have, and what the most we can’t have is what we already had and lost.
– odysseus, the odyssey (2026)
Song will be all they have to remember those of us who could write.
– The Odyssey
we are living in a time that is hyper-contingent.
– Joanne Freeman
‘I’ve been through all this before,’ he says to his heart. Yes, you have been through all this before,’ replies his heart. ‘But you have never been beyond it.’
– Paulo Coehlo
There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other—by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.
– Oscar Wilde
There are many sham diamonds in this life which pass for real, and vice versa.
– William Makepeace Thackeray
I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.
– Charles Dickens
The administration warning Americans about the terrifying specter of government that seizes the means of production [ie communism]—has, over the past year—seized a whole fucking lot, of the means of production [ie communism]. The US government has taken direct ownership stakes in a growing pile of private companies—north of ten billion dollars and climbing.
– Heather Ashley
The good life is expensive.
There is another way to live
that doesn’t cost as much
but isn’t any good
– Spanish Distillers
A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions… he is not his own master.
– Carl Jung
When one sought to gaze at closer range upon this pedagogic and literary god, benevolent to man, one discovered a squatting ape-faced figure, with the sign of night and magic on its brow.
– Thomas Mann
There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.
– Jane Austen
…learning without Love is sterile and dry, enthusiasm without learning can easily become blind arrogance.
– N. T. Wright
I met her when i wasn’t looking for love, And I lost her when I loved her the most.
– Charles Bukowski
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
– Frederick W. Robertson
Human behavior is more contagious than most people realize.
– Malcolm Gladwell
The scope of your freedom stretches as far as the autonomy of the person next to you.
– Ether Noble
Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.
– Terry Pratchett
Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see.
– Douglas Adams
I own land but I’m not a landowner. The land is part of me and I’m part of the land. But that comes with a responsibility and you need to leave that land better than you found it.
– Sam Neill
There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Forgetting is a form of freedom
– Khalil Gibran
There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.
– Douglas Adams
The future doesn’t argue with the past, it just replaces it.
– Bryan Colter
Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.
– Douglas Adams
All thirsts are without explanations, as are all loves.
– Alexander Chee
Whoso belongs only to his own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or smoot-smeared Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it.
– Thomas Carlyle
What We Need Is Here
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
– Wendell Berry
We seek the absolute everywhere and only ever find things.
– Novalis
I don’t believe in magic. I believe in the sun and the stars, the water, the tides, the floods, the owls, the hawks flying, the river running, the wind talking. They’re measurements. They tell us how healthy things are. How healthy we are. Because we and they are the same. That’s what I believe in. Those who learn to listen to the world that sustains them can hear the message brought forth by the salmon.
– Billy Frank Jr.
Conversing with those of past centuries is much the same as traveling.
– René Descartes
European nights might be pitch-dark or coal-black, but not American nights, which are dark like a void, where there’s nothing to hold on to, no shelter from the elements, just empty, storm-whipped space, above and below.
– Roberto Bolaño
Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.
– Ray Bradbury
Ages are no more infallible than individuals; every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.
– John Stuart
To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.
– Umberto Eco
We worship perfection because we can’t have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.
– Fernando Pessoa
The death of self-esteem can occur quickly, easily in children, before their ego has “legs,” so to speak. Couple the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair, and the journey to destruction is sealed.
– Toni Morrison
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.
– William Sherman
Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind rest at peace. The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return. They grow and flourish and then return to the source. Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.
– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Observe the marvelous change that comes over you the moment you stop seeing people as good and bad, as saints and sinners and begin to see them as unaware and ignorant. You must drop your false belief that people can sin in awareness.
– Anthony de Mello
If I lived by the sea I would never be really sad. I get an immense sense of eternity and peace from the ocean. I can lose myself in staring at it hour after hour.
– Sylvia Plath
warm coffee
mornings forgive
late bloomers
– Ogawa
The poet offends the brainwashed millions who are the majority in any country. His words, his free manner of living are a constant irritation to the repressed, the fearful, the self satisfied, and the incurious.
– Irving Layton
Don’t get deceived into just treasuring a bunch of old rocks. It is better to pursue diamonds; it is better to pursue nibbana.
– Ajaan Suchart Abhijato
And it’s inside myself that I must create
someone who will understand.
– Clarice Lispector
The cosmic origin of things is beyond our intellect, our mind, our words. But in deep silence we reach it.
– Osho
Man will begin to recover the moment he takes art as seriously as physics, chemistry, or money.
– Ernst Levy
sunflowers leaning
toward something
they never owned
– Ogawa
But you’re getting these silly convictions
and conceptions out of nowhere, don’t you
realize all this life is just a dream? Why
don’t you just relax and enjoy God? God is
YOU, you fool!
– Jack Kerouac
The way in which you perceive the other is determined by your own thought forms.
– Eckhart Tolle
It affected him as the sequel of something of which he had lost the beginning.
– Henry James
Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.
– Leonard da Vinci
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.
– Loren Eiseley
Go on pondering, wondering, being anxious to find a way. Be conscious of yourself, watch your mind, give it your full attention. Don’t look for quick results, there may be none within your noticing. Unknown to you, your psyche will undergo a change.
– Nisargadatta
As time passes I become more and more afraid of my growing love of music.
– Paul Klee
If nothing saves us
from death, may
love at least save
us from life.
– Pablo Neruda
You are total freedom, absolute happiness. nirvana. ultimate oneness. When you think about yourself, think about yourself in those terms. Do not question yourself. Do not analyze yourself. Do not wonder about this. Do not say to yourself, “I hope it becomes so.”
– Robert Adams
candlelight
ordinary faces
become legends
– Ogawa
Spirituality is not a box that you can open and close again. Like Pandora’s box, after you open it, you spend half of your time thanking the heavens that you opened it and the other half of your time cursing yourself for having cracked the lid. There is nothing comfortable about awakening. Awareness is as painful as it is satisfying.
– Teal Swan
WORMHOLE
This is the season where grace is most difficult;
hunger, prominent; the body constantly running
out of fuel. Hey, wild hands drumming,
can I have that boyish zeal? Windows clapping,
red dogs barking in the streets, can I have again
those gone days where the only consequence
was fun? I am losing the heart of my youth. I am
stacking, with shaky hands, jagged rocks
by the shore of this blue dream-knowing
that every pebble is a moment balanced in time,
and waiting for the collapse. How now the wind
tears through it all. This is not how it ends. This
must not be how it ends. Tell me about that year
when I threaded the eye of a storm, how life
had only just begun, how it was cold and no one
could breathe. I was on a mare, somewhere
in the sky, and all around me the clouds were falling,
cotton fluff by cotton fluff by cotton fluff, when
at once, I pierced the fabric of the world and sewed shut
the mouth of the rogue wind. I can do it all again.
– Timi Sanni
Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half hour of the day in communion with the saints of humanity.
– William Osler
it can be challenging to teach poems in terms of their weird effects, their mysteries, their unanswerable questions and unresolvable tensions… when many people just want to know what the damn thing is “about.” and be done with it.
– @chenchenwrites
morning mist
mystery wears
pastel colors
– Ogawa
Humanists recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves, using reason as their guide, that they are best capable of developing values that succeed in satisfying human needs and serving human interests.
– Isaac Asimov
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
– Oscar Wilde
To think of her in the middle of the day lifts me
out of ordinary living.
– Henry Miller
Then I am reminded that life will continue on, regardless of whether I choose to board the train or stay on the platform.
– Courtney Peppernell
This blindness will not end by itself — it must be undone skilfully and deliberately. When all illusions are understood and abandoned, you reach the error-free and perfect state in which all distinctions between the personal and the universal are no more.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
a butterfly lands
even a wild heart
needs a soft place
– Akari
i go to poems not for morals or lessons or Knowledge—i go to poems for music and pleasure, texture and disturbance, lust and color, risk and provocation, tenderness and jokes, questions and rage, dream and gorgeousness, love and hate, love and what is it, what’s that…
– @chenchenwrites
DECONSTRUCTION
by Mary Ruefle
I think the sirens in The Odyssey sang The Odyssey,
for there is nothing more seductive, more terrible,
than the story of our own life, the one we do not
want to hear and will do anything to listen to.
He who waits to do a great deal of good at once, will never do anything.
– Samuel Johnson
He took his pain and turned it into something beautiful. Into something that people connect to. And that’s what good music does. It speaks to you. It changes you.
– Hannah Harrington
good and evil can only be experienced as a diametric opposition of two unique principles at any given moment — there is no such singular principle of good or evil but the only the singular diametric opposition of it at every given moment.
– ahnaf abrar
I sipped the dark / from my coffee. The black wick / of my heart snuffed in my chest. Afterwards, I pulled my hat / down over my eyes and walked through the snow towards / the bus.
– Sean Thomas Dougherty
Yellow flags require watching, not always running from. Sometimes they move to a spring green and then a green. Other times it’s a descent from orange to red. Basically the flames of hell.
– No BS Therapist
EN ABYME
Here in the duskgarden it’s getting so you can’t tell
an abyss from a pageant. We think of stars as brief words
which blink on at evening saying something we would like
to say also. Words are flowing toward mysterious black coasts.
One passes near the kind of village usually found in the Japan
of pictures. And it is a picturesque village
don’t you think? I loved it and hope to visit it some day.
It was there you fell into exile among the laughing children
of the laughing class. Now we are older and empty
into the winedark sentence the inkdark sea.
– Joshua Clover
“The kids are in the way”
No, the kids *are* the way
– @KettlebellDan
When I was small and easily wounded, books were my carapace. . . My corporeal life was slight; the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home.
– Lauren Groff
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
ELIZABETH’S EYES
Five feet from the ground the sky begins, that plane
of two joined points of darkness surrounded
by the color of the ocean dawn, bright
space of a second infinity
where I want to live forever
– Franz Wright
A bird takes flight,
It casts off the clouds like an useless veil,
It has never feared the light,
Enclosed in its flight,
It has never had a shadow.
– Paul Éluard
Yes, I too was stymied by the animal of music
and the shadow its breath sent through history.
– John Yau
gravel path
every stone
softened by years
– Aoki
I write you many letters with pens which are not seen. Do you receive them?
– Emily Dickinson
moss
the oldest green
still feels young
– Akiko
God knows I feel half-mad with everything at the moment.
– Susanna Clarke
I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.
– Anne Sexton
From the fear that my life has no meaning or worth – Deliver me, Jesus.
– Sr. Faustina Maria Pia
A peaceful mind is not the same as a mind without thoughts, sensations, or emotions. Mental tranquility does not mean mental emptiness.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
If peace depends on circumstances, it will disappear with them.
Discover the peace that remains while every circumstance changes.
– unknown
Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity.
– Albert Camus
The first people to be murdered in the Holocaust were psychiatric patients at the behest of their doctors. Psychiatry was the very template for the mass murder of populations.
– David Fitzpatrick
Sleep is the most
innocent creature there
is and a sleepless men is
the most guilty.
– Franz Kafka
As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
– Emil Cioran
We’re all together inside a system that scripts and constructs not just behavior but imagination.
– Claudia Rankine
A system is never the sum of its parts;
it is the product of their interaction.
– Russell Ackoff
Momentum
is a driven but not an always positive force:
it can be as uncontrollable
as the wayward life
of thoughts,
or lock-in a useless path,
like the constant circling
of that gilded gawp
found within any goldfish bowl.
– Julian Cason
People think that reading makes them learned; but it doesn’t. Reading only provides materials for knowledge; it is thought that makes what we read our own.
– Le CorBeau
Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.
– Voltaire
He knows he has aged much; he feels it, he sees it.
And yet the time he was young seems like yesterday.
How short a time, how short a time.
– Constantine P. Cavafy, An Old Man
Who can stand in defiance of fate? If the fate between us is to be unfortunate and mad, we must pity each other in order to put fate behind us.
– Takeo Arishima
There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.
– Homer, The Odyssey
As long as you demand to be loved.
There is no love in you.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
…I was saddened by my own empty recollections. Human beings can become more or less than they are in an instant. That is where the hardness of the human heart lies.
– Takeo Arishima
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.
– Sylvia Plath
The idea that every organism was meticulously constructed by a Great Designer provided a significance and order to nature and an importance to human beings that we crave still. A Designer is a natural, appealing and altogether human explanation of the biological world.
But, as Darwin and Wallace showed, there is another way, equally appealing, equally human, and far more compelling: natural selection, which makes the music of life more beautiful as the aeons pass.
– Carl Sagan
Some therapists act like a defense lawyer, reassuring you against your internal prosecution. Others act like a prosecutor, investigating and explaining what went wrong and where. A few act like the judge.
But the core of good psychotherapy is being the stenographer of the internal court. (Or helping to create internal stenography.) Without internal stenography, the case never finishes nor proceeds. In a way the trial never happens, and there is no resolution, only the sense that a trial could or should occur.
– Kemtrup
In every consulting room there ought to be two rather frightened people; the patient and the psychoanalyst. If they are not, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what everyone knows.
– Wilfred Bion
My current silence interests only me. It touches too many parts of my personal life for me to explain it to you.
– Albert Camus
The poet, the mystic and the ‘magician’ have this in common: the desire to develop their powers ‘downward’ rather than upward. In the Symposium, Socrates expresses the ideal aim: to do both at the same time…
– Colin Wilson
O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts.
– William Shakespeare
Nothing is more usual than for philosophers […] to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine, that they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.
– David Hume
When you shut down emotion, you’re also affecting your immune system, your nervous system. So the repression of emotion, which is a survival strategy, then becomes a source of physiological illness later on.
– Gabor Maté
Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
Life, according to Zen, ought to be lived as a bird flies through the air, or as a fish swims in the water.
– D.T. Suzuki
And then it is another day and another and another but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.
– Jenny Offill
Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know. Acting without knowing takes you right off the cliff.
– Ray Bradbury
Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.
– Richard Powers
The world, whatever we might think about it, terrified by its vastness and by our helplessness in the face of it, embittered by its indifference to individual suffering – of people, animals, and perhaps also plants, for how can we be sure that plants are free of suffering; whatever we might think about its spaces pierced by the radiation of stars, stars around which we now have begun to discover planets, already dead? still dead? – we don’t know; whatever we might think about this immense theater, to which we may have a ticket, but it is valid for a ridiculously brief time, limited by two decisive dates; whatever else we might think about this world – it is amazing.
– Wisława Szymborska
I have come into this world to see this:
the sword drop from men’s hands even
at the height of their anger, because we
have finally realized there is just one
flesh to wound, our Beloved’s.
– Hafiz
The winters of your life are very important, and how you live your winters, or how you develop yourself and hone your inherent potential during those winters, is how beautifully the cherry blossoms of your life will blossom.
– Nakuul Mehta
This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
– Douglas Adams
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
– George Orwell
Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.
– Richard Powers
I hoard books
They are people
Who do not leave
– Anne Sexton
HIGHLIGHTS AND INTERSTICES
We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children, vacations, and emergencies. The uncommon parts. But the best is often when nothing is happening. The way a mother picks up the child almost without noticing and carries her across Waller Street while talking with the other woman. What if she could keep all of that? Our lives happen between the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.
– Jack Gilbert
What fills any of us with care enough
to say yes to this difficult world,
taking our places in it, despite
the risks, knowing the dangers?
– James Crews
PENELOPE AND ODYSSEUS
Not the moment when he slays the suitors
in the palace, their wild cries thicker
than history. Not the moment
when he shows them all his great deeds,
the dark scars where they tied him
from the Sirens.
Not the moment someone touches him
in wonder
and feels Hector’s death,
the flames of Troy, no land.
Not any of those moments. No.
Not those but the moment
he stands face to face with only her
and takes off the last of his armor
and she comes to him and touches his shoulder.
History is what happens
when we step out of the myths
and see the real mess standing before us.
Love is what happens after that.
– Joseph Fasano
The stunning message of the mystics is that in the very core of your being, you are God. Strictly speaking, God is neither within nor without – Spirit transcends all duality. But one discovers this by consistently looking within, until “within” becomes “beyond.”
– Ken Wilber
The Merry-Go-Round
by Aldous Huxley
The machine is ready to start. The symbolic beasts grow resty, curveting where they stand at their places in the great blue circle of the year. The Showman’s voice rings out. “Montez, mesdames et messieurs, montez. You, sir, must bestride the Ram. You will take the Scorpion. Yours, madame, is the Goat. As for you there, blackguard boy, you must be content with the Fishes. I have allotted you the Virgin, mademoiselle.” . . . “Polisson!” “Pardon, pardon. Evidemment, c’est le Sagittaire qu’on demande. Ohé, les dards! The rest must take what comes. The Twins shall counterpoise one another in the Scales. So, so. Now away we go, away.”
Ha, what keen air. Wind of the upper spaces. Snuff it deep, drink in the intoxication of our speed. Hark how the music swells and rings. . . . sphery music, music of every vagabond planet, every rooted star; sound of winds and seas and all the simmering millions of life. Moving, singing . . . so with a roar and a rush round we go and round, for ever whirling on a ceaseless Bank Holiday of drunken life and speed.
But I happened to look inwards among the machinery of our roundabout, and there I saw a slobbering cretin grinding at a wheel and sweating as he ground, and grinding eternally. And when I perceived that he was the author of all our speed and that the music was of his making, that everything depended on his grinding wheel, I thought I would like to get off. But we were going too fast.
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
– Aldo Leopold
When we introduce ourselves as Maaori we mention a river/sea, mountain, or long-deceased relative, as well as an entire tribe. All beings and objects contain a mauri or mana and are thereby interconnected. It’s not a ‘thingness’ or ‘plant-thinking’; it’s a constant awareness and relationship to the non-human – a relation that respects and manaaki all non-human entities. It’s impossible to explain how vastly our bodies relate to the world – they encompass soil, air, water, corpses, and even worms. Our bodies are the rhizomes, they are dynamic and beat softly in time with the rhythms of this world, because they are connected.
– Hana Pera Aoake, The Only Way Out Is Through
Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
– Tom Stoppard
…yet, listen, there was rain, then the swift interval before evaporation, & the stillness of brimming, & the wet rainbowing where oil from exhaust picks up light, sheds glow, then echoes in the drains where deep inside the drops fall individually, plink, & the places where birds interject, & the coming-on of heat, & the girl looking sideways carrying the large bouquet of blue hydrangeas, shaking the water off, & the wondering if this is it, or are we in for another round, a glance up, a quick step over the puddle carrying speedy clouds, birdcall now confident again, heat drying…
– Jorie Graham
When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to other. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.
– Joy Harjo
Now we have to get back the cosmos, and it can’t be done by a trick. The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again. It has taken two thousand years to kill them. Who knows how long it will take to bring them to life. When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos. — It is nothing human and personal that we are short of. What we lack is cosmic life, the sun in us and the moon in us.
– D.H. Lawrence
I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.
– Neil Gaiman
When I use the word “body,” I mean more than the physical machine. Not only do you physically live the circumstances around you but also those you only think of in your mind. Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people–in fact, the whole universe. This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from inside.
– Eugene Gendlin
Emotional healing does not depend on the process of figuring something out. It does not depend on conceptual understanding, but rather on a return of the feeling life to a natural biological rhythm. Emotional healing involves allowing the feelings to enter into the basic pulsations of the body. This is accomplished, in part, by separating those feelings from the arrhythmic clutch of thought.
The feeling life is not a conceptual experience. Feelings are not ideas, but subtle physical experiences. They take place in the body. They are not inherently meaningful in the way they seem to be when we apply our thoughts and beliefs to them. Feelings are part of the rhythm, the giving and receiving, the nourishment, and the interdependent ecology of our experience here.
– Stephen R. Schwartz
Sometimes we use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them. We use part of the mind as a screen to prevent another part of it from sensing what goes on elsewhere. […] One of the things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day.
The alleged vagueness, elusiveness, and intangibility of emotions and feelings are probably symptoms of this fact, an indication of how we cover the representation of our bodies, of how much mental imagery based on nonbody objects and events masks the reality of the body. Otherwise we would easily know that emotions and feelings are tangibly about the body. Sometimes we use our minds to hide a part of our being from another part of our being.
– António Damásio
I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn’t forget, I’m alive, I know I’m alive, I mustn’t forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.
– Ray Bradbury
When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?
– Tom Stoppard
From “Unfinished Vow,” the book I am working on, as I consider the violent burning of the boundary water forests: “Consider what a lump of coal actually is. It is time: sunlight that fell on fern forests three hundred million years ago, taken in by living things, laid down, buried, compressed through spans that make the whole of human history a rounding error. Oil is the same, the concentrated time of ancient seas. Our civilization’s founding act has been to burn hundreds of millions of years of stored being-time in the space of about two centuries, an eyeblink, and to exhale it into a sky whose consequences will be inherited by beings who have no vote in the matter because they have not yet been born. I know of no more precise description of the climate crisis than this: it is a derangement of time. We are spending the deep past to foreclose the future, and calling the transaction growth.”
– Joan Halifax
Finished in a frenzy that reminded me of our last night in Cambridge. Watched my final sunrise. Enjoyed a last cigarette. Didn’t think the view could be any more perfect until I saw that beat-up trilby. Honestly, Sixsmith, as ridiculous as that thing makes you look, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful. Watched you for as long as I dared. I don’t believe it was a fluke that I saw you first. I believe there is another world waiting for us, Sixsmith. A better world, and I’ll be waiting for you there. I believe we do not stay dead long. Find me beneath the Corsican stars, where we first kissed.
Yours eternally, R.F.
– David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Queer people don’t grow up as ourselves, we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimize humiliation and prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us and which parts we’ve created to protect us.
– Alexander Leon
“Want the Change,“ Rilke said, “O be inspired by the Flame!” To laurel, to nightingale, to wind… to *wanting* it, to be taken, to embrace, to fall to-ward the flame growing to fill all the senses and… not to love because it was no longer possible to act… but to be helplessly in a condition of love…”
– Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
The main thing in life is not to be afraid to be human.
– Pablo Casals
There are four chief obstacles in grasping truth … namely, submission to faulty and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular prejudice, and the concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display of our knowledge.
– Roger Bacon
The Living Road
All people have their own living road to heaven. Until they walk on this road, they are like drunkards who cannot tell which way is which.
Then when they set foot on this road and lose their confusion, it is up to them which way they shall go — they are no longer subject to the arbitrary directions of others.
– Zen Master Mi-An, (tr. Thomas Cleary)
How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best
by Andrea Gibson
When you are trapped in a nightmare, your motivation to awaken will be so much greater than that of someone caught up in a relatively pleasant dream.
– Eckhart Tolle
When I realized the storm
was inevitable, I made it
my medicine.
Took two snowflakes
on the tongue in the morning,
two snowflakes on the tongue
by noon.
There were no side effects.
Only sound effects. Reverb
added to my lifespan,
an echo that asked—
What part of your life’s record is skipping?
What wound is on repeat?
Have you done everything you can
to break out of that groove?
By nighttime, I was intimate
with the difference
between tying my laces
and tuning the string section
of my shoes, made a symphony of walking
away from everything that did not
want my life to sing.
Felt a love for myself so consistent
metronomes tried to copyright my heartbeat.
Finally understood I am the conductor
of my own life, and will be even after I die.
I, like the trees, will decide what I become:
Porch swing? Church pew?
An envelope that must be licked to be closed?
Kinky choice, but I didn’t close.
I opened and opened
until I could imagine that the pain
was the sensation of my spirit
not breaking,
that my mind was a parachute
that could always open
in time,
that I could wear my heart
on my sleeve and never grow
out of that shirt.
That every falling leaf is a tiny kite
with a string too small to see, held
by the part of me in charge
of making beauty
out of grief.
What failure still keeps you
Among us the unfinished
– W.S. Merwin
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can’t avoid. I mean my own body…Now it’s like an empty house.
– C.S. Lewis
Mine ear is open, and my heart prepared. The worst is worldly loss thou canst unfold. Say, is my kingdom lost?
– William Shakespeare
I can recover my calm by living the metaphors of the ocean.
– Gaston Bachelard
We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.
– Bill Hicks
An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it.
– Paul Valéry
Empire of Dreams
by Charles Simic
On the first page of my dreambook
It’s always evening
In an occupied country.
Hour before the curfew.
A small provincial city.
The houses all dark.
The storefronts gutted.
I am on a street corner
Where I shouldn’t be.
Alone and coatless
I have gone out to look
For a black dog who answers to my whistle.
I have a kind of Halloween mask
Which I am afraid to put on.
He looked like the kind of young man who should have experienced braces and private school, but when he opened his mouth, his family’s economies were evident.
– Christine Schutt
Great art picks up where nature ends.
– Marc Chagall
Across centuries and the
void of a world, sleepless, I
seek you.
– Rafael Alberti, (tr. Ben Belitt)
My ego exists in time-in a world of fear and trepidation. My true self has its being in eternity.
– Mendek Rubin
I have spent ten years becoming a saint. It was not easy because always the man I was in got in the way.
– Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight
You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars.
– Thomas Traherne
Something in us always resists being grasped and understood, and in that sense, opacity may be seen as a sturdiness in us…that connects to self-sovereignty.
– Avgi Saketopoulou
Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas.
– Donatella Versace
I have always desired- and
passionately— to belong to you,
with both my faults and my
good qualities: totally.
– Albert Camus
A people may prefer a free government, but if, from indolence, or carelessness, or cowardice, or want of public spirit, they are unequal to the exertions necessary for preserving it… they are unlikely long to enjoy it.
– John Stuart Mill
Art is a wound turned into light.
– Georges Braque
Suffering’s value is the unknown variable.
– Quinn Franzen
I would rather be on a sunny pacific (or, pacifist) atoll with you, mangoes, and grass huts of books.
– Sylvia Plath
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
– Francis Bacon
Being must be felt. It can’t be thought.
– Eckhart Tolle
I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvellous.
– Bill Moyers
I think people who are unhappy are always proud of being so, and therefore do not like to be told that there is nothing grand about their unhappiness.
– Bertrand Russell
Getting older means that without meaning to, you accidentally forgive almost everyone—almost.
– Anne Lamott
Shelving hard
decisions is the
least ethical
course.
– Sir George Adrian Cadbury
What do you have to do? Pack your bags, Go to the station without them, Catch the train, And leave your self behind.
– Wei Wu Wei
Most intellectuals and most artists belong to the same type. Only the strongest of them force their way through the atmosphere of the bourgeois earth and attain to the cosmic. The others all resigned themselves or make compromises.
– Hermann Hesse
From Homer’s Odyssey, Book I
Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
“Daughter!” the Cloud God said,
“You must be joking,
since how could I forget Odysseus?
He is more sensible than other humans,
and makes more sacrifices to the gods.
But Lord Poseidon rages, unrelenting,
because Odysseus destroyed the eye
of godlike Polyphemus, his own son,
the strongest of the Cyclopes-whose mother,
Thoösa, is a sea nymph, child of Phorcys,
the sea king; and she lay beside Poseidon
inside a hollow cave. So now Poseidon
prevents Odysseus from reaching home,
but does not kill him. Come then, we must plan:
How can he get back home? Poseidon must
give up his anger, since he cannot fight
alone against the will of all the gods.”
Craving and desire are the cause of all unhappiness. Everything sooner or later must change, so do not become attached to anything. Instead devote yourself to clearing your mind and finding true, lasting happiness.
– The Buddha
I avoid my gaze in
the mirror; I have no
interest in learning
what it feels like to
meet my eyes.
– Jayson Greene
A man who is seeking for realization is not only going around searching for his spectacles without realizing that they are on his nose all the time, but also were he not actually looking through them he would not be able to see what he is looking for!
– Wei Wu Wei
Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.
– Bertrand Russell
I’ll walk forever with stories inside me that the people I love the most can never hear.
– Michelle Hodkin
Jesus and Buddha didn’t build churches or temples.
They realized that when you make each breath holy,
you become the temple.
– Rabia Hayek
Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.
– Edgar Degas
The past beats inside me
like a second heart.
– John Banville
Instead of new branches,
I might grow deeper
roots.
– David Kishik
[Imagine] the problems you think you have. They will take care of themselves if you have enough faith in the inner power of grace. As I said before, there is nothing in the universe that wants to or can hurt you, if you are diligently working on yourself.
That will supersede everything else. It will put a halt on your karma, it will disintegrate your past lives, samskaras. It will cause your mind to slow down, and it will bring you extreme happiness.
– Robert Adams
Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you.
– Kahlil Gibran
Descartes said: I think, therefore I am. In the same way I can say: I have an image, therefore I exist.
– Abbas Kiarostami
The smartest people I know are dumb. I prefer instinctual people. There’s more fire in their eyes.
– Poetic Outlaws
All I ever wanted was to know what to do.
– Dave Eggers; You Shall Know Our Velocity!
the moon path
lined with blossoms
instead of answers
– @BashoSociety
Art should be very brave. Bravery is penniless. Are you still brave?
– Laura Kerr
one butterfly
the whole garden
changes plans
– Aoi
One must love with the mind of God, not just know with the mind of God.
– Paul Marshall
even the breeze
refuses to apologize
for changing
– Akari
The trick, in writing, is to stay no lighter than one actually is. Borrowed lightness shows its borrowing.
– Yahia Lababidi
Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.
– Madeleine L’Engle
When anxious, uneasy, and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
If everything you offered was not enough, offer your absence.
– Mario Benedetti
warm sand
the ocean
starts over
– Aiko
I really, really hate writing that pulls its punches, stalls out in exposition that we don’t need.
– Maggie Nelson
What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.
– Oscar Wilde
every sparrow
finds enough morning
to sing anyway
– Aoki
REMEMBER
There will be only a few days like this –
The low sun flinting the house
Through the green sea of the trees as you stand
Struck, blessed, bathed in the same light
That rose life once from the young earth, that appled
The first child’s cheeks.
There will be only a few days like this
To stop doing and stand, blinking,
As the leverets tumble in the bright field
And a cuckoo’s moss voice calls from a far wood.
Wait until the sun has gone in broken orange
Down beneath the hills, and the blue sky
Hurts with the sudden shudder of the dusk.
Give thanks and turn and go back home –
For there will be only a few days like this.
– Kenneth C. Steven
To be insulted, you must first agree to carry the weight of another’s ignorance.
– Buddha
Whoever, at any time, has undertaken to build a new heaven has found the strength for it in his own hell…
– Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no virtue in advertising one’s sadness. But there is no wisdom in denying it either. And there is the beautiful possibility that great love can grow out of sadness if it is well-tended.
– Allen Levi
The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead.
– Aristotle
I never again shall tell you
what I think.
I shall be sweet and crafty, soft
and sly.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.
– Anne Sexton
Stop thinking about art works as objects and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. What makes a work of art good for you is not something that is already inside it but something that happens inside you.
– Brian Eno
summer rain
the roof
learning music
– Ogawa
Only God is objective, but he’s long
gone, the thing that could save you
explained away.
– Karen Solie
The First Step
Even if you are on the first step, you ought
to be dignified and happy.
To have got this far is no small thing;
what you have done is a glorious honor.
Even that first step, even the first,
is very far removed from the common lot.
In order for you to proceed upon this stair
you must claim your right to be
a citizen of the city of ideas.
– Constantine Cavafy
Give up all ideas about yourself and simply be.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild–the mallard-thought, which ‘mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself–and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.
– Henry David Thoreau
To feel the Love
of people
whom we love
is a fire that
feeds our Life
– Pablo Neruda
Fiction is a thing of comparatively recent birth; poetry is an older and men say a greater art.
– A. Edward Newton
Sleeping with the Dictionary
by Harryette Mullen
I beg to dicker with my silver-tongued companion, whose lips are ready to read my shining gloss. A versatile partner, conversant and well-versed in the verbal art, the dictionary is not averse to the solitary habits of the curiously wide-awake reader. In the dark night’s insomnia, the book is a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic trance of language. Retiring to the canopy of the bedroom, turning on the bedside light, taking the big dictionary to bed, clutching the unabridged bulk, heavy with the weight of all the meanings between these covers, smoothing the thin sheets, thick with accented syllables—all are exercises in the conscious regimen of dreamers, who toss words on their tongues while turning illuminated pages. To go through all these motions and procedures, groping in the dark for an alluring word, is the poet’s nocturnal mission. Aroused by myriad possibilities, we try out the most perverse positions in the practice of our nightly act, the penetration of the denotative body of the work. Any exit from the logic of language might be an entry in a symptomatic dictionary. The alphabetical order of this ample block of knowledge might render a dense lexicon of lucid hallucinations. Beside the bed, a pad lies open to record the meandering of migratory words. In the rapid eye movement of the poet’s night vision, this dictum can be decoded, like the secret acrostic of a lover’s name.
The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end – you don’t come to an achievement, you don’t come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.
– Krishnamurti
… my religion were a charmed despair,
Did I not in thy perfect heart discover
How beauty can be true and virtue fair.
– George Santayana
a blue sky
making room
for impossible things
– Ogawa
Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.
– Albert Einstein
At the Waystation
When I licked yellow
lilies, the monarch
mocked my tongue.
– Ori Fienberg
Creation was not finished till the poet came to interpret, and so complete it.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne
If you only walk on sunny days, you’ll never reach your destination.
– Paulo Coelho
The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.
– Albert Einstein
Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself.
– Paulo Coelho
The god is so skilled a poet that he can make others into poets: once Love touches him, anyone becomes a poet, ‘howe’er uncultured he had been before.’
– Agathon, Symposium
Be softer with you. You
are a breathing thing.
– Nayyirah Waheed
Always be mindful of the kindness and not the faults of others.
– Buddha
Everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.
– Patrick Rothfuss
Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.
– Buddha
I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
On the secretly blushing cheek is reflected the glow of the heart.
– Søren Kierkegaard
The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.
– Seneca
Why do I need to humiliate myself? Why do I need to call to those who don’t want to come, and why does it sadden me to receive those who arrive with a desire to see me?
– Alejandra Pizarnik
He who blames others, his enemies, or the spirit of the times for his failures does not deserve to triumph. For it is in the natural order of things that the enemy should oppress you and that circumstances should be hostile.
– Guillaume Faye
I don’t agonize about writing. I totally enjoy the act of writing, and I think of myself more like a furniture-maker, somebody who sits there sanding the table and staining and waxing it.
– Eliot Weinberger
The essence of courage is saying Yes to the reality of this moment. By Yes I mean a fundamental acceptance of life in the here and now.
– Tara Brach
The body has been designed to renew itself through continuous self-correction. These same principles also apply to the healing of psyche, spirit, and soul.
– Peter A. Levine
You cannot make everyone think and feel as deeply as you do. This is your tragedy … because you understand them, and they do not understand you.
– Daniel Saint
But then it passed, as all
things do.
– Khaled Hosseini
Life is not like water. Things in life don’t necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.
– Haruki Murakami
Don’t you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?
– Søren Kierkegaard
The most disciplined people I know aren’t trying to become someone new. They’re fighting every day to avoid becoming the person they used to be.
– Unknown
There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on
its knees.
– Victor Hugo
I want to make things that put me in the position of innocence, that recreate the feeling of innocence in you.
– Brian Eno
Forget about everything. Begin to go backwards into your source. Negate everything. Do not allow any condition to make you feel as if something is wrong somewhere.
– Robert Adams
The elms with arms of love wrapped us in shade
Who watched the ecstatic west with one desire,
One soul uprapt; and still another fire
Consumed us, and our joy yet greater made:
That Bach should sing for us, mix us in one
The joy of firelight and the sunken sun.
– Ivor Gurney
Hope awakens courage. He
who can implant courage in
the human soul is the best
physician.
– Karl Ludwig von Knebel
Burnout isn’t the price of success.
It’s the cost of poor leadership.
– Arianna Huffington
Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones.
– Seneca
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
– Marcus Aurelius
I have got lost;
I am everything that has got lost.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
And if life is repeated a thousand times Still you, you, and again, you.
– Forough Farrokhzad
It is only through some kind of delight, some feeling of joy or pleasure or some genuine affection or desire, that a person can work and bring about any change of being in himself. Fear, for example, will not act in this way…
…A man may have some knowledge of truth, but unless he values it, unless he feels some delight in it, it cannot affect him. It cannot act on him, for a man unites with truth only through his love, as it were, and in this way his being is changed. But if he is negative, then…
…his love-life—that is, his emotional side—is in a wrong state & it will be the same if he is in a state of fear and feels compelled to do something against his will. To do a thing willingly, from a delight in doing it, will effect a change in you.
– Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries on the Psychological
Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky
It is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war.
– Miyamoto Musashi
How do you start? By letting go of all your problems. All those things that have been hounding you, all those things you love so much, mentally letting them go, and inquiring, “To whom do they come?”
– Robert Adams
People empty me, I have to get away to refill.
– Charles Bukowski
A dictatorship means muzzles all round, and consequently stultification. Science can flourish only in an atmosphere of free speech.
– Albert Einstein
No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth.
– Seneca
Now, if you keep this law, you don’t have to broadcast what you want; you simply assume that you have it, for — although your reasonable mind and outer senses deny it — if you persist in your assumption your desire will become your reality.
– Neville Goddard
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
– Edgar Degas
If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
– John von Neumann
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
– William James
All the ups and downs are grace in different wrappings, sent to refine consciousness. Say thanks to them all.
– Mooji
All you had to do was to wake up and you wouldn’t have to go through all those hours and years and eons of meditation techniques, various procedures, all you had to do was wake up. You simply had to awaken, that’s all you had to do.
– Robert Adams
I know that you are with me, because I have seen
In things your shadow, which is peace;
And the reasons have been clarified for me
of humble deeds, and the walking
along the white path has become for me
an exercise in happiness.
– José María Pemán
Men have always sought affinity with the defeated Trojans and not with the victorious Greeks. Perhaps it is because there is a dignity in defeat that barely corresponds to victory.
– Jorge Luis Borges
The duties of universal obligation are between sovereign and minister, father and son, husband and wife, elder and younger brother, friend and friend.
– Confucius
Do not count your defeats before the war is over. One victory may yet make them all forgotten.
– Miyamoto Musashi
Solitude is a function of the mind. A man attached to desires cannot get solitude wherever he may be, whereas a detached man is always in solitude.
– Ramana Maharshi
The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
– Milan Kundera
A luminous intuition tells him that the novels of the future will be something like this: illustrated almanacs, enormous catalogs, curiosity cabinets on which the authors, mere copyists, write commentaries.
– Carlos Fonseca
finished preparing to die
the moonlight falls
at an angle
– Mari Maria
Learning is finding out what you already know.
– Richard Bach
They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
– Joseph Conrad
A great, wise person looks at it
And does not get involved.
– Chan Master Fenyang
I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.
– Albert Einstein
To be thoughtful and kind only takes a few seconds compared to the timeless hurt caused by one rude gesture.
– Byron Pulsifer
Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.
– Voltaire
Censorship isn’t always deleting a voice.
Sometimes it’s surrounding it with so much noise that no one hears it.
Modern algorithms do this at scale.
– Mo Zarrinsadaf
I do not want to admit my strategies
are strategies. I do not want to admit it is only
a thin rhyme, a kind of vanity that holds me up.
– Quinn Franzen
Be grateful you slipped through the hands of people who had no clue how to hold you.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Some of us exist in the background of every story. Likeable, not loveable. Needed but not wanted. Present, but not included. Observed, but never truly seen.
– Anna Marrie
If a million loved you, I am one of them, and if one loved you, it was me. If no one loved you then know that I am dead.
– Franz Kafka
There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Listen!
If stars are lit
It means there is someone who needs it,
It means someone wants them to be,
That someone deems those specks of spit
Magnificent!
– Vladimir Mayakovsky
The wise man delights in water, the Good man delights in mountains. For the wise move; but the Good stay still. The wise are happy; but the good secure.
– Confucius
“We are not seeking power. We are seeking the end of power! What do you say?” Maedda appealed to Shevek. “The means are the end. Odo said it all her life. Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice! We cannot be divided on that on the eve of action!”
– Ursula Le Guin
One day, I hope our maps become less famous than our gardens, and our children know the names of birds better than the names of missiles.
– Karim Wafa-Al Hussaini
Every day that we fail to live out the maximum of our potentialities we kill the Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Christ which is in us.
– Henry Miller
The monk asked, “Who owns the mountain?”
The elder replied, “Ask the mountain. It has survived every flag planted on it.”
The monk sold the flag and bought a seed.
I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consists in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.
– Thomas Paine
Americans are relearning the lesson we learned during the Gilded Age of the late 1890s, when robber barons ran the government and the economy for their own benefit: Oligarchy is incompatible with the common good.
I’m hopeful we’ll respond with a new progressive movement.
– Robert Reich
When you climb a mountain, the higher you climb, the higher it is; when you go into the ocean, the farther you go, the deeper it is.
– Hakuin Ekaku
I learned to be with myself rather than avoiding myself with limiting habits; I started to be aware of my feelings more, rather than numb them.
– Judith Wright
When you change houses you always lose something. Every move betrays you, it always cheats you somehow. I’m still looking for certain things.
– Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts
The past is a place of reference, not a place of residence; the past is a place of learning, not a place of living.
– Roy T. Bennett
Innocence means a mind that is incapable not only of hurting others but also of being contaminated or corrupted.
– Krishnamurti
A man who has suffered much and wandered much has pleasure out of his sorrows.
– Homer’s Odyssey
There’s a big difference between being numb to something and being immune to it.
– Michael Monroe
The wings of the ostrich wave proudly, but are they the pinions and plumage of love?
– Job 39:13
True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.
– Philip Pullman
The best things arrive on time.
– Dorothy Gilman
Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
– Flannery O’Connor
when we talk about eternity, we likely have the wrong concept in mind. If we are thinking about unending time that goes on forever, we are thinking of perpetuity, not eternity. Eternity is above or beyond time, as we think of God transcending time.
– C. S. Lewis
Someone has already crossed the river you’re afraid will drown you.They left a bridge behind, disguised as a book, a song, a film, a prayer, a piece of art. Keep on. Reach out. Remain curious. Gently, gracefully.
– Omondi Ochuka
No woman has ever written enough.
– Bell Hooks
We are saying that something is wrong … with capitalism…. There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.
– MLK
Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.
– Audre Lorde
The fundamental algorithm of life: repeat what works.
– Charlie Munger
Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script.
– Tom Wolfe
We’re all together inside a system that scripts and constructs not just behavior but imagination.
– Claudia Rankine
Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all life really means.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
At every moment, you are not just what had been but also what you will be.
– Oscar Wilde
There were nights when I believed myself so sure of being able to forget her that I voluntarily remembered her.
– Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph
Until I was about seven, I thought books were just there, like trees. When I learned that people actually wrote them, I wanted to, too, because all children aspire to inhuman feats like flying.
– Fran Lebowitz
Flowers, themselves too in bondage, have contrived in their captivity sublime stratagems for passing on their messages.
– Marcel Proust
[I traveled to expectancy]
I traveled to expectancy
Through expectancy
Feared my way through
Fear my scholarship
Criterion among criterions
I loitered at the wooden
Doors I had a touch
Of something like a flu
A forfeiture of something
In my gut but like a charm
A gendered thing I guess
I wasn’t swayed to bring it up
– Jane Huffman
Accepting something, by the way, isn’t the same as liking it. To accept a feeling that we habitually associate with discomfort doesn’t mean we immediately turn around and start enjoying it. It means being okay with it as part of the texture of human life.
– Pema Chödrön
THE SILENCE OF THE STARS
When Laurens van der Post one night
In the Kalahari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn’t hear the stars
Singing, they didn’t believe him. They looked at him,
half-smiling. They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them. Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened. One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now?
And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No. They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now. On some clear night
When nearby houses have turned off their visions,
When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
Are between crossings, when the wind
Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence where the inside jokes
Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
My fair share of the music of the spheres
And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
Still tending ever tone-deaf creatures
Through their exiles in the desert.
– David Wagoner
All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still.
– Anton Chekhov
Make no mistake- you can change things. Question everything, take nothing for granted; argue with all received ideas, don’t respect what does not deserve respect; speak your mind, don’t censor yourself; use your imagination and express what it tells you to express. These are the weapons of the mind.
– Salman Rushdie
Until a day came when he said, Marie, you know how we’ve been waiting for the big pain to come? I think it’s here. I think this is it. I think it’s been here all along.
– Marie Howe
Who is a good person? A good person is one who praises good people. Some people are looking for mistakes, to put people down – operating from cynicism. But a good person is looking for goodness and when a good person sees it, he or she praises. The idea is that morality is based on praise, not on good works as such and certainly not on obeying commandments as such. In this spontaneity that praises lies the basis for a rich morality indeed.
Again, it’s the difference between original blessing and original sin.
You begin with what’s good in people and build it up. Then the goodness increases in its presence. But the other way around just doesn’t do the job.
The word “Eucharist” just means “thank you;” it is the word for thanks or praise in Greek.
– Rupert Sheldrake, Natural Grace
We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.
– Grace Paley
We live in a country where the mantra of the powerful is “Move on from the dead.” Move on from the reasons behind assassinations and wars and genocides and pandemics and deaths of despair. Move on and do not look too hard at who is responsible, because that may spur reevaluation and recourse.
– Sarah Kendzior
In 1933, Einstein responded to a letter he received from a despondent and out of work musician from Munich who was living in mortal fear from the Nazi Machtergreifung and attempting to flee Germany. He asked specifically if Einstein had any advice as to how to maintain his mental health in these dark times. Einstein responded:
I am the one to whom you wrote in care of the Belgian Academy… Read no newspapers, try to find a few friends who think as you do, read the wonderful writers of earlier times, Kant, Goethe, Lessing, and the classics of other lands, and enjoy the natural beauties of Munich’s surroundings. Make believe all the time that you are living, so to speak, on Mars among alien creatures and blot out any deeper interest in the actions of those creatures. Make friends with a few animals. Then you will become a cheerful man once more and nothing will be able to trouble you. Bear in mind that those who are finer and nobler are always alone-and necessarily so-and that because of this they can enjoy the purity of t heir own atmosphere. I shake your hand in heartfelt comradeship, E.
– Jamie Sayen, Einstein in America
He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.
– Ken Kesey
You don’t have to set aside a time for meditation. You can do it while you’re driving your car, while you’re at work, while you’re playing music. Just be aware of yourself, of who you really are, and realize the rest is a projection of your mind.
– Robert Adams
He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no sense.
– Philip Roth, American Pastoral
Poverty, in the stories and books will be colorful.
In fact, poverty is very fierce and painful.
– unknown
When you love, you remember
everything.
– Sue Monk Kidd
Just as we have to be careful about what food we put into our mouths, we should also be careful about what mental food we put into our minds. We should avoid feeding our minds with too much hate, greed and other junk information.
– Yuval Noah Harari
You must not stop keeping a diary!
– Franz Kafka, 1912.
There are two ways to avoid suffering. The first is easy: accept hell and become part of it until you stop perceiving it. The second is risky and requires continuous learning: try to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, is not hell, and preserve them.
– Italo Calvino
Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.
– Boethius
To be left alone is the most
precious thing one can ask
of the modern world.
– Anthony Burgess
Some nights I wake and everything hurts a little. It is
amazing how long a ruined thing will burn.
– Paul Guest
And it’s a pleasure to spend this sunny day
pacing the carpet and repeating the words,
feeling the syllables lock into rows
until I can stand and declare,
the book held closed by my side,
that hours, days, and months are but the rags
of time.
– Billy Collins
Existence is one. The body is the visible soul, and the soul is the invisible body – it is one mystery. Don’t divide it, and don’t make a conflict between them.
– Osho
Remember then, were not the words that made your blood run cold, that brought the blood to your cheeks, that made you tremble or delighted you,-did they not sound to you as old as yourself?
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
An increase in ‘charity’ is an enormous gain.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner – no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
– C.S. Lewis
Everyday Buddhist: Buddha is not something to be attained but something to be realized in the very fabric of our daily lives.
I cannot escape the feeling that I have been made
for a purpose, but I cannot find it.
– Franz Kafka
Strive to bring back
the god in yourselves
to the God in the All.
– Plotinus
It is the destiny of stars to collapse.
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
We take ourselves for granted. We take the fact that we can speak or think or move or see or hear all for granted. We do not realize that we can explain nothing of all this, & that we simply do not know. To become aware of this gives a sense of wonder…
– Maurice Nicoll
The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement.
– Karl Popper
In winter I think spring will be my salvation, and in summer I think autumn, and in autumn winter, it is always the same, I hope from one season to the next.
– Thomas Bernhard
The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego… Awareness and ego cannot coexist.
– Eckhart Tolle
Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.
– Philip Roth
I was terribly sensitive, and determined
never to show it.
– Ottessa Moshfegh
Touched by the true sublime your soul is naturally lifted up, she rises to a proud height, is filled with joy and vaunting, as if she had herself created this thing that she has heard.
– Longinus
How easy life is when it’s easy, and how hard when it’s hard.
– Philip Roth
Should I be grateful or
should I curse the fact that
despite all misfortune I can
still feel love.
– Franz Kafka
The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, are not of long duration: so in the world are man and his dwellings.
– Kamo no Chōmei
He who does not travel, who does not read,
who does not listen to music,
who does not find grace in himself,
she who does not find grace in herself,
dies slowly.
– Pablo Neruda
Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. … The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that power into this world.
– Eckhart Tolle
Nothing that was real ever died, only names, forms, and illusions.
– Eckhart Tolle
We began to marvel at our own ability to manufacture awe.
– Don DeLillo
It is one thing to introduce a new doctrine into the world, it is something else to live it.
– Søren Kierkegaard
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
Truly, I consider the man who succeeds in healing himself of a vice as infinitely braver than a soldier or a man who defends his honor in a duel.
– Charles Baudelaire
You don’t want to live in a shameless culture. There are some behaviors that one should be ashamed of.
– Nancy McWilliams
Your whole life, your whole being, including your body, is part of a system.
What happens in one part affects every other part.
Once you stop thinking of your problems as disconnected, isolated from one another, things become more manageable.
– Dean Abbott
The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
– Philip Roth
Industrialism, as it exists now, destroys beauty, creates ugliness, and tends to destroy artistic capacity.
– Bertrand Russell
summer afternoon
envying the old poet
asleep on bamboo
– Basho
Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man.
– Sigmund Freud
LSD was never useful for writing, but it was useful for thinking. Speed was a bit more useful for writing, but I had to make sure I didn’t take too much of it.
– Alice Notley
But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
– Albert Camus
Fortunately, analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.
– Karen Horney
Nothing gives rise to creative enthusiasm as much as music. These very verses that I prefer are almost all linked to pieces by Chopin and Beethoven.
– Hermann Hesse
I feel more confident and more satisfied with myself when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress.
– Anton Chekhov
dragonfly
a whole philosophy
without words
– Ogawa
not arguing with someone who’s emotionally dysregulated is a form of self respect.
– Dr. Nicole LePera
I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
every desire
casts a shadow
called tomorrow
– Ogawa
one wild path
enough for
a lifetime
– Ogawa
Her heart was a secret
garden and the walls
were very high.
– William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Life is what is happening
this instant.
The greatest art
is the art of living.
– J. Krishnamurti
There was no mystery: even before I learned to read and write I knew it was in order to write poetry.
– Yves Bonnefoy
Aren’t we all waiting to
be read by someone.
Praying, that they’ll tell
us that we make sense?
– Ruby Francisco
T.S. Eliot was right: Paradise Lost changed how we hear poetry.
– Gordon Teskey
If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.
– Charles Darwin
You can make a good film which is just that, a good film. But sometimes there are films which are not so good, but they are still worthwhile because they suggest new directions.
– Abbas Kiarostami
To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
– Cynthia Ozick
True problems are the Ideas themselves or the archetypes.
– Deleuze
You would be better off with a woman. / Men will only break your heart—the celestial body // turned debris. Men want to touch every / star.
– Gary Jackson
There is nothing I want to know. But what I need to know, I come to know.
– Nisargadatta
What you are looking for is where you are looking from.
– Saint Francis
It’s never fun when old friends abandon you– literally or emotionally– as you reorganize your life & personality in trauma recovery. But it doesn’t mean you’ve done something wrong, or that you need to go back to who you were.
Stay committed to you, your needs, & your future.
– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle
Until looking up I saw myself like a cloud,
like ectoplasm, like an angel
among the branches of trees.
Then peeling layer after layer
I went to it letting go…
– Ruth Stone
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
– Albert Einstein
A good man without strength is hoping that evil has mercy.
– Sun Tzu
When you tire
of the round,
consider the peace
at the center.
– Kenneth Folk
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power.
– Timothy Snyder
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
– John Steinbeck
Talent cannot originate, genius must.
– Harold Bloom
The isolation isn’t safety, it is death. If no one knows
you are alive, you aren’t.
– Neil Hilborn
Natural desires are limited; those which spring from false opinions have nowhere to stop, for falsity has no point of termination.
– Seneca
The whole of contemporary politics oppresses me with a continuous physical horror like the feeling of growing madness in one’s brain.
– T. S. Eliot
He who thinks materialistically only knows that one can physically reach & assist another person. He has no notion that his inner feelings have significance for others, or bonds, invisible to physical sight, link soul to soul. A mystic is well aware of these bonds.
– Rudolf Steiner
Humanity builds great works upon the sand
and like a child, time topples them with its feet.
– Kostas Karyotakis
The mutual care that family life expresses is our buddha-nature, actualizing itself in its most palpable and tender ways.
– Lama John Makransky
Good men must know violence, so evil men do not become fluent in it.
– Miyamoto Misashi
Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
– Arthur Miller
The Three Oddest Words
When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.
– Wislawa Szymborska
The difficulty lies not so much
in developing new ideas as in
escaping from old ones.
– John Maynard Keynes
I came home one day from school after being chased by kids singing “Yellow Submarine”, and I didn’t understand why. It just seemed surreal: why are they singing that song to me? I came home and I freaked out on my dad: ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were in The Beatles?’ And he said, ‘Oh, sorry. Probably should have told you that.’
– Dhani Harrison
Everything written has a political bearing, even in the case of a study on bees.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
– George Orwell
The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.
– Theodor Adorno
What are the convulsions of a city in comparison with the insurrections of the soul?
– Victor Hugo
Pan me, don’t give me the part, publish everybody’s book but this one and I will still make it! Why? Because I believe I will. If you believe, then you hang on. If you believe, it means you’ve got imagination, you don’t need stuff thrown out for you in a blueprint, you don’t face facts – what can stop you? If I don’t make it today, I’ll come in tomorrow.
– Ruth Gordon
He was reaching that age, he was at the edge of it, when the world becomes suddenly more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before the rain. The world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long, passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given.
– James Salter, Light Years
we are not careful about
perpetuating high dreams that
look up to peace and down on
angry people, nothing has
changed.
– Arnold Mindell
I am convinced that cinema can
convey certain things that no
language in the world can translate.
For me, it goes back to the Tower
of Babel, to before the division into
different languages.
– Artavazd Pelechian
Modernity’s grave mistake is thinking that the obstruction is in the way. And that the thing to do is to get rid of the thing in the way so that the way might carry us to the ends we seek. So that we might proceed.
This thinking follows from a logic of distance, one that separates us from the way and the way from the obstruction. What if, however, the obstruction is the way densely assembled? The road folded on itself? What if your beloved isn’t on the other side of the rock, but is mothered by the rock, gestating in the rock’s belly? What if the world is so ravishingly intimate with itself that the partner you seek is intercarnated with the difficulty of embrace? What then?
What might a theology of intimacy teach modernity and its anxious citizens about roads, obstructions, love, bodies and being at home?
It might teach us this: love the obstacle so soulfully that it spills its secrets. Stay in the crack of the world long enough to realize you are already partnered and held beyond your images of arrival.
Beyond your images of completion.
Let the obstacle bend you so that the unbearable burdens of love might find a way to dance the world into new shapes.
The rock is how your beloved arrives. Press your ear on the rock in the road, and your very ear might tickle your partner hidden in its side, the one carved from the obstruction.
So, ask not how to get past the obstacle. Ask this: what if the obstacle has been carrying me all along?
– Báyò Akomolafe
Clear thinking is rarely forgivable.
– René Girard
We have to learn now
to live in the future that
we are fighting for,
rather than compromising
in the vain hope of a future
that is always deferred,
always unreal.
– Mary Daly
Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that.
– Mikhail Bulgakov
Believe a single thought that runs contrary to what is and you suffer. No exceptions.
– Adyashanti
…Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, it locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.
– McLuhan
The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession.
– Thomas Carlyle
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
– Paul Valery
My advice is, never do to-morrow what you can do to-day. Procrastination is the thief of time.
– Charles Dickens
Marry while you’re young; because as you get older you become wiser, and wise people don’t get married.
– Agatha Christier
Many people are so used to chaos that when they get a taste of alignment they sabotage it. Alignment feels like everything is right, it feels like peace, and they’re not used to that.
– Nika Solé
high summer
the trippy pink
of wild orchids
– Tony Williams
A spacious view and a thorough, careful attitude regarding your activities are never contradictory.
– Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
dandelions
the stubborn joy
of ordinary places
– Aoki
To move the world we must move ourselves.
– Socrates
Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
– Carl Jung
In a day, when you don’t come across any problems – you can be sure that you are traveling in a wrong path.
– Swami Vivekananda
A single moment of patience can prevent a lifetime of regret.
– Japanese Proverb
I’m not actually tired, but numb and
heavy, and can’t find the right words.
– Franz Kafka
Sometime I think; and sometime I am.
– Paul Valéry
The moment you start caring about what a gallery or a publisher thinks, you stop being an artist and become an employee.
– Remedios Varo
Most customers, by the time the musicians reach the second set, are to some extent inebriated. They don’t care what you play anyway.
– Charles Mingus
morning tea
peace has
a favorite cup
– Aoki
We have to learn to think in a new way.
– Prof. Carl Sagan
Aging isn’t just the accumulation of damage—it’s often the loss of balance. When the sympathetic “fight-or-flight” system stays switched on and the parasympathetic “rest-and-repair” system can’t keep up, inflammation rises, recovery suffers, and aging accelerates.
– Frank Lipman, MD
In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That’s a little bit too much.
– Miles Davis
Wynton Marsalis is jazzy the same way someone who drives a BMW is sporty.
– Keith Jarrett
All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie.
– Francois Truffaut
All the words I had to say turned into stars.
– Guillaume Apollinaire
It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.
– Arthur Machen
Every day sees humanity more victorious in the struggle with space and time.
– Guglielmo Marconi
We have observed that most of the trouble in the world has been caused by ten to twenty percent of folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus.
– William S. Burroughs
Often we are not able to cure, but we are always able to care.
– Henri Nouwen
Man might be a network of exquisite nerves running over the whole universe, a subtle spider’s web of pity.
– G.K. Chesterton
Many of the things you can count, don’t count. Many of the things you can’t count, really count.
– Albert Einstein
When I started reading as a little boy, of course I wanted an escape from the small town where I was living. But what I discovered was that the escape you get from art isn’t away from the world but into an infinitely wider one – into life.
– John Banville
I will not subscribe to your rhetoric,
you may speak between margins,
but the sun has lifted the ink you left.
– Tess Rio
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
– Thomas Jefferson
Whatever you may be sure of,
be sure of this – you are
dreadfully like other people.
– James Russell Lowell
A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair’s breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I want you to triple down on what you’re naturally good at. Ironically, you’ll find that it actually compensates for your weaknesses more effectively than trying to turn a weakness into a strength.
– Gary Vaynerchuk
We cannot become what we want by remaining what we are.
– Max DePree
And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.
– Marilynne Robinson
The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.
– Vince Lombardi
I saw the world from the stars’ point of view, and it looked unbearably lonely.
– Shaun David Hutchinson
Find yourself someone who talks to you like Kate Bush sings to Peter Gabriel in Don’t Give Up.
– R. E. Sanders
A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.
– Robert Frost
The Prelude, subtitled Growth of a Poet’s Mind, Wordsworth describes how inspiration requires both the effort by which the mind ‘aspires, grasps, struggles, wishes, craves’ and the stillness of the mind which ‘fits [the poet] to receive it, when unsought’. An effort must be made at first, but, despite the effort, inspiration still only comes unsought.
– Iain McGilchrist
A favorite analogy of mine for the poem is the eye chart, where you have this big E at the top of the chart when you take an eye test. A poem should start with a big E, you know, something everybody can recognize. The gambit of the poem is not making any demands on you emotionally or intellectually. It’s sort of setting something up that’s undeniable. Something like “I’m sitting here at the window with this tree. It’s snowing.” I mean, the reader can’t say, bullshit, I don’t buy it. And then as the letters get smaller the poem can move into areas of ambiguity and subtlety, or fantasy and hypothesis. The poem should start in Kansas and get to Oz, you know.
– Billy Collins
Horizon has been defeated
By the pirates of the new age
Alien casinos
Well maybe it’s just time to say
The things can go bad
And make you wanna run away
But as we grow older
The trouble just seems to stay
Future complications
In the strings between the cans
But no prints can come from fingers
If machines become our hands
And then our feet become the wheels
And then the wheels become the cars
And then the rigs begin to drill
Until the drilling goes too far
Things can go bad
And make you wanna run away
But as we grow older
Horizon begins to fade, fade, fade, fade away
Thingamajigsaw puzzled
And anger don’t you step too close
‘Cause people are lonely
And only animals with fancy shoes
And Hallelujahs exact nothing
And misery it’s on the loose
‘Cause people are lonely
And only animals with too many tools
That can build all the junk that we sell
Aw sometimes man make you wanna yell
That things can go bad
And make you wanna run away
But as we grow older
Horizon begins to fade away
Begins to fade away,
begins to fade, fade, fade.
Begins to fade away
– Jack Johnson
Education loses its way when it focuses entirely on money-driven technologies, “marketable” skills, and preparing children for nothing other than playing the empty game of wealth.
You cannot educate a person without educating the whole human being. And that means, in part, that every curriculum, whether public or private, should include instruction in ethics.
That doesn’t mean teaching children *what* to think, or indoctrinating them with a particular ideology; it means teaching them *how* to grow their empathy and love, how to be sure they are thinking about others at least as much as themselves, about the interpersonal, local, and global consequences (and impact) of their actions.
And guess what? That’s what the human being actually wants. That’s the connection we crave before being corrupted by a cynical attitude toward self, toward others, toward “success.”
So much of modern misery is a result of a disconnected solipsism, which arises from a consumerism that intentionally isolates each person, turning them into a perpetually dissatisfied consumer, a solitary sadness-robot that seeks out false fulfillment by purchasing more, more, more.
We can’t let that happen to the next generation.
What we need is connection. What we need is critical thinking, literacy, and the justice that can be nurtured only by those whose lives are as whole as they can be.
What we need, desperately, is a vision of selfhood that understands that each life should pursue individual passions and gifts, yes, *and* that when we dig down deep enough into the self, we find the other.
Every time AI enters the education-chat, remind yourself (and anyone who will listen) that we should be spending at least as much time talking with our children and ourselves about what it means to be an ethical operator of any technology, including the great and ancient technology of a human life.
– Joseph Fasano
At times, we must lay down
upon the earth and grieve
what the path will eventually
ask of us.
Everything.
– Matt Licata
Words are like birds… When you publish books, you are setting caged birds free. They can go wherever they please. They can fly over the highest walls and across vast distances, settling in the mansions of the gentry, in farmsteads and labourers’ cottages alike. You never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet songs.
– Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky
BEYOND THE HEADLINES
Then I saw the wild geese flying
In fair formation to their bases in Inchicore
And I knew that these wings would outwear the wings of war
And a man’s simple thoughts outlive the day’s loud lying.
Don’t fear, don’t fear, I said to my soul.
The Bedlam of Time is an empty bucket rattled,
“Tis you who will say in the end who best battles.
Only they who fly home to God have flown at all.
– Patrick Kavanagh
The Sea
I need the sea because it teaches me.
I don’t know if I learn music or awareness,
if it’s a single wave or its vast existence,
or only its harsh voice or its shining
suggestion of fishes and ships.
The fact is that until I fall asleep,
in some magnetic way I move in
the university of the waves.
It’s not simply the shells crunched
as if some shivering planet
were giving signs of its gradual death;
no, I reconstruct the day out of a fragment,
the stalactite from the sliver of salt,
and the great god out of a spoonful.
What it taught me before, I keep. It’s air
ceaseless wind, water and sand.
It seems a small thing for a young person,
to have come here to live with his own fire;
nevertheless, the pulse that rose
and fell in its abyss,
the crackling of the blue cold,
the gradual wearing away of the star,
the soft unfolding of the wave
squandering snow with its foam,
the quiet power out there, sure
as a stone shrine in the depths,
replaced my world in which were growing
stubborn sorrow, gathering oblivion,
and my life changed suddenly:
as I became part of its pure movement.
– Pablo Neruda
Light gives me a feeling of spiritual atmosphere. Light is with you –you do not have to feel you are alone.
– Sven Nykvist
But I think it is very useful, and indeed more accurate, to call it “the mind” instead of “my mind.”
Imagine if for the next twenty-four hours you had to wear a cap that amplified your thoughts so that everyone within a hundred yards of you could hear every thought that passed through your head. Imagine if the mind were broadcast so that all about you could overhear your thoughts and fantasies, your dreams and fears. How embarrassed or fearful would you be to go outside? How long would you let your fear of the mind continue to isolate you from the hearts of others? And though this experiment sounds like one which few might care to participate in, imagine how freeing it would be at last to have nothing to hide. And how miraculous it would be to see that all others’ minds too were filled with the same confusion and fantasies, the same insecurity and doubt. How long would it take the judgmental mind to begin to release its grasp, to see through the illusion of separateness, to recognize with some humor the craziness of all beings’ minds, the craziness of mind itself?
– Stephen and Ondrea Levine
When a country is strong… it accepts any dose of pessimism from its writers.
– Michel Houellebecq
Have the courage to use your own reason. That is the motto of enlightenment.
– Immanuel Kant
I believe my unconscious knows what I need more than anyone else does. If you allow a dream image into your life when you are sick or having psychological difficulties, it can pull you in a helpful direction.
– Marion Woodman
Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
– Alan Watts
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.
– Audre Lorde
Zen Buddhism teaches that truth, the dharma, is always only ever in motion. It’s a great dance partner. It moves as you move. It never stands still. You just can’t capture it.
– Shozan Jack Haubner
Open up the old cookbook, or that shoebox of letters in the back of your closet. Look with the eyes of a creature, or your inquisitive childhood self, or simply look closer.
– Megan Baxter
a poem erases and rewrites
its poet.
– Milton Acorn
You don’t need to have your story figured out to write it or decide to publish. Keep writing and revising until you find your story and the ending you need, which is most likely the ending your reader needs too.
– Liz Fiedorow Sjaastad
Why dwell on faraway places, when we’re standing right where the curious thing I’m telling you about happens?
– Marco Martella
Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
– Aldous Huxley
The contemplative life is not, and cannot be, a mere withdrawal, a pure negation, a turning of one’s back on the world with its sufferings, its crises, its confusions and its errors.
– Thomas Merton
Tune yourself to the world, not the self, says the poet. Look and listen more closely.
– Dan Beachy-Quick
In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.
– Hemingway
For to know a man’s library is, in some measure, to know his mind.
– Geraldine Brooks
It does not take much to see what great damage this war has done to the image of our nation. It has left our country politically and morally isolated in the world, where our only friends happen to be puppet nations … The major allies in the world that have been with us in war and peace are not with us in this war. As a result we find ourselves socially and politically isolated.
– Martin Luther King Jr. (1967)
“Your vibe attracts your tribe.” Sounds good, right? But it’s not always true, because sometimes your vibe also attracts sociopaths, lite-dimmers, and border- crossers that come to steal your light. If you needed that lesson, then I suppose it’s okay to call them part of your tribe, but if you didn’t, then it’s fair to say that your vibe also attracted an abuser. I have known many who bought into this bouncy ‘New Cage’ quote and let the wrong people through the door. Perhaps a grounded re-frame would serve us: “Sometimes, your vibe attracts your tribe. Sometimes, your vibe attracts that which doesn’t serve you. And sometimes your vibe has nothing to do with any of it. Sometimes, a predator walks in your direction just because (she wants to.” Be wary of spiritual clichés posing as truth.
– Jeff Brown
Trust the strange leaps that the mind makes.
– Heather Swan
A flower touches almost everyone’s heart. A red hill doesn’t touch everyone’s heart as it touches mine.
– Georgia O’Keeffe
And if among Christians the English and Dutch have embraced the principles of toleration, this has come from the steady resolution of the civil magistrate in opposition to the continued efforts of priests and bigots.
– David Hume
(I)
Count Binface of Bayeaux–
a historical novel
(II)
And the name of the first mentor–
Mentor
(III)
Oh no, they’re fighting “communism”
at home again
– Alec Finlay
While wandering down
the path of wonder,
I briefly escape the world
of separation and enter
the world of unity.
– Hermann Hesse
Books, like paper lanterns,
provide us with a light
amidst the fog.
– Elif Shafak
I feel sorry for Americans, because if you can’t be friends with Canada, then you almost certainly don’t have a friend in the world…and that is a lonely place to be.
– Brittish Columbia Premier, David Eby
Emotions are not reactions
to the world; they are your
constructions of the world.
– Lisa Feldman Barrett
A schedule defends against chaos and whim, It is a net for catching days.
– Annie Dillard
There’s no guarantee, since there’s no guarantor.
– Chögyam Trungpa
You cannot leave a mess and go beyond it. It will pull you back.
– Nisargadatta
When I was young I thought things were bad because solutions were complicated and now I’m old and realize things are bad because solutions are simple but will inconvenience affluent people (or those who aspire to be) and religious fanatics.
– @KendraWrites
Love has bridged the high-
rises of despair we were
about to fall between. Love
has been a penlight in the
blackest, bleakest nights.
Love has been a wild animal,
a poultice, a dinghy, a coat.
Love is why we have hope.
– Anne Lamott
I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
– Abraham Maslow
Thoughts in your head are really no different than the sound of a bird outside.
– Heather O’Neill
Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed.
– Charles Bukowski
One who is passionate about the world and the necessity for change must be free from political activity, religious conformity and tradition.
– Krishnamurti
The greatest revolution will come when we demand that the “value” of a human life is not in what it produces but in the pure mystery of its process of becoming what it is.
– Joseph Fasano
Self-actualized people…live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world.
– Abraham Maslow
A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism – you learn this as you go on.
– Will Self
Leave the letter that never begins to go find the latter that ever comes to end, written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of solitude, sealed at night.
– James Joyce
The great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s backyard.
– Abraham Maslow
Idolizing your favorite entrepreneurs, artists, writer or anybody else is the biggest mistake you will ever make.
Never ever take their opinions, lifestyle or habits on face-value.
Their traits won’t fix your life, you need your original opinions, traits & style to win your life.
– Prasad
It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.
– Abraham Harold Maslow
Humans do not live by bread alone. We need love and care, and to find an answer to who we are and why we live.
– Jostein Gaarder
If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.
– Abraham Maslow
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
– Albert Einstein
What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.
– Abraham Maslow
Remember that you’re not on this earth to be perfect. We’re here to love well, to realize our unity and our connection.
– Adyashanti
In loneliness, the lonely one eats
himself; in a crowd, the many eat
him. Now choose.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
cicada shell
the past hanging
where the future began
– Ogawa
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
There won’t be a revolution here, because the poor think that the next rich person will be themselves.
– John Steinbeck
The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy.
– Abraham Maslow
If the essential core of the person is denied or suppressed, he gets sick sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes immediately, sometimes later.
– Abraham Maslow
Words are symbols for shared memories. If I use a word, then you should have some experience of what the word stands for. If not, the word means nothing to you.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Every moment in the Earth school offers you an opportunity to learn important things about yourself that you need to know in order to grow in wisdom and compassion.
– Gary Zukav
summer market
flowers purchased
for no occasion
– Akari
My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.
I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.
– Dylan Thomas
I have to say where I came from,
because all those who arrived with me
have forgotten that country without bodies.
– Claudia Lars
False optimism sooner or later means disillusionment, anger and hopelessness.
– Abraham H. Maslow
Love changes the whole climate of your inner being – and with that change the whole existence is changed.
– Osho
I am alone here in my own
mind. There is no map and
there is no road. It is one of a
kind just as yours is.
– Anne Sexton
But how can you call yourself educated, if you still experience envy, pity, jealousy, and fear and complain everyday about your condition and about God?
– Epictetus
I used to try to be Good.
Good was my go-to in everything.
But Good got me nowhere.
Not like Truth.
Truth,
she tore me to shreds,
devoured me whole and spat me out shaking and new.
Truth keeps a box of matches in my pocket.
While Good made me afraid of transformative fire
Truth keeps me real,
even if it makes everyone in the room uncomfortable.
And Truth,
unlike Good,
doesn’t let me bow down to anything.
Truth doesn’t let me give in to bullying, misguidance and fear-based criticism
or cowardice.
Truth is a queen and a humanitarian,
while Good,
she’s a silent,
scared little sheep.
Truth knows that Good dulls my already radiant, fierce and loving soul.
Good showed me how to hide my wings,
my words and angel vision.
Truth taught me to be brave.
Truth taught me how to respect myself.
Truth allows me to hold impenetrable space for any story,
but first and foremost,
for my own.
– Tanya Markul
Every feeling you have is valid, in that it makes sense and is connected to a very real experience or need– and but also, feelings don’t have to have the final say in your choices. It is not invalidating feelings to consider them a source of information– but not the only source.
– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle
When thinking leads to the unthinkable, it is time to return to the simple life. What thinking cannot solve, life solves.
– Carl G. Jung
There is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and never return.
– Marcus Aurelius
I’m a master of speaking silently,
all my life I’ve spoken silently and I’ve
lived through entire tragedies in silence.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Is man merely a mistake of God’s? Or God merely a mistake of man?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
We can never be gods,
after all -but we can
become something
less than human with
frightening ease.
– N.K. Jemisin
We went too far in thinking and forgot that destinies are written.
– Mahmoud Darwish
At the heart of all great art
is an essential melancholy.
– Federico García Lorca
Everything about him was old, except for his eyes; and these were the color of the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.
– Ernest Hemingway
It’s said that when a butterfly flaps its wings, that energy flows thousands of miles away. Therefore, everything you think and do extends outward and multiplies. Live your life knowing that the difference you choose to make is toward wholeness, not destructiveness.
– Wayne Dyer
What an age! Every one is dying,
everything is dying, and the earth is
dying also, eaten up by the sun and
the wind. I don’t know where I get
the courage to keep on living in the
midst of these ruins. Let us love
each other to the end.
– George Sand
Be interested in yourself beyond all experience, be with yourself, love yourself; the ultimate security is found only in self-knowledge. The main thing is earnestness. Be honest with yourself and nothing will betray you.
– Nisargadatta
Uncompounded and spontaneously present, it is not realized as result of any circumstances, yet it endowed with wisdom, love, and energy. This is buddhahood itself, which ensures the two kinds of benefit.
– Mahayana Uttaratantra Shastra
thunderclouds
the sky finally says
what everyone felt
– Akari
Defects of style betray defects of content. There are always defects. Everybody has things they can say well and things they can’t say. And that, of course, has to do as much with society as with a writer’s individual life choices.
– Fredric Jameson
You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it’s better to listen to what it has to say.
– Paulo Coelho
To whom do I owe
the biggest apology?
No one’s been crueler
than I’ve been to me.
– Alanis Morissette
The naturalist George Forster believed “nature was a dynamic, interconnected entity, a ‘magic net of countless threads joined by countless knots.’”
– Jenny Uglow
No, these are not times
to gaze with nostalgia
at that infinite wake of men’s passing.
There is much to forget
and even more to await.
– Claudio Rodríguez
There’s something in me today, too, that doesn’t speak, but it’s there. Maybe it’s better not to give it a sound. Let’s keep silent.
– Manuel Puig
warm pavement
every road believes
it is going somewhere
– Ogawa
any kind of knowledge can be a prescription against despair.
– Claudia Rankine
Life is made of choices. When you take a step forward, inevitably something is left behind.
– Caio Fernando Abreu
LATE SUMMER
I, dusty and bedraggled as I am,
Pestered with wasps and weeds and making jam,
Blowzy and stale, my welcome long outstayed,
Proved false in every promise that I made,
At my beginning I believed, like you,
Something would come of all my green and blue.
Mortals remember, looking on the thing
I am, that I, even I, was once a spring.
– C.S. Lewis
all changes of place in the spiritual world are effected by changes of state in the interiors, which means that change of place is nothing else than change of state…
– Swedenborg
The Mouth of the Hudson
Chemical air
sweeps in from New Jersey,
and smells of coffee.
Across the river,
ledges of suburban factories tan
in the sulphur-yellow sun
of the unforgivable landscape.
– Robert Lowell
There are two dimensions of consciousness possible within you: one is the dimension of thinking, but a more vital and deeper dimension is that of simple awareness.
– Eckhart Tolle
Ursa Major
an old spruce forest
also points
– Millicent Bee
The amazing thing is to know yourself as spacious awareness—that frees you from believing that your personal history is who you are.
– Eckhart Tolle
first blind date
a cherry tomato
in one bite
– Chen-ou Liu
ripe tomatoes
ordinary life
becomes delicious
– Aiko
Enlightenment isn’t something you and I can earn like a black belt in karate or a best film award; it’s a process, always unfolding everywhere, that involves us all.
– Kurt Spellmeyer
They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.
– Seneca the Younger
To wish to be well is a part of becoming well.
– Seneca the Younger
Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear – are caused by too much future, and not enough presence.
– Eckhart Tolle
black coffee
white sugar
I stir the world into oneness
– Adjei Agyei-Baah
Without genetic mutations, it is “not possible to understand how life’s imperfections have yielded life’s magnificent diversity.”
– David Quammen
Every footnote is a confession of failure.
– Daisy Rockwell
When you look at the Earth from space, it is striking. There are no national boundaries visible. They have been put there, like the equator and the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, by humans. The planet is real. The life on it is real, and the political separations that have placed the planet in danger are of human manufacture. They have not been handed down from Mount Sinai. All the beings on this little world are mutually dependent. It’s like living in a lifeboat.
We breathe the air that Russians have breathed, and Zambians and Tasmanians and people all over the planet. Whatever the causes that divide us, as I said before, it is clear that the Earth will be here a thousand or a million years from now. The question, the key question, the central question—in a certain sense the only question—is, will we?
– Carl Sagan
I know nothing in the world that has “as much power as a word.” Sometimes I write one, and look at it, until it shines.
– Emily Dickinson
And by the power of a word, I begin my life again.
– Paul Éluard
There is something beautiful about being chosen by someone who has seen darkness in you and stayed anyway. That kind of love makes suffering feel survivable.
– Dostoevsky
But some people only stay long enough to learn your darkness. Then one day they use it as the reason they had to leave.
– Kafka
The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
– E.O. Wilson
Anti-social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists
– Nikola Tesla
If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.
– Jane Austen
You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. Fall in love with some activity and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about and it doesn’t matter.
– Richard Feynman
Jazz attracted me because I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but that popular music does not have.
– Django Reinhart
A Good Life Also Includes…
by Jen Shoop
Mistakes / Bad break-ups with the wrong
ones (so you can meet the right one) /
Terrible first drafts / “I have no idea what
I’m doing” / Closed doors / Years that ask
(versus answer) / Criticism / Getting caught
in the rain / “We regret to inform you”
letters / Throwing everything out and
starting over from scratch / “How did I
miss that?!” / Outgrowing friendships /
Asking for help / Change, change, and
more change / Walking in the wrong
direction / Grief (love’s twin sister)
Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.
– Samuel Beckett
When spirituality is a disembodied, ungrounded mental exercise, you are stuck on the mental plane. Your living body needs to be a part of that equation.
– @soulmeaning
The ability to read the room is not just a nice ability to have, it’s a survival mechanism.
– Nika Solé
Confine yourself to the present.
– Marcus Aurelius
People wanted a loser who became a winner. Or a winner who became a loser. But a loser who stayed a loser? That was too much like themselves. They weren’t interested in themselves.
– Charles Bukowski
Often, observing others who seem deeply immersed in their practice or who have been meditating for a significant amount of time can trigger feelings of inadequacy within us.
It’s important to recognize and acknowledge these feelings when they arise, understanding them as obstacles.
These are typical hindrances that emerge, creating a divide between us and our practice. Cases where we tell ourselves, ‘This individual is superior,’ or ‘They wouldn’t desire my friendship,’ or, ‘My meditation skills are not advanced enough to form bonds here.’
This is a blend of aversion and doubt that can surface. The remedy to counteract this doubt and reconnect with our worth is to remind ourselves, ‘I am deserving of being here, of having friends who inspire and support my journey and my highest aspirations.’
– Kate Johnson, Admirable Friendship
Now, with God’s help,
I shall become myself.
– Søren Kierkegaard
I was once a fortunate man but at some point fortune abandoned me.
But true good fortune is what you make for yourself.
Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions.
– Marcus Aurelius
The main difference between people consists in the degree to which they live by their own thoughts and those of others.
– Leo Tolstoy
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding.
– Ezra Pound
When you find an unwillingness to rise early in the morning, endeavor to rouse your faculties,
and act up to your kind, and consider that you have to do the business of a man;
and that action is both beneficial and the end of your being.
– Marcus Aurelius
Awakening does not mean a change in difficulty, it means a change in how those difficulties are met.
– Mark Epstein
Everything that man ignores does not exist for him. That is why the universe of each one, is summed up to the size of his knowledge.
– Albert Einstein
She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn’t. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.
– Mark Strand
“Non est ad astra mollis e terris via” – “There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.”
– Seneca
In the end, quiet competence will serve you better than noisy mediocrity. Karma keeps the score, so we don’t have to.
– Kenneth Folk
I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.
– Charles Bukowski
I have a heart that hurts nobody
but me.
– Ghada al-Samman
No man on earth can love the country as I do, for surely woods, trees, and rocks produce that echo which man longs to hear.
– Ludwig van Beethoven
The writer’s language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.
– Paul de Man
My memory loves you; it
asks about you all the
time.
– Jonathan Carroll
When my daughter was about seven years
old, she asked me one day what I did at work.
I told her I worked at the college-that my job
was to teach people how to draw.
She stared back at me, incredulous, and said,
“You mean they forget?”
– Howard Ikemoto
Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach.
– Bessel van der Kolk
I’d been on my own for ages, and I was convinced that there was no way I could be any more alone, but now I’d finally realized how alone I truly was. Despite the crowds of people, and all the different places, and a limitless supply of sounds and colors packed together, there was nothing here that I could reach out and touch.
– Mieko Kawakami
The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men.
– George Eliot
We’re our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
– Tom Robbins
If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.
– Edward Hopper
Attack the evil that is within yourself, rather than attacking the evil that is in others.
– Confucius
The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence itself, it is acting with yesterday’s logic.
– Peter Drucker
Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.
– Valery Legasov
We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.
– Elbert Hubbard
Novels and poems are the creeks and rivers coming out of my brain. I continue writing in bleak times to support my wife and daughters, my dogs and cats, to buy wine, whiskey, food. I write as an act of worship to creatures, landscapes, ideas that I admire, to commemorate the dead, to create new women to love. … . Writers are mere goats who must see the world we live in but have never discovered. I write to continue becoming an unmapped river. It suits me like my skin.
– Jim Harrison
They may fight with us, but they don’t fight for us.
– Christopher Paolini
What the mind invents, the mind destroys.
But the Real is not invented and cannot be destroyed.
Hold to That over which mind has no power.
– Nisargadatta
Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.
– George Orwell
Even his griefs are a joy long after to one that remembers all that he wrought and endured.
– Homer, The Odyssey
All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.
– Cormac McCarthy
Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness.
– Napoleon Hill
Maturity is the ability to think, speak and act your feelings within the bounds of dignity. The measure of your maturity is how spiritual you become during the midst of your frustrations.
– Samuel Ullman
Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You’ll find what you need to furnish it – memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.
– Tad Williams
There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.
– Maria Popova
The fog comes/ on little cat feet./ It sits looking/ over harbor and city/ on silent haunches/ and then moves on.
– Carl Sandburg
When you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
The central purpose of each life should be to dilute the misery in the world.
– Karl Menninger
Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.
– Homer’s The Odyssey
Life is rarely about what happened; it’s mostly about what we think happened.
– Chuck Klosterman
Perhaps not one religion contains all of the truth of the world. Perhaps every religion contains fragments of the truth, and it is our responsibility to identify those fragments and piece them together.
– Christopher Paolini
People were cruel to what they were afraid of loving.
– Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads
If these words can do anything
if these songs can do anything
I say bless this house
with stars.
Transfix us with love.
– Joy Harjo
The real field of knowledge is not the given fact about things as they are, but the critical evaluation of them as a prelude to passing beyond their given form. Knowledge deals with appearances in order to get beyond them… The concept of reality has thus turned into the concept of possibility. The real is not yet ‘actual,’ but is at first only the possibility of an actual.
– Herbert Marcuse
Think lightly of yourself and deeply of this world.
– Miyamoto Mushashi
The moment you have a motive for being kind, you are no longer kind.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj, The Ultimate Medicine
We mistake each other. Our whole social arrangement a series of mistakes and compromises. Shorthand for a mystery too large to be seen.
– Zadie Smith
Except when it is insanely easy, writing remains elusive. Always I am someone longing to be a poet, to make something never heard before, to be taken out of myself. That it happened at all is a wonder.
– Louise Glück
Write like you write, like you can’t help but write, and your voice will become yours and yours alone. It’ll take time but it’ll happen as long as you let it.
– Chuck Wendig
In mindfulness
one is not only restful and happy,
but alert and awake.
Meditation is not evasion;
it is a serene encounter with reality.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Look around you–there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn’t make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you’ll hear. Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of the Archipelago. They intertwine, touch one another for one night only in just such a clickety-clacking half-dark car as this and then separate once and for all. Put your ear to their quiet humming and the steady clickety-clack beneath the car. After all, it is the spinning wheel of life that is clicking and clacking away there.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
As a navigational tool, the Mappa Mundi would clearly be a dead loss. As a map of the medieval mind, however, it has few peers. I wonder if that isn’t the point about maps of fictitious places, too? They are maps of minds. You lose yourself in them and find if not factual truth, then other kinds. You meditate upon them. You meet yourself in them. You co-opt them and set stories of your own there, or fragments of stories, at least. Fictitious maps give form to a thing—the imagination—that has no form. They are mysteries and answers to those mysteries.
– David Mitchell
let us stay home together my love
and not know
as the rain does not know where it came from
and the sea that is
all around us
does not know its beginning
– W.S. Merwin
She was not listening at the level of language but beneath it, in the deep recesses of the imagination.
– N. Scott Momaday
We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one—we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.
– James Salter
A world in which there are monsters, and ghosts, and things that want to steal your heart is a world in which there are angels, and dreams and a world in which there is hope.
– Neil Gaiman
I do believe in an everyday sort of magic – the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone.
– Charles de Lint
She wanted to live, and live fully, and to give life, she who loved life! What was the good of existing, if you couldn’t give yourself?
– Émile Zola
I am something supernatural
not exactly god, ghost, spirit, angel, principle or element –
There is no term for it in English.
– Anne Carson
Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?
– Mahmoud Darwish
Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there’s no forcing it.
– Leo Tolstoy
I have argued that philosophy doesn’t begin in wonder or in the fact that things are, it begins in a realization that things are not what they might be. It begins with a sense of a lack, of something missing, and that provokes a series of questions.
– Simon Critchley
No, no, no… you’ve got it all wrong… you can’t act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen —it’s not gasps and blood and falling about—that isn’t what makes it death. It’s just a man failing to reappear, that’s all —now you see him, now you don’t, that the only thing that’s real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back—an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.
– Tom Stoppard
Then she spotted in the corner, glowing wonderfully, a Wurlitzer jukebox. ‘ Holy shit!’ It was like being on a commuter train through the Bronx and seeing among the piles of crushed cars a pasture with a lone white horse.
– Garth Risk Hallberg
As George Orwell said of cliches:
“What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around… When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.”
Yet in my estimation, the most damaging aspect of using other authors’ imaginations is that it stops people from using their own. As Robert Pirsig said:
“She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.”
Remembered fictions rush in and do your thinking for you; they substitute for seeing—the deadliest convenience of all.
– Eliezer Yudkowsky
One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.
– Robert Pirsig
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
– C.S. Lewis
I believe, in fact I am certain, that many men never give out the whole of themselves, their deepest truth. They live on the surface, and yet, so rich is the soil of humanity that even this thin outer layer is able to yield a kind of meager harvest which gives the illusion of real living.
– Georges Bernanos
Taking it easy feels empty unless you’ve done something hard, the vitality of life is found in the contrasts, and by heightening the contrasts you deepen life.
– Dylan O’Sullivan
A billion and a half human souls, who had been given the techniques of music and the graphic arts, and the theory of technology, now had the others: philosophy and logic and love; sympathy, empathy, forbearance, unity, in the idea of their species rather than in their obedience; membership in harmony with all life everywhere.
A people with such feelings and their derived skills cannot be slaves. As the light burst upon them, there was only one concentration possible to each of them—to be free, and the accomplished feeling of being free. As each found it, he was an expert in freedom, and expert succeeded expert, transcended expert, until (in a moment) a billion and a half human souls had no greater skill than the talent of freedom.
– Theodore Sturgeon
THE ORDINARY WEATHER OF SUMMER
In the ordinary weather of summer
with storms rumbling from west to east
like so many freight trains hauling
their cargo of heat and rain,
the dogs sprawl on the back steps, panting,
insects assemble at every window,
and we quarrel again, bombarding
each other with small grievances,
our tempers flashing on and off
in bursts of heat lightning.
In the cooler air of morning,
we drink our coffee amicably enough
and walk down to the sea
which seems to tremble with meaning
and into which we plunge again and again.
The days continue hot.
At dusk the shadows are as blue
as the lips of the children stained
with berries or with the chill
of too much swimming.
So we move another summer closer
to our last summer together –
a time as real and implacable as the sea
out of which we come walking
on wobbly legs as if for the first time,
drying ourselves with rough towels,
shaking the water out of our blinded eyes.
– Linda Pastan
Sensations, from the beginning, involve a sort of doing. This means that, in an important sense, it is your doing self that brings your core self into being. You are responsible at the very deepest level for what it feels like to be you. But then, for your next trick, well, how about spreading some of that soul dust onto the things around you? Remember, too, that it is your mind that projects phenomenal qualities onto external objects. If you only knew it, you yourself are responsible for the feel of the world.
– Nicholas Humphrey
To me it seems that it is madder never to abandon oneself, than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive, and a slave, than always to walk in armor.
– Margaret Fuller
IF ANYWHERE IN these hills around me there is a dreamer, or two dreamers together, looking at the sunset or listening to the rain on the roof, with no words, with no idea of what the next day will be — that’s where ecstasy is, and not in any of the forms we cling to as we try to identify what cannot be named.
– Thaddeus Golas
But if we define the Megaphone as the composite of the hundreds of voices we hear each day that come to us from people we don’t know, via high-tech sources, it’s clear that a significant and ascendant component of that voice has become bottom-dwelling, shrill, incurious, ranting, and agenda-driven. It strives to antagonize us, make us feel anxious, ineffective, and alone; convince us that the world is full of enemies and of people stupider and less agreeable than ourselves; is dedicated to the idea that, outside the sphere of our immediate experience, the world works in a different, more hostile, less knowable manner. This braindead tendency is viral and manifests intermittently; while it is the blood in the veins of some of our media figures, it flickers on and off in others.
– George Saunders
They clipped their wings,
certain they would forget the sky,
but, they were the phoenix all along,
they never needed permission to rise.
– j.mann
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
– Thomas Paine
Palestine is not a metaphor. It is a wound that speaks. The siege is not just on the land. It is on the dream. In the shadow of olives, we wait for the sun.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Just because they’re your type, doesn’t mean they’re your partner. In fact, your type is often exactly what you don’t need. Not because there is anything inherently wrong with it, but because it often reflects who you were at a different time. It often reflects ways of being you have outgrown, comfort zones that limit your expansion, projections and fantasies that don’t actually land in reality. I liked quiet women, because I grew up with loud women. This healed me for a time, but then it trapped me inside of a way of relating that held me back. After a while, you get tired of leading the way. And other(s) get tired of being led. Better to surrender your type to your truth moment to moment. Not fixed, but fluid. Not firm, but flexible. Open to whatever surprises come your way.
– Jeff Brown
Being too busy has this result: that an individual very, very rarely is permitted to form a heart; on the other hand, the thinker, the poet, or the religious personality who actually has formed his heart, will never be popular, not because he is difficult, but because it demands quiet and prolonged working with oneself and intimate knowledge of oneself as well as a certain isolation.
– Kierkegaard
As you dissolve into love, your ego fades. You’re not thinking about loving; you’re just being love, radiating like the sun.
– Ram Dass
Real scientist are delighted when they find out they are wrong. And to me that is one of the greatest gifts that a scientific education can bring. There are too many people in this world who want to be right. And too few who just want to know.
– Brian Cox
Peace doesn’t require two people; it requires only one. It has to be you. The problem begins and ends there.
– Byron Katie
After all, we are nothing more or less than we choose to reveal.
– Sylvia Plath
I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.
– Herta Müller
It is good to be born in a depraved time; for, compared to others, you gain a reputation for virtue at a small cost.
– Montaigne
Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic — if it is pulled out I shall die.
– Søren Kierkegaard
So much universe, and so little time.
– Terry Pratchett
I wish I had two life stories, a set of interesting things I hadn’t written or said elsewhere, so I didn’t have to bore you or myself.
– Maggie Nelson
The politics of modernism are ambiguous. One aspect is elitist, racist, archaic, violent and hierarchical, while a more minor tributary is progressive, democratic and egalitarian.
In Irish terms, this contrast is represented by Yeats and Joyce. The former is archaic, while the latter is avant-garde. Joyce celebrates the commonplace life of modernity, whereas Yeats is keenest on the commonplace when it takes the form of a crackbrained peasant. It’s doubtful that he knew anything of film, whereas Joyce established the first cinema in Ireland (in Dublin in 1909).
The two writers are linked by their use of mythology; but whereas myth for Yeats is a source of primordial wisdom, Joyce uses it chiefly as a principle of artistic organization. The modern and the ancient fuse in the structure of Ulysses, as the Homeric myth secretly shapes the account of modern Dublin; but the fusion is something of a joke, and another myth might have served his purpose just as well.
– Terry Eagleton
Awareness has to be unmanufactured; it has to be a natural state.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I have long ceased to pray for victory. I pray for the survival of the good and the beautiful against the powers of darkness.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.
– P.G. Wodehouse
Once I have forgotten what I appeared to know, then I can desirously love that which I cannot think.
– Simon Critchley
Whether it be the singing of a lamp or the voice of a storm, whether it be the breath of an evening or the groan of the ocean – whatever surrounds you, a broad melody always wakes behind you, woven out of a thousand voices, where there is room for your own solo only here and there. To know when you need to join in: that is the secret of your solitude: just as the art of true interactions with others is to let yourself fall away from high words into a single common melody.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.
– James Salter
Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.
– Milan Kundera
Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.
– Gabriel García Márquez
Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.
– Jonathan Lethem
…time was not passing…it was turning in a circle…
– Gabriel García Márquez
LALALOL
And then came the day
I discovered my mother had been writing “LOL”
on the Facebook walls of her grieving friends.
Roger was a kind man. LOL.
Susan left this world far too soon. LOL.
Heaven has another angel. LOL.
Bless her heart and the hearts of the grieving families
but I couldn’t help but Laugh Out Loud.
My poor mother, trying to send “Lots Of Love”
and not knowing how.
I knew if I told her she would never be able to forgive herself.
But I knew if I didn’t…
Jenny will be deeply missed. LOL.
You will meet again in a better place. LOL.
I’m so so sorry to hear about your loss. LOL.
What do we owe to the truth?
Certainly not our mothers’ smiles.
I couldn’t think of a worse thing to take from someone
than the comfort they had offered others.
So I stayed quiet, and prayed that if she became
the laughing stock of town, the laughers would
Laugh Out Loud and she would hear it the way she always had.
Just Lots Of Love. Just Lots And Lots And Lots Of Love.
– Andrea Gibson
Not so much because many occupations would not permit of a loving attitude, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.
– Erich Fromm
Music is a fantastic friend and reflects, like a mirror, how far you’ve come. You briefly enter a realm which you can’t live in. When you’re lost in it, you discover powers you didn’t know you have. It’s a chance to be more than you might have been.
– Colin Davis
There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.
– Zora Neale Hurston
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
Ideological thinking ruins all relationship with reality.
– Hannah Arendt
The tech industry seeks to corrode countless brains. Yours need not be one of them. Study history. Read mythology. Get acquainted with Bach, Dante, George Eliot. In a time when people are rapidly getting dumber, we need communities devoted to the life of the mind.
– Boze Herrington
If we cannot bear being with ourselves, how is it that we ask another to do that for us? In fact, the capacity to be with ourselves, as we really are, finite, imperfect & flawed, will prove not only to be the cure for loneliness but our secret gift to others as well.
– James Hollis
Most people are carrying yesterday’s emotions because they turned them into stories about who they are.
– @PaulNHughes
There was a period of my life, from ages 18 to 21, when the world for the first time felt to be not only dizzyingly big but still expanding. There were so many people, so many ideas, so much life. All of that is now gone, and I am what’s left.
– @claustralis
Every impulse to write is born of an idea of form, for me.
– Susan Sontag
A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.
– Angela Carter
You know we’re in space already, way out. If anybody cared to be sensitive and let what’s outside space come to you, you can, if your eyes are clear enough. We’re as far out in space as we’re ever going to get.
– Alan Watts
I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows.
My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.
– Emil Cioran
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
It is the rare fortune of these days that a man may think what he likes and say what he thinks.
– Tacitus
How do we forgive ourselves for all of the
things we did not become?
– David ‘Doc’ Luben
fireflies fading
the unseen world
closes its lantern
– Akari
ON THE DEATH OF A POET
the river will clog,
unheard words
butting the bank
for attention.
Fewer stones on the path.
Fuller pockets.
– Helen Laycock
AI doesn’t have a mouth. We keep lending it ours.
– Laura Kerr
Political leaders are never leaders.
For leaders we have to look
to the Awakeners!
– Henry Miller
midsummer moon
one unread message
loses its importance
– Akari
But I do feel strange—almost unearthly. I’ll never get used to being alive. It’s a mystery. Always startled to find I’ve survived.
– John Steinbeck
I can hardly believe that I have limits, that I am cut out and defined. I feel scattered in the air, thinking inside other beings, living in things beyond myself.
– Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart
A bigger house, a celebrity diet, a new sports car, a luxury holiday, the latest fashion, the most recent iPhone… year after year, after year… at what point in your life will you realize that the lasting happiness that you seek can only be found inside?
– Chamtrul Rinpoche
You can spend your entire life searching for lasting happiness outside, traveling the whole world from the bottom of the oceans to the top of the mountains, but it won’t be found anywhere other than inside that which is doing the searching.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche
I want to calm down,
to rest, to outlive this
nonsense.
– Anne Sexton
There’s this mysterious mountain out there called reality. Novelists are always trying to climb it.
– Norman Mailer
The Buddha got the ball rolling. We can pick up the ball of the dharma and roll it further along ourselves.
– Michael Santi Keezing
The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.
– Nietzsche
Love doesn’t need any name, category
or definition.
Love is a world itself.
Either you are in it, at the center….
or you are out, yearning.
– Shams Tabrizi
summer stars
too many options
none nearby
– Ogawa
I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few
times since then.
– Lewis Carroll
People who love themselves, don’t hurt other people. The more we hate ourselves, the more we want others to suffer.
– Dan Pearce
It’s so easy to imagine that you don’t have enough, even when you do.
– Kenneth Folk
Books stand or fall really on their endings. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a good novel that has a weak ending.
– Pat Barker
If History had a goal, how lamentable would be the fate of those of us who have accomplished nothing! But in the universal purposelessness, we stand proud, ineffectual streetwalkers, riffraff well-pleased with having been right.
– Emil Cioran
Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.
– Louis L’Amour
The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. It’s not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.
– Emil Cioran
Bliss is a thing which is always there and is not something which comes and goes. That which comes and goes is a creation of the mind.
– Ramana Maharshi
sunset beach
the tide takes back
a whole conversation
– Oagwa
A sign of intelligence is an awareness of one’s own ignorance.
– Machiavelli
If no one sees your art, it is still a revolution. You freed yourself, did you not?
– Jaiya John
Yes, dissociation can disconnect us from the world “out there”– but that’s not what really makes it problematic. Dissociation does the most damage when it disconnects us from our internal world, our needs, our values, our most vulnerable & authentic “parts.”
– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.
– Dale Carnegie
Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.
– Lorrie Moore
The moral covenant of reciprocity calls us to honor our responsibilities for all we have been given, for all that we have taken.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
There is a love of wild nature in all of us, an ancient mother-love showing itself whether recognized or no, and however filled with cares and duties.
– John Muir
Go on with what your heart tells you, or you will lose all.
– Rick Riordan
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Business is a combination of war and sport.
– Andre Maurois
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
– Aldous Huxley
Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.
– Abraham Flexner
Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.
– Gabriel García Márquez
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
since the imperfect is so hot in us,
lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
– Wallace Stevens
…The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
– Alfred Tennyson
Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature. In order to improve society it is first necessary to understand the laws by which society lives. The operation of these laws being impervious to our preferences, men will challenge them only at the risk of failure.
Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics, must also believe in the possibility of developing a rational theory that reflects, however imperfectly and one-sidedly, these objective laws. It believes also, then, in the possibility of distinguishing in politics between truth and opinion — between what is true objectively and rationally, supported by evidence and illuminated by reason, and what is only a subjective judgment, divorced from the facts as they are and informed by prejudice and wishful thinking.
– Hans Morgenthau
Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate. In all my works I take the part of trees against all their enemies.
– JRR Tolkien
Childhood is still running along beside us like a little dog who used to be a merry companion, but who now requires our care and splints, and myriad medicines, to prevent him from promptly passing on.
– Thomas Bernhard
Both Virgil and Dante set some of their greatest work in another world. But Shakespeare didn’t, and his is the attitude I prefer. There is enough of heaven in a hedgerow, and enough of hell in the perfidy of man.
– Clive James
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
The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.
– Marcel Proust
But there are areas of human experience that allow us to push outside the sticky self towards something larger, something vaster, something full of vibrancy and maybe a sheer, mad joy at the fact of life and the world. This pushing outside is what religious practice at its best does. It is what art at its noblest can open in us. It is what poetry can point us towards. It is also what can (if we are lucky) take place in our sexual lives and arguably what drives the desire for intoxication, of whatever kind. We can think of such experiences as forms of surrender. One gives up all desire for control, for dominion over oneself and others, and freely submits.
In such moments, and they are instances of extraordinary vulnerability and exposure, the self fades away into a larger and more capacious environment or space for being. Such surrender takes place particularly powerfully in the experience of music. Mysticism is about evoking and opening us up to such experiences, limitless experiences of aliveness and intensity.
– Simon Critchley, Mysticism
If you want to cure a neurosis you have to risk something. To do something without taking a risk is merely ineffectual, as we know only too well.
– CG Jung
Impossibility is the door of the supernatural. We can but knock at it. It is someone else who opens.
– Simone Weil
Sounds, like everything else, arise and pass away. Just by listening, you can experience the insight of impermanence, an understanding the Buddha taught as crucial for the development of wisdom.
– Sylvia Boorstein
Write one good clean sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then write another one.
– M.F.K. Fisher
Giving Up Smoking
There’s not a Shakespeare sonnet
Or a Beethoven quartet
That’s easier to like than you
Or harder to forget.
You think that sounds extravagant?
I haven’t finished yet –
I like you more than I would like
To have a cigarette.
– Wendy Cope
A wise man accepts his pain, endures it, but does not add to it.
– Marcus Aurelius
Not everything has to have a point. Some things just are.
– Judy Blume
For me, obedience to another is the decay of self.
For though every being is similar,
each being is different,
and to herd our differences
under one law
degrades each self.
– Charles Bukowski
If one loves stories, then one would naturally love the story of the story.
– Lorrie Moore
under the willow
I forget which
worries were mine
– Aiko
A child who saves a sparrow is stronger than a man who makes war. The war-maker has done nothing the most unimaginative brute couldn’t do. The child, though—like the saint, like any empath—has done something much bolder: truly imagined the suffering of another living thing.
– Joseph Fasano
Religion, God, soul, are all just words, ideas, to keep your psychological continuity intact. When these thoughts are not there, what is left is the simple harmonious functioning of the organism.
– U.G. Krishnamurti
Anyway, I have it borne in on me that my business is to write and not talk about it.
– Flannery O’Connor
Too much of the animal distorts the civilized man, too much civilization makes sick animals.
– Carl Jung
To the intellect, all my mythologizing is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives existence a glamour which we would not like to do without. Nor is there any good reason why we should.
– C.G. Jung
Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
– T. S. Eliot
We must learn to reawaken
and keep ourselves awake,
not by mechanical aids,
but by an infinite expectation
of the dawn, which does not
forsake us even in our
soundest sleep.
– Thoreau
I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
– Simone Weil
how hard it is to reach that level of clarity and precision, to work through the dark deep end and let go. No words, just sitting with it.
– Miranda Holmqvist
I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.
– Mary Oliver
Your family members are souls on a journey, struggling through their lessons, just like you.
– Iyanla Vanzant
The whole universal system is held together through love, harmony, and cooperation. If you use your thoughts according to these principles, you can transcend anything that gets in your way.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
See that you are, not what you believe yourself to be. Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable. You are not.
– Nisargadatta
I knew that it was cruel to be so optimistic, but, in my solitude, I couldn’t resist
the urge and spent entire days basking in idiotic fantasies,
sometimes verging on prayer.
– Mieko Kawakami, Heaven
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
– Heraclitus
I want fresh water to always be flowing into the poem, like in a spring-fed lake.
– Henri Cole
A person is known only by the one who loves them without hope.
– Walter Benjamin
Most people are not seeking truth. they are searching for comfort in illusions.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Once I used to look at your
Rounded dreamlips
Now I have bought
A round ginger-jar
But never
Will it teach me to sing.
– Jan Hanlo (tr. Hans Koningsberger)
Something waved to me, whispering: Do you remember? You do remember, don’t you? from some remote depth within the white-edged surface of the photograph.
– Esther Kinsky
But good God, what’s wrong with
me, after all? What am I missing?
Why this emptiness, this nostalgia?
What is this anxiety, as if I only
loved something I didn’t know?
– Clarice Lispector
Thoughts are just moving through consciousness. They have no power. Nothing has reality until you reach it, grab it, and somehow impregnate it with the power of belief.
– Adyashanti
noon heat
even the scarecrow
leans toward shade
– Ogawa
There is no such thing as a person. There are only restrictions and limitations. The sum total of these defines the person. You think you know yourself when you know what you are. But you never know who you are. The person merely appears to be.
– Nisargadatta
You could say that to write is necessary and to live is unnecessary.
– Mario Vargas Llosa
Power
A poet is sentenced to death
and brought before the Leader.
Between them is a map of the world.
Can’t you see? the Leader asks. You’re powerless.
Name one power you have that I do not.
Very slowly, the poet lowers her head
and lays her ear on the map.
I know, she whispers, I know,
as if she is comforting someone,
as if she is hearing the voices of children.
When the guards take the prisoner away
and begin to beat her,
the Leader is alone in his chamber.
He looks out the curtains, straightens his necktie.
Very slowly, he lowers his ear to the map
and closes his eyes, and listens.
Silence. Silence and paper.
– Joseph Fasano
Run your fingers through my soul. For once, just once, feel exactly as I feel, believe what I believe, perceive as I perceive, look, experience, examine, and for once, just once, understand.
– Oscar Wilde
Writing is like spelunking… you’re descending into dark and unknown territory and you can never see very far ahead.
– Tobias Wolff
To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
When you were doing an undergrad, you wanted to do a masters. When you did a masters, you wanted to do a PhD. Now you’re doing a PhD, you want to be a cat.
– @ThePhDPlace
What she had realized was that love was that moment when your heart was about to burst.
– Stieg Larrson
under the moon
a fox crosses
an unfinished road
– Akari
Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astounding universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.
– Carl Sagan
You will freeze in place if you
remain this way. You must not,
dear. You have to move.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
morning mist
a spider repairs
the broken light
– Akari
What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
– Van Gogh
Man absolutely needs ideas and beliefs that give meaning to his life, and allow him to identify his place in the universe.
– Carl Gustav Jung
He…who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.
– Albert Einstein
Sometimes we just supply
the signposts.
– Rick Rubin
At times, my life seems to be nothing but a
series of remorse, of wrong choices, of
irreversible mistakes.
– Paul Auster
Once one has seen God, what is
the remedy?
– Sylvia Plath
Yes yes yes I do like
you. I am afraid to write
the stronger word.
– Virginia Woolf
There is a certain coldness in me, a silence that makes people uncomfortable: a lack of the usual social grease.
– Sylvia Plath
Failure to understand the logos is the root of all evil.
– Heraclitus
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.
– W.H. Auden
I am the dream you are dreaming.
When you want to awaken, I am the wanting:
I grow strong in the beauty you behold.
And with the silence of stars I enfold
your cities made by time.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
All things come into being by conflict of opposites.
– Heraclitus
I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.
– Dylan Thomas
I’ve devoured the whole world trying to find you.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love. Which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page.
– Donald Barthelme
How does it feel
to lie between
the flats and the peaks
the land and the sky
between heaven and earth
calm and a storm
reason and irrationality
all on your own
– Francis H Powell
All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.
– Frank Zappa
Nothing comes from doing nothing.
– William Shakespeare
Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.
– Nikki Giovanni
I like to think that music undergirds the mind, a harmony below thought, and seek out poets who seem to share the same suspicion.
– Dan Beachy-Quick on Jennifer Clarvoe and Susan Stewart
THE LILIES
Hunting them, a man must sweat, bear
the whine of a mosquito in his ear,
grow thirsty, tired, despair perhaps
of ever finding them, walk a long way.
He must give himself over to chance,
for they live beyond prediction.
He must give himself over to patience,
for they live beyond will. He must be led
along the hill as by a prayer.
If he finds them anywhere, he will find
a few, paired on their stalks,
at ease in the air as souls in bliss.
I found them here at first without hunting,
by grace, as all beauties are first found.
I have hunted and not found them here.
Found, unfound, they breathe their light
into the mind, year after year.
– Wendell Berry
To John Ashbery
I can’t believe there’s not
another world where we will sit
and read new poems to each other
high on a mountain in the wind.
You can be Tu Fu, I’ll be Po Chü-i
and the Monkey Lady’ll be in the moon,
smiling at our ill-fitting heads
as we watch snow settle on a twig.
Or shall we be really gone? this
is not the grass I saw in my youth!
and if the moon, when it rises
tonight, is empty —a bad sign,
meaning “You go, like the blossoms.”
– Frank O’Hara
You know, I have been hearing for almost my entire life that people change, or people can change, and I have never been present at this change, or a witness to this change. Outside of some catastrophic event or cerebral accident, people don’t change, and we’re better off realizing that we’re perpetually stuck with whomever we met and liked or disliked.
– Mike Nichols
Will the river fill again.
Will there be pity taken.
Will it ever rain again.
What is ever. What is again.
What is it we mean by
ok. Take this October. The deep white turn
the air is taking.
How many more
Octobers. Is there another October with
us in it.
Blood flows in my hand writing this.
The crows glance through the upper
branches.
They are not waiting.
– Jorie Graham
It is certainly true that you can’t judge a book by its cover, nor can you judge a book by its first chapter—even if that chapter is twenty years long.
– Gregory Boyle
The way to approach it, I think, is not to ask, “What would it be like to be black?” but to seriously consider what it is like to be white. That’s something white people almost never think about. And what it is like to be white is not to say, “We have to level the playing field,” but to acknowledge that not only do white people own the playing field but they have so designated this plot of land as a playing field to begin with.
White people are the playing field. The advantage of being white is so extreme, so overwhelming, so immense, that to use the word “advantage” at all is misleading since it implies a kind of parity that simply does not exist. It is now common—and I use the word “common” in its every sense—to see interviews with up-and-coming young movie stars whose parents or even grandparents were themselves movie stars.
And when the interviewer asks, “Did you find it an advantage to be the child of a major motion-picture star?” the answer is invariably “Well, it gets you in the door, but after that you’ve got to perform, you’re on your own.”
This is ludicrous. Getting in the door is pretty much the entire game, especially in movie acting, which is, after all, hardly a profession notable for its rigor. That’s how advantageous it is to be white. It’s as though all white people were the children of movie stars. Everyone gets in the door and then all you have to do is perform at this relatively minimal level. Additionally, children of movie stars, like white people, have at—or actually in—their fingertips an advantage that is genetic. Because they are literally the progeny of movie stars they look specifically like the movie stars who have preceded them, their parents; they don’t have to convince us that they can be movie stars. We take them instantly at face value. Full face value. They look like their parents, whom we already know to be movie stars.
White people look like their parents, whom we already know to be in charge. This is what white people look like—other white people. The owners. The people in charge. That’s the advantage of being white. And that’s the game. So by the time the white person sees the black person standing next to him at what he thinks is the starting line, the black person should be exhausted from his long and arduous trek to the beginning.
– Fran Lebowitz
The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity .…They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
– Vice President Henry A. Wallace
now it’s computers and more computers
and soon everybody will have one,
3-year-olds will have computers
and everybody will know everything
about everybody else
long before they meet them.
nobody will want to meet anybody
else ever again
and everybody will be
a recluse
like I am now.
– Charles Bukowski
My solitude surrounded by refusals. The void into which a sickening cascade falls from above. The judge in the red robe whom I carry within me and who condemns me to death. This foam of distress at the edge of my teeth. This lump in my throat. This breast where storms gather but never break. This white road that paralyzes me.
– Jean Cocteau
coffee first
then emotional availability
midsummer morning
– Akari
But in your time things have been made still more cock-eyed by the intrusion of some half-baked ‘psychological’ nonsense, less than half understood, and more than half false anyway.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Habit is easy as TV.
Imagination asks you to turn off the TV
and step into your life.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
Nothing is harder on the soul, than the smell
of dreams, while they’re evaporating.
– Mahmoud Darwish
God is not the author of all things, but of good only.
– Plato
It is not feelings themselves that are problematic but our turning away from them. In the way of surrender, we turn towards that from which we previously
turned away.
– Rupert Spira
In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
In Buddhism, the most important question is, What’s the motivation?
– Peter Trachtenberg
You lost all interest in this world. You were disappointed and discouraged, and lost interest in everything. So you abandoned your physical body. You went to a world apart and you’re living a different kind of life there. In a world that’s inside you.
– Haruki Murakami
I find nothing so singular in life, as that everything appears to lose its substance, the instant one actually grapples with it.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne
The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
– Rabindranath Tagore
deep summer
the old stone lion
covered in moss
– Aiko
The thoughts we choose to think are the tools we use to paint the canvas of our lives.
– Louise Hay
The thought ‘I am meditating’ is an ego thought. If real meditation is taking place, this thought cannot arise.
– Annamalai Swami
The main affliction of civilization is that we don’t know how to handle suffering inside and so we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
mountain path
a blue feather
where the trail divides
– Akari
Some of us aren’t meant to belong. Some of us have to turn the world upside down and shake the hell out of it until we make our own place in it.
– Elizabeth Lowell
Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.
– Georges Bataille
Do you understand, sir, do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
An answer that was right the first time may not be right again the second.
– Italo Calvino
Nothing lasts, you
see, not even the
thoughts inside you.
And you mustn’t
waste your time
looking for them.
Once a thing is gone,
that is the end of it.
– Paul Auster
no one for miles
the billboard declares
“SIN IS EVERYWHERE”
– LeRoy Gorman
All life is a movement in relationship. There is no living thing on earth which is not related to something or other.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
summer clouds
a hawk circling
an invisible mountain
– Ogawa
Everything
Everything is a matter of the spiritual
and should be considered from the
vantage point of luminous darkness;
in light of the eternal hidden within
the present shadow of reality.
There is therefore no mundane moment;
no nameless darkness so deep as to remove
all hope of flashing forth, and the kindling
shall begin in the human eye that learns to see.
– Daniel C. Potts, MD, FAAN
While the philosophers are still arguing whether the world even exists, nature around us is perishing …
– Karl Popper
May you have at least one person who will love you when you ain’t so lovable. When you’re anxious and nervous. When you mistreat others. When you no longer crack jokes and have no more stories to tell.
– Shorouk Mostafa Ibrahim
One has to be a painter to make images, and images make one paint, but that is a secret.
– Eugene Leroy
A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student.
– Herbie Hancock
He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further testing, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.
– Karl Popper
A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
I write poetry to prove I can’t write poems.
– Percival Everett
How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it’s some kind of murder?
– Richard Siken
Have you asked to be made like your Lord? Have you longed for the fruit of the Spirit, and have you prayed for sweetness and gentleness and love? Then fear not the stormy tempest that is at this moment sweeping through your life. A blessing is in the storm, and there will be the rich fruitage in the “afterward.”
– Henry Ward Beecher
Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one… cities will never have rest from their evils.
– Plato
If you are wondering who
your people are, they are
the ones who make your
heart feel seen and your
nervous system feel calm.
Yes, it’s that simple.
– Yung Pueblo
Books have that wonderful quality of showing you other lives. They can be a great nourishment.
– Manuel Puig
You should not honor men more than truth.
– Plato
It is worth mentioning… that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time…Doubts creep in …. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.
– Virginia Woolf
Generosity is
giving more thy you can,
and pride is taking less
than you need.
– Khalil Gibran
Most Beautiful Word
Some truths endure; some simply state our tastes.
I grew up thinking milk and silk were neat
as a clipper ship, and Bendix was placed
with cellar door on lists of the elite.
Fifteen hundred Babbel-onians choose
diaphanous the loveliest this year—
though Babel names the place where God confused
one common speech till none could clearly hear.
It sounds like what it means: an air of air,
open vowels, a transparent sort of flow.
These poets praise its music and declare
it beautiful.
They seldom use it though.
Like them, I favor words of coarser thread:
crustacean, bunghole, and Procrustean bed.
– Casey Goodall
Keep moving toward what’s next; the path ahead holds richer joy, deeper growth, and truer promise than anything left behind.
– Roy T. Bennett
“There is something here I do not know, the knowing of which could change everything.” This single statement can heal the world. A little more willingness to continue the search, to acknowledge that there may be something you do not know – the knowing of which could change everything.
– Neale Donald Walsch
The people who make us feel safest aren’t always the ones who agree with us. They’re the ones who stay kind when they don’t.
– Lori Deschene
Something within you
must catch fire.
Not the fire of ambition,
but the flame that says yes
when a thousand voices say no.
The fire that burns through fear
and keeps walking
toward the light.
– @KavijiPoet
THREE POEMS BY CHENCHEN XIANG YIN
TRANSLATED BY QIANG MENG
I
I Guess You Are a Firefly Girl
To poetry
Year of the Tiger, I catch a water-blue butterfly
whose wings will unfold into your eyes.
You nap on tender grass, each motion a ripple.
You smear light all over me, help me dive
to the sea floor and lift moonshine to the surface.
My lapels, too, are dusted with the glow
easy to shake off. I guess you are a firefly girl—
I’m an idler chasing trouble out of nothing.
You light a flame in my rival’s chest
as his flickering heart. Consumed by jealousy,
I reach out but find you already in my arms,
in a mirror between me and us.
Now I see it: a home between your legs
where I come from and will return.
Like a river running backward, I’ll strangle
the newborn sun. Let the good night continue
and darkness hang high. I’ll pluck your ripeness,
fill your cave with the warmest liquor.
On a belated morning, I’ll open a window
to the mist, with no singing swallow
as soft as your belly. Aside from mothers,
only you in this world offers the amniotic
comfort of the heaven. Perhaps I should’ve died
young, but I knew this without a prophecy:
We’d meet the way a tiger returns to her mountain.
II
Flying a Kite on Open Ground
When my eyes take flight to the blue
ceiling, my vision grows clear.
The heaven reaches a hand to fish for me,
casting down a sturdy tire swing,
like the stern governess who will pull me home
through a game of tug-of-war.
Perhaps before humans emerged, birds
had appointed us as their earthly avatars.
They came through the atmosphere
to select me, passing down their long
but finite life, a sharp pain into my hands.
My kite, running out of string, reminds me
of those who failed to invent the airplane.
They strove for intellect to return home sooner,
legs dangling, tortured like a fluttering flag.
The swallows, dragonflies, and goldfish
in matching colors. The upside-down horizon
becomes a zoo in the azure crevice—
My ground expands into a collapsed wall.
Do we stand on a valley floor
or in the abyss of a flipped sky?
The kite string, a rescue team that never gives up
spellbinding the sufferer, cuts into my finger,
my bamboo skin wrapping hungry bones.
It begins to climb, upward and inward—
the vortex will flay me into a newborn
on the far shore: an indestructible bird of truth.
III
Smokestacks
The city donates orange blood to sunset—
A century-old man with incurable tuberculosis
sighs for his egret-white hair, the banners of smog.
He suffers from the heatstroke of hellfire.
Magma swallows his dark face. Coal scattered
like coarse lotus roots: the misaligned Stonehenge.
Who pilots the unsung wasteland? From the north,
Snow Country is a late-spring cruise.
Tired of commuting, the young angels abscond
with simple dreams. The longer one burns,
the further he could travel. My ancestors
sew ashes and bricks into rigid rags. To armor
the erected elephant trunks. Those giant statues
of gods, with a pigeon’s shape and a swan’s face,
inspect us, as we care for the hushed chessboard
and vanishing galaxies. We bear the torment
on the same wavelength. The Tower of Babel.
A fairytale castle. Fallen for a smokestack’s menace.
Who pilots the unsung wasteland? The hands
of meaning—they manipulate a well’s bottom
and fabricate the rebar of ideology. The unbridled
horns scream, as the stale geography repeats
my body: the many bones lacking a sense of pride
are the minutes of my cruciform self-starvation.
Unlike many religions and secular ideologies, liberalism doesn’t claim to lead to perfection. What it does do, is offer humanity a self-correcting system that allows us to correct our mistakes.
– Ezra Klein
It may be said that in a state of nature, since it is a state of war, the life of man is solitary, nasty, brutish, and short, but in our present state of mediocrity, it is cowardly, shallow, tedious, banal, and uselessly drawn out.
– William H. Gass
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.
WATERMELONS
Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.
– Charles Simic
…to go on burning
in dignity and
silence.
– Albert Camus
The first and best of victories is for a man to conquer himself; and to be conquered by himself is, of all things, the most shameful and worst.
– Plato
My current silence interests
only me. It touches too many
parts of my personal life for
me to explain it to you.
– Albert Camus
Time and again I hear stories about idealistic people, wholly devoted to worthy causes, who wind up tearing one another apart over relatively minor disagreements before retreating to their former lives of quiet desperation.
– Lisa Wells
From time to time, I wrote for the outside—when the outside overwhelmed me, when there were things that drove me mad, outside, in the street…
– Marguerite Duras
Self-awareness has no end, you don’t come to an achievement, you don’t come to a conclusion.
It is an endless river.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Yes, yes, art is ruthless; it tolerates nothing false, nothing contrived, nothing half-hearted. To be or not to be, to be able or not to be able;
that is precisely the question.
– Hugo Wolf
What other people say is unrealistic, God is saying – dream bigger.
– Nika Solé
under the moon
the narrow river
widens
– Aio
If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.
– Amit Ray
Pregnant with God
You are either
with or
without.
I tell you:
there
is
no other.
– Meister Eckhart
Patience, I said to myself.
If you ever want to see your
time machine again, you
must leave the sphinx alone.
– H. G. Wells
Over time, you may find people begin to question why you are ‘still’ grieving. The simplest and truest answer: I still love them. And they are still gone.
– Julia Morin
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
– E.B. White
You must form the habit of living in the fourth dimension, “The World of the Wondrous.” It is the world where you do not judge by appearances.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Counting the stars
one by one,
I remember
all the things
I have loved.
– Yun Dong-ju
It is very easy to conform to what your society or your parents and teachers tell you. That is a safe and easy way of existing; but that is not living…To live is to find out for yourself what is true.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Beauty is not in the face;
Beauty is a light in the heart.
– Kahlil Gibran
Mind, It’s like space. You can’t possess it and you can’t lose it.
– Bodhidharma
Nobody reads anymore, nobody goes out and looks and explores the society and culture they were brought up in. People have attention spans of five seconds and as much depth as a glass of water.
– David Bowie
People’s opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people is a secondary consideration.
– Bertrand Russell
Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.
– Haruki Murakami
Be patient where you sit in the dark.
The dawn is coming.
– Rumi
[A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing]
by John Ashbery
A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing
I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare colors
Too late the last express passes through the dust of gardens
There’s often a woman
in fairytales
who lives in a house,
in the heart of the woods,
deep in the kingdom;
there’s often a woman
who watches over
lost children and runaway
brides, who hides from
hunters and travelers alike,
who speaks in creeks,
who hears through hawks,
who opens or closes
the road depending
on who walks upon it.
There’s often a woman
in the woods
with no shoes
who has run out
in the middle of the night
with no other choice.
There’s often a fairytale
about a woman
who lives in the woods,
who once lived in town;
and doesn’t care now
what the townsfolk think —
that’s what she says
and knows the lie —
she cares so deeply so
given the choice
she gives her hair
to the forest crown
and her feet to
mycelia. She
encircles the town.
She gave her heart
to the bees; she keeps
up with the news.
Often in the woods
there are stories of an old woman
who lived there years ago.
That clump of rocks
is called Witches’ Cauldron,
which is atop Hag’s Hill,
which is next to Maiden’s Leap,
near The Devil’s Gash,
which is a gate to hell. Or
maybe it was a root cellar.
There’s often a woman
who lives in the woods,
who’s been run out of town —
for not following the path,
for twirling at night,
and cutting her hair;
there’s often a woman
whose cattle are better,
(they’re not her cattle
anymore) whose house
is larger (it’s not
her house anymore);
The woman in the woods
did not start
out there.
The woman in the woods
is sick of this shit. She is
other: world wise and weary.
She does not share her location.
– Catherine Fahey
This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.
– Rumi
gather them & give them back to me.
by Renia White
(after Toni Morrison)
I don’t have the wherewithal to die today,
not with you here. (thank you for that)
you say things could be simple, and sometimes
they are. it’s true, we only need what we need
in order to have all we need. nothing more,
but love, which is a texture you say you don’t
understand. but look at this bread in my mouth
and your hand in mine although we barely touch
because how outlandish—to feel even further? beyond
the sure blessing? so your hand isn’t in mine, but I feel
it there-when I am asleep, awake, inside my mind room.
I touch everything I walk by or into. but, you here?
and us with hands in case we need them? I think this is it,
but if you want to make it more complicated, I agree.
My body was trying to show me
that I was carrying too much.
Not just weight. But sorrow.
Guilt. Rage. Fear. Love. Death.
– Lidia Yuknavitch
Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness. The presence of another person – of any person whatsoever – instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me it is a counterstimulus, if this compound word be linguistically permissible. When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick come- backs to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.
The mere thought of having to enter into contact with someone else makes me nervous. A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that’s hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever – attending a funeral, dealing with someone about an office matter, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know – the very idea disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep badly. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn.
‘My habits are of solitude, not of men.’ I don’t know if it was Rousseau or Senancour* who said this. But it was some mind of my species, it being perhaps too much to say of my race.
– Pessoa
Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake- its everything except what it is!
– William Shakespeare
rain-streaked window
what’s left of my hometown
all a blur
– Chen-ou Liu
Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them.
– Paulo Coelho
To absolute power, humor is a mortal enemy because it refuses to take power at its own serious estimation.
– Milan Kundera
Bright mornings.
Days when I want so much I want
nothing.
Just this life, and no more.
– Raymond Carver
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Love is no destruction, but rather instruction, nourishment and sustenance for those who trust in it, for Love is repletion and the abyss and the fullness of the sea.
– Marguerite Porete
What angel will free you from sadness
and awaken you one precious day
without memory of what grieved you
– Silvina Ocampo
The responsibility of each individual is to question and to question themselves, in order to avoid falling into dogmas and prejudices.
– Karl Popper
They call it a masterpiece because they never saw the first version.
– Leo Di Lux
They asked:
“Why is it important to be kind?”
I said:
Because we walk past hundreds of people every day, and none of them wear signs that say, “Im grieving,” “I’m exhausted,” or “Im barely holding it together.” But they’re everywhere. Kindness might be the only
softness they receive today.
– Vex King
Truth is confirmed by inspection and delay; falsehood by haste and uncertainty.
– Tacitus
In matters of culture and knowledge, one only loses what one keeps; one only gains what one gives.
– Antonio Machado
Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.
– Beatrix Potter
But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
– Joan Didion
I wonder what those lovers mean, who say
That they have given their hearts away.
That some good lover tell me how;
For mine now is nothing but a torment.
– Abraham Cowley
Our destiny is a mystery and perhaps the meaning of life is nothing more than the search for that meaning.
– Rosa Montero
I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?
– John Lennon
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
– Carl Sagan
The work of the age of inversion and anticulture, which is the culture of the Machine, is not to fight puny online battles, or to look for victory in some imagined political settlement or brilliant new ideology. Our wounds are much deeper than that. Our stories are cracked at their foundations, and as a consequence we are afloat in a fantastical world of our own making: grasping at freedom, entirely enslaved.
The antidote to this is to dig down to those foundations and begin the work of repair. We are going to have to learn to be adults again; to get our feet back on the ground, to rebuild families and communities, to learn again the meaning of worship and commitment, of limits and longing. We are, in short, going to have to grow up. This is long, hard work: intergenerational work. It is myth work. We don’t really want to begin, and we don’t really know how to. Does any child want to grow up? But there is nothing else for it; no other path is going to get us home.
– Paul Kingsnorth
We are on the threshold of a more searching,
more honest, more open society.
– László Krasznahorkai
The primary religious virtue is sincerity, a penetrating sincerity.
– Alfred North Whitehead
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
I rest my paddle
let the canoe drift awhile
rocks trees sky
the lake and I
are an empty mirror
– Irene Golas
Where will what comes next be
I wonder
while what was left behind
resembles
a bottomless barrel
in which it is impossible to search
for a clue for this future
that comes riding slowly
– Tamara Kamenszain
when someone hands you a flyer, it’s like they’re saying “here, you throw this away!”
– mitch hedberg
Sometimes, I wonder if I would know a beautiful thing / if I saw it.
– Megan Fernandes
I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do.
– Plato
…Mad River I love you
cold press my morning mist
across sunlight of paper and pixie wings…
– Mike Ketch
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, oh what black hours we have spent
this night!
What visions did you see, heart; what paths did you tread!
– Gerard Manley Hopkins
What are you reading? isn’t a simple question when asked with genuine curiosity; it’s really a way of asking, Who are you now and who are you becoming?
– Will Schwalbe
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.
– Immanuel Kant
The silence depressed me.
It wasn’t the silence of silence.
It was my own silence.
– Sylvia Plath
When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
i am fond of lovers but I cannot love, I am too far away, I am banished.
– Franz Kafka
Some hearts carry loneliness
the way lakes carry reflections of clouds,
quietly holding entire skies inside themselves.
– Amy Christie
These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies.
– John Steinbeck
I say there exists something beyond words like humanity or nature. Only when we entrust ourselves to that thing can we find true peace.
– Saneatsu Mushanokōji, Friendship
Psychologically there’s no tomorrow. Truth is not a result of time. Truth is seen only now.
– J. Krishnamurti
A beautiful word,
just the intact intimacy of a beautiful word,
would suffice me for life
– Fernando Paz Castillo
The mind is capable of any selfishness and it thinks unworthy things whether you want to or not. Best to admit it is a bad child rather than to pretend it is always a good one. Because a bad child can improve but a good one is a liar and nothing can improve a liar.
– John Steinbeck
Pure desire, sign of grace,
mountainous joy, you poured yourself out
possessed by your own possession.
– Guillermo Sucre
One lives in vain when one does not live beyond oneself.
– Goethe
I think, as I have always thought, that the only salvation for our civilization is going back; not so much going back to former conditions as going back to First Principles.
– G. K. Chesterton
That is the real spiritual awakening, when something emerges from within you that is deeper than who you thought you were. So, the person is still there, but one could almost say that something more powerful shines through the person.
– Eckhart Tolle
One of the signs of a peaceful and pure heart is letting people enjoy the books, music, movies, and hobbies that bring them joy, especially when they harm no one. Not everything has to be understood to be respected.
– Vex King
At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
We both
post pictures of the moon
like bright dots that want
to be connected.
– Poppy Cockburn
You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.
– Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
And I don’t know what being is. And I don’t know what consciousness is. But I do know what bliss is: that deep sense of being present, of doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself. If you can hang on to that, you are on the edge of the transcendent already.
– Joseph Campbell
I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.
– Sylvia Plath
What Orwell failed to predict was that we’d buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching.
– Keith Jensen
One of the best arguments for what poetry can do, what it’s for, how it can serve us, is that poetry says the unsayable.
– Maggie Smith
Maybe someday gardening will call to me and be just what I need.
– Maggie Smith
Vegetables in a garden: a marvelous thing
Otherwise it is all too much
The vines of memory
Clinging, lurching, winding out of touch
The social noise clanging, banging, haranguing
Could have beens and should have beens
Binding mind like glue in overheated bins
Not vegetables in a garden.
– via Clifton Lee
Silence is our salvation, that and the reassurance of this earth, this clear air, this forgetting.
– Kwame Dawes
The sign of a great marriage is that it becomes a contest of generosity.
– David Whyte
There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river. One was a god; he drank ambrosia. One was a man; he drank water. One was a demon; he drank filth.
What you get is a function of your own consciousness.
– Joseph Campbell
Having been brought up with a definition of faith as adherence to a set of beliefs, I have more and more begun to turn instead toward a definition of faith as openness to truth, whatever truth may turn out to be.
– Barbara Brown Taylor
When you write, it’s like having a conversation with the reader, and you don’t want to mislead them. And in order to make that relationship with the reader more meaningful, it becomes a power struggle or a meeting of minds where their vision is different from your vision.
– Christopher Bowen
No person, no place, and no thing has any power over us, for “we” are the only thinkers in our mind. We create our experiences, our reality, and everyone in it. When we create peace and harmony and balance in our mind, we will find it in our lives.
– Louise Hay
Sometimes just making yourself at home is revolutionary.
– Paul Beatty
All you need is a little foolishness to enjoy life, and a ittle wisdom to avoid the errors.
– Osho
Not to be stuck to any person … Not to be stuck in any homeland … Not to be stuck in some pity … Not to be stuck in some field of study … Not to be stuck in our own detachment … Not to be stuck to our own virtues … the greatest test of independence.
– Nietzsche
I made myself free.
I live free
in this immense punishment cell
that is the earth.
Saying the truth sets me free.
– Gloria Fuertes
We become what we love and who we love
shapes what we become.
– St. Clare of Assisi
the poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.
– Frank O’Hara
We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies. It is the first law of nature.
– Voltaire
In the same corner of this old map there is a country I long for.
It is the homeland of apples, hills, lazy rivers, sour wine, and love.
Unfortunately, a great spider wove its web over it
and with its viscous saliva sealed the doors of dream.
– Zbigniew Herbert
The ever-increasing rise in temperatures will end up leading us to a sleep deficit.
– Juan Antonio Madrid
Coffee is the little sister of freedom.
– Honoré de Balzac
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
– Zora Neale Hurston
Hope is the taste of fresh air after leaving a place that made you feel small.
– Amy Christie
I don’t know how to feel or think or love. I’m a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I’ve even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. I’m always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I’m falling through a trapdoor, through infinite space… in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am the centre that exists only because every
circle has one.
– Pessoa
…how they go, how they go!—all the ones you thought would
never go.
– Charles Bukowski
But the jewel you
lost was blue!
– Ted Hughes, Red
It is easy to feel discouraged and simply let go… On the other hand, if we take a step back, reflecting on what is happening all over the world and the history of struggle, the history of solidarity movements, it becomes clear, sometimes even obvious that seemingly indestructible forces can be, thanks to people’s willpower, sacrifices, and actions, easily broken.
– Angela Davis
Waste
Don’t want to be an actor pretending on the stage
Don’t want to be a writer with my thoughts out on the page
Don’t want to be a painter ’cause everyone comes to look
Don’t want to be anything where my life’s an open book
A dream it’s true
But I’d see it through
If I could be
Wasting my time with you
Don’t want to be a farmer working in the sun
Don’t want to be an outlaw always on the run
Don’t want to be a climber reaching for the top
Don’t want to be anything where I don’t know when to stop
A dream it’s true
But I’d see it through
If I could be
Wasting my time with you
So if I’m inside your head
Don’t believe what you might have read
You’ll see what I might have said
To hear it
Come waste your time with me
Come waste your time with me
So if I’m inside your head
Don’t believe what you might have read
You’ll see what I might have said
To hear it
Come waste your time with me
Come waste your time with me
Come waste your time with me
Come waste your time with me
Come waste your time with me
– Ernest Anastasio / Tom Marshall
People We Used To Be
How I miss the people we used to be
And all those things that you brought out in me
We’re both different now and times have changed
Even the best of friends can become estranged
Well I am well aware that we can not go back, but
I will not stand by and watch this fire
Burn down everything we worked so hard to build
If you keep willing those flames to go higher
You know they will
Things were easier once, when our hearts were light
We’d stay up talking late, and put all the world to right
We got fair warning, though I may have spoke too soon
‘Cause something altogether unforeseen stepped into view
Well I am well aware we can’t go back there, but
I will not stand by and watch this fire
Burn down everything we worked so hard to build
If you keep willing those flames to go higher
You know they will
I will not stand by and watch this fire
Burn down everything we worked so hard to build
If you keep willing those flames to go higher
You know they will
I will not stand by and watch this fire
Burn down everything we worked so hard to build
If we keep willing those flames to go higher
You know they will
– Marketa Irglova
Hundred Words
I want you to know I’m not scared
I have just been keeping my head down
Tired of the noise all around me
Everyone has something to say
Words coming out with no meaning
I’m tuning them out with prayer
Just a hundred words that I have for you
The same hundred words that I want from you
Don’t give up, don’t give up
Don’t stop believing, don’t stop believing
Keep the faith, keep the faith
Don’t close the book just keep on reading
I want you to know I’m still here
I’ve just been keeping a low profile
Grateful for my time in the limelight
Everyone is talkin’ ’bout love
In a way that robs the word of it’s meaning
Fill in the void with a prayer
Just a hundred words that I have for you
The same hundred words that I want from you
Don’t give up, don’t give up
Don’t stop believing, don’t stop believing
Keep the faith, keep the faith
Don’t close the book just keep on reading
Never let them say that I didn’t even try
That I ran away when things got hard
I did not give up I just learned to let love have the final say
The world is as I see it and I begun to love it, yeah
I am still hung up on things I wish would change
I’m still looking for someone to hand me the answers
Don’t give up, don’t give up
Don’t stop believing, don’t stop believing
Keep the faith, you’re not seeing straight
Don’t close the book just keep on reading
Don’t give up, don’t give up
Don’t stop believing, don’t stop believing
Keep the faith, you’re not seeing straight
Don’t close the book just keep on reading
Don’t give up, don’t give up (light up the world, light up the world, light up the world)
Don’t stop believing, don’t stop believing (light up the world, light up the world)
(Light up the, light up the, light up the, light up the, light up the world)
Don’t give up, don’t give up (light up the world, light up the world, light up the world)
Don’t stop believing, don’t stop believing (light up the world, light up the world)
(Light up the, light up the, light up the, light up the, light up the world)
– Glen James Hansard / Marketa Irglova
For me, he will always be everywhere I see a coin spinning into an open guitar case.
– Bono on Glen Hansard
However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth … steps in and does something.
– Vincent Van Gogh
The secret of Buddhism is to remove all ideas, all concepts, in order for the truth to have a chance to penetrate, to reveal itself.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
To say this now, in the city of our remaking, is to say that I have always longed to be the lurking shadow beneath the water’s surface, a universe of mystery, waiting to breach the water and fill all watching with a certain awe and assurance.
– Kwame Dawes
I never start writing a story until I have at least three or four fields of action … things I know that are going on simultaneously. Like different balls thrown in the air. If there’s only one ball in the air, anybody can do that. Two balls, still easy. But when you get three or four or five, things start to be really interesting, and that’s where I want to be before I write a single word.
– Nance Van Winckel
Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling.
We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.
Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.
The less we read, the more harmful it is what we read.
The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.
Men shout to avoid listening to one another.
– Unamuno
My friend’s son just said to him, “How about we stop being screenagers and go outside?”
– Vince Horn
Chaos and ineptitude are anti-human; but so too is a superlatively efficient government, equipped with all the products of a highly developed technology.
– Aldous Huxley
Bookstores have never really gone out of style in Seattle, which has been ranked America’s Most Well-Read and is one of just two U.S. UNESCO Cities of Literature.
– Axios, July 29, 2026
Wasn’t that the definition of home?
Not where you are from, but where you are wanted.
– Abraham Verghese
Of my parental home I have retained only precious memories, for a person can have no memories more precious than those of his earliest childhood in his parental home, and this is nearly always so, if there is in the family even the slightest degree of love and union. Indeed, precious memories may be retained even from the very worst of families, if only your soul is capable of seeking that which is precious.
– Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The New York School poets were instantly alluring, this witty, catty, playful coterie who seemed to toss out brilliant poems while talking on the phone or riding the Staten Island Ferry. They made it look not just easy but fun.
– Joe Dunthorne
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
– Oscar Wilde
The world always moves on despite the chaos and waste in its midst.
– Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afterlives
My dreams have never been kept within reason.
– E. B. White
When we step back from our traditional methods and try something new, we may be surprised by how much more there is to learn.
– Vanessa R. Sasson
Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.
– William H. Gass
Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.
– C.S. Lewis
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we already have done.
– Lelouch Lamperouge
When God ceases to surprise us, that may be the moment we have ceased to do business with Him.
– N.T. Wright
Every human being is endowed with a dignity that must never be lessened, impaired, or destroyed.
– Pope Saint John Paul II
When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below and the below like the above, and when you make the male like the female and the female like the male, then you will enter the Kingdom.
– Jesus in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas
Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start: In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
– W.B. Yeats
Some people worship the Teacher. It is wrong. They highly respect and love their Teacher, but they forget the Teaching. When you worship the Teacher, you lose the Teaching. You will assimilate the Teaching, actualize the Teaching. You will live the precepts of the Teaching. Your daily labor, daily life must express the Teaching. When you love the Teaching, when you actualize the Teaching, then your Teacher is glorified, not before.
– Torkom Saraydarian
I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can, by inspection, destroy such a system.
– John Steinbeck
Hunger would be absurd if there was no such thing as food. Thirst would be absurd if there was no such thing as water. Loneliness would be absurd if there was no possibility in satisfying that yearning in a relationship with another human being. The desire to find God would be absurd if He did not exist.
– C.S. Lewis
And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.
– Helen Macdonald
I am already building a museum for every treasure you unearth in the rock bottom.
– Andrea Gibson
(…) her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.
– James Joyce, Ulysses
My life at home is super simple. My local bar with my mates, cooking for my mother, making tables, planting vegetables: It’s the classic idea of the artistic existence.
– Glen Hansard
Ignorance is faster than intelligence. Intelligence stops every so often to ponder; ignorance passes over the accidents of the terrain which are concepts at great speed where nothing can catch its attention. This way ignorance gets anywhere quickly… especially to conclusions.
– Alejandro Dolina
It’s a very rare person who is taken for what he truly is.
– Peter S. Beagle
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
– Mark Twain
Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
– Jean Cocteau
Our forefathers loved wisdom and left it to us. Here we can still see their footprints but cannot follow them, and therefore we have lost both wealth and wisdom.
– King Alfred the Great
Encryption is the defense against the dark arts in the digital realm.
– Edward Snowden
The years pass in their hundreds and their thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem… but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.
– Maester Luwin
I learned that a friend may be waiting behind a stranger’s face.
– Maya Angelou
In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
– Eric Hoffer
We have already seen, in general that the way a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has, or how he is regarded by others.
– Schopenhauer
Every time a written word is put to page it is an opportunity to expand our minds, whether we are the writer or the reader.
– K. Lamb
To love you is enough, to have known you, to have felt alive in your presence, that is my greatest joy and I will carry it with me always.
– Dostoevsky
Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.
– M.C. Richards
it is easy to control an elephant, catch hold of the tiger’s tail, grab the snake and dance, dictate the angels, transmigrate into another body, walk on water or sit on the sea; but it is more difficult to control the mind and remain quiet.
– Thayumanavar
Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.
– Ruha Benjamin
Ultimately, arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
– Edward Snowden
Treating yourself as a transaction means constantly exchanging your time and energy for the minimum someone is willing to give back. Treating yourself as an investment means being selective about where you put yourself and why.
– Mark Manson
Every scene should be able to answer three questions: Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don’t get it? Why now?
– David Mamet
Culture is always something that was,
Something pedants can measure,
Skill of bard, thigh of chief,
Depth of dried up river.
Shall we be thus for ever?
Shall we be thus for ever?
– Patrick Kavanaugh
Poverty of goods is easy to cure, poverty of soul impossible.
– Michel Eyquiem De Montaigne
Discard every self-seeking motive
as soon as it is seen.
And you need not search for truth,
truth will find you.
– Nisargadatta
Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.
– C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love
Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness — I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.
– Aaron Copland
Prejudice is like a cactus. It flourishes without any discernible source of nourishment.
– Quentin Crisp
If you get rid of qualities you don’t like by denying them, you become more and more unaware of what you are, you declare yourself more and more non-existent, and your devils will grow fatter and fatter.
– CG Jung
There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.
– Frank Herbert, Dune
Universal healthcare in the US would lower our overall stress level by about 89%.
– @goodolddurby
Most people return small favors, acknowledge medium ones and repay greater ones – with ingratitude.
– Benjamin Franklin
The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.
– Isaac Asimov
Love of bustle is not industry – it is only the restlessness of a hunted mind.
– Seneca
Revolution that runs counter to nature is a sword that always turns against the one brandishing it.
– Herman Bavinck
Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Those who were the victors wrote the histories but those who suffered wrote the songs.
– Glen Hansard
As a busker, one thing that does not work is self-consciousness. A busker needs to be working. A busker needs to shed all ego and get down to work.
– Glen Hansard
Welcome All Guests
The heart is not a filter.
You cannot separate one
strand of happiness from
the sorrow with which
it was woven, both of them
slipping into the blood
at the very same moment.
The heart is a waiting room
and every stranger you meet,
every feeling that arises
must pass through. You might
as well leave the door open,
welcome them all.
– James Crews
I am made and remade continually.
– Virginia Woolf
I am therefore inclined to assume that the real root of alchemy is to be sought less in philosophical doctrines than in the projections of individual investigators. I mean by this that while working on his chemical experiments the operator had certain psychic experiences which appeared to him as the particular behavior of the chemical process. Since it was a question of projection, he was naturally unconscious of the fact that the experience had nothing to do with matter itself (that is, with matter as we know it today). He experienced his projection as a property of matter; but what he was in reality experiencing was his own unconscious. In this way he recapitulated the whole history of mankind’s knowledge of nature…. Such projections repeat themselves whenever man tries to explore an empty darkness and involuntarily fills it with living form.
– Carl Jung
If little else, the brain is an educational toy.
The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they’d rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don’t play some people’s game, they say that you have “lost your marbles,” not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.
– Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
– Annie Dillard
The moment you change your perception is the moment you rewrite the chemistry of your body.
– Dr. Bruce Lipton
Needle and Thread
It was the sixties, and embroidery was back in,
and if you had jeans torn at the knee, an old
denim jacket, a plain white shirt or a cloth
handbag, I might ask you what you liked
then spend hours alone in my room
with your favorite colors, woven threads
luxurious as a young girl’s hair, practicing
the chain stitch, cross stitch, running stitch,
satin stitch across your ripped skirt until
flowers and suns unfurled, a blustery field
of violet iris, a blind yellow meadow or a deep ravine
that scrolled down your back or pants seam,
red ferns blushing your blouse above
a clavicle, daisy chains circling your cuffs.
I’d return your garment on a day you had almost
forgotten about it, baggy T-shirt, ragged shorts,
laid across my arms so the crewel work
shimmered, patchwork of hearts, patina
of wings, like the riven marble draped
beneath Christ’s Pieta, folds catching the light,
offering it up as a sacrifice, asking nothing in return,
though you bowed your head over it and touched it
with your whorled fingertips, the veined leaf
or cresting wave, frothed, feathered, spiders’ webs
and fleur-de-lis, peace signs and scepters and stars,
then looked up into my face like an alien being, you
who I hardly knew.
– Dorianne Laux
Only when you grow old do you see the rarity of beauty, and what a wonder it really is when flowers bloom between factories and cannons, and poetry still lives between newspapers and stock-market reports.
– Hermann Hesse
He saw the lightning in the east and longed for the east, but if it had flashed in the west he would have longed for the west. My desire is for the lightning and its gleam, not for the places and the earth.
– Muhyiddin Ibn
I’m at an age when remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm.
– Gloria Steinem
Everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common ground, has crumbled into dust and has been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that’s left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.
– Boris Pasternak
Beat, Old Heart
by Carl Sandburg
Beat, old heart, these are the old
bars
All stragglers have beat against.
Beat on these bars like the old sea
Beats on the rocks and beaches.
Beat here like the old winter winds
Beat on the prairies and timbers.
Old grizzlies, eagles, buffalo,
Their paws and beaks register this.
Their hides and heads say it with
scars.
All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerrilla warfare, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise.
– Milan Kundera
I never had the feeling that I was teaching anybody anything. I was simply reporting from the heart.
– Leonard Cohen
This is how it must go. There will be catastrophes. Disastrous setbacks and slaughters. But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it’s willing to use even death to find them.
– Richard Powers
No Armani suit
covers the odor oozing
from the corrupt heart.
– Pam Uschuk
On Ghosting
by Tad Hargrave
“The soldiers settled down to filling and lighting their clay pipes. They continued to ignore him as if he were a ghost and they could not see him. Perhaps he was in a dream. Or perhaps he was a ghost; perhaps he was dead already. How would you know if you were dead?” – Peter Behrens, The Law of Dreams
When someone ghosts us, one of the hardest parts, whether we choose not to ask them why or whether they choose not to answer, is that we are left with the question, “Why?”
Like a tongue constantly going to touch a chipped tooth, our mind goes to the place they used to occupy in our psyche and our lives, touching the absence over and over as if touching it enough times would convince us that they’re really gone.
But, somehow the tongue is never convinced.
The memory of the presence of the intact tooth (or relationship) is somehow more real than the reality of what’s no longer there.
Ghosting is commonly understood as when you pull away or vanish without explaining what’s going on, leaving the other person to guess at what it meant and, very likely, feeding into whatever insecurities they may have.
I want to offer a different perspective on ghosting in relationships.
So, we often look at ghosting as the action taken by the one leaving. Ghosting therefore describes their manner of leaving and not much else. And this modern culture, with its lack of close knit communities and online dating (where we meet people outside of our existing social networks, is the perfect set up for ghosting to occur.
But, what if we looked at ghosting as what we are doing to the other person?
What if it’s not so much that we are the one ghosting but that, by our actions, we are turning the person we are leaving into a ghost? We have tremendous power over each other.
If the love given to the Velveteen Rabbit can make him real, then that realness can be withheld as well and real things can be made less so.
If you have ever been shunned, you know this. It’s a viscerally felt thing to have someone look right through you. By the way we treat each other we grant each other existence or we take it away.
Don’t believe me? Try solitary confinement.
Don’t believe me? Don’t touch a baby until it’s one year old. It likely won’t last that long. If it does it may be damaged for life.
Don’t believe me? Wait until someone ghosts you and see how together you feel.
I’m not saying you can’t work through it. I’m saying it gives you something to work through.
Consider the constant graciousness of this world: when you walk on soil, your foot leaves a print. Another way of saying this is that the soil allows your foot to make an impression on it. When you run your hand through water, it makes ripples and swirls. Another way to say that is that the water allows this. Branches move for you. Wind blows around you. Nature is constantly affirming to you that you are real and present in this world by letting itself be impacted by you. This seems trivial, like nothing. But imagine that nature rescinded this deepest of hospitalities? Imagine that your feet left no marks in the soil, that leaves wouldn’t lift when you kicked them, that the apple wouldn’t give way to your teeth or that the candle flame wouldn’t recognize your breath. Imagine what that would make you. It would make you into a ghost.
How would you know if you were dead? By those things.
Imagine no human would acknowledge you on top of that. Imagine that when you died, no one came to your funeral, or cried, or spoke of you… it would be as if you’d been a ghost your whole life. Like you’d never really been there.
How would you know if you were dead? By those things too.
A woman I once knew put it this way in sharing what is, I believe, some traditional Mexican wisdom. “There are three human deaths. The first, when you know you are dying. All reality expands, distinguishing only the very vital heartbeats to the closing of the gate. The second is the passage, the leaving, the place from which you will not be retrieved. The third is the last time someone speaks your name. To me, ghosting is a prompting of the third death, and it contributes to the subjected person experiencing a personal death.”
I was recently unfriended by someone I’d known through a shared community. It came out of the blue. We hadn’t been in touch in a few years. When I saw it, I sent him a voice note asking him what was going on.
”Tad… it’s not personal. I need to move on from [that community] at this time in my life. All the best.”
I replied to let him know that the ghosting was painful. He didn’t reply. I didn’t expect him to.
So many things are begun, ceremoniously, and ended unceremoniously. It’s worth noting about this modern world.
By unfriending me in the way that he did, he removed my personhood. He was telling me, “you are nothing more to me than a member of that group.”
Ghosting makes it easier for you but harder, if not impossible for them. It gives them an impenetrable riddle of, “what happened?”
I am struck by how much less painful it would have been if the message had come first before the unfriending.
Ghosting is the offloading of responsibility for closure to the other person. Ghosting simultaneously says some combination of, “I don’t matter”, “This didn’t matter,” and “You don’t matter” or… don’t matter enough to have put any real labour into the ending.
Ghosting is the trashcan into which relationships get thrown.
Instead of sending a message saying, “I need to set this friendship down for now, or maybe forever, for such and such reasons.” We leave them to wonder what those reasons might be. Ghosting is the chip in the tooth that the tongue can’t fix, but won’t stop finding.
Ghosting relieves you of the responsibilities for any ways you might have given the other person the impression that they mattered to you, any of the ways you might have led them on or astray, any of the ways you might have seduced them into an untruth or the responsibility of the burial of something that was once true, but is no longer.
Ghosting is leaving somebody else to deal with the body of something that has died or something that you killed. Ghosting washes the hands and tells you that your friendship was the dirt that needed to be removed and then that leaves the dirty water in the basin for you else to deal with.
Ghosting is an expression of the modern, utilitarian mindset. The clear messages, “I am happy to use our friendship and benefit from it and enjoy it while it serves me. But, the moment I’m done with it, I will throw it in the trash bin without any further regard or consideration or notification.”
Ghosting testifies to how we have become resources to each other more than relatives.
And… to set down the stridency and grievance of the thing, perhaps ghosting, and the scale and frequency of it in the modern world, testifies, above all, to how unmanageable the pace and scale of modern life has become. We have more human friendships than we can possibly tend to well. We become Facebook friends with people we only see every few years and the ‘unfriending’ becomes an issue known only to the modern world. Ghosting is the scorpion’s tail of this upside and ‘increased connection’ of the electrified world (and the crafting of ‘the world’ out of a collection of localities).
And when we collude with the notions of ‘global community’, when we find that most of our friends are on WhatsApp, overseas and tethered to us by affinity rather than geography, perhaps we, ourselves, become less substantial and less real as we seek to sustain too many relationships with others who have become invisible ghosts speaking to us from that black mirror in our hands.
And none of this excuses the ghosting. In a very real way, our existence is much more in the hands of others than we’d like to think. And, similarly, others existence is in our hands. We have the power to grant it or take it away.
When we vanish on others with no explanation, it’s not us that becomes the ghost. It’s the person we’re leaving. It’s what we turn them into.
“I’m sorry for the ghost I made you be. Only one of us was real and that was me.”
– Leonard Cohen
Take this sinking boat and point it home; we’ve still got time. Raise your hopeful voice, you had the choice; you’ve made it now.
– Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová
When bodies are discussed, especially in popular culture, it has often meant a very circumscribed set of themes, largely to do with what the body looks like or how to maintain it at a pinnacle of health. The body as a set of surfaces, of more or less pleasing aspect. The perfect, unattainable body, so smooth and gleaming it is practically alien. What to feed it, how to groom it, the multiple dismaying ways in which it might fail to fit in or measure up. But the element of the body that interested me was the experience of living inside it, inhabiting a vehicle that was so cataclysmically vulnerable, so unreliably subject to pleasure and pain, hatred and desire.
– Olivia Laing
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place… Nothing outside you can give you any place… In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
– Flannery O’Connor
everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale;
– Salman Rushdie
If you dislike war, respect your neighbor. And cherish the person who comes from afar. . . Distance is like allusion to the infinite. Love the person in your neighbor. Love God in the person who comes from afar.
– Lanza del Vasto
It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert.
– Jacques Yves Cousteau
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only they who see
take off their shoes.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
If real poetry rises only out of fragments, then the narrative impulse could be taken as narcissistic, as it keeps insisting on a longer line, which gives more space for the self to enter. The more self that enters the poem, the more like prose a poem can become.
The difference is the line and the way the mind breaks over the line and the way the line breaks over the mind.
If the poetic line is a kind of fragment, poems at their most essential happen with an understanding of how those fragments lean into what consciousness sounds like.
As soon as the poem reaches for more narrative, the hand of the writer falls more heavily on the line becoming longer than if that same hand wrote a line that was shorter.
– Michael Klein
He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.
– Gabriel García Márquez
Nothing hinders people’s improvements more than their desire to improve their own lives through violence. Violence against others distracts people more than anything else from the one thing that can improve their lives: striving to become better themselves.
– Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Reading Circle
Among humans, the fact that no one ever feels they are the aggressor is because everything is always reciprocal. The slightest little difference, in one direction or another, can trigger the escalation to extremes. The aggressor has always already been attacked. Why are relations of rivalry never seen as symmetrical? Because people always have the impression that the other is the first to attack.
– Rene Girard
Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.
– Richard Powers
One must not content oneself with small demands but must rise to the thought that all living creatures have to be redeemed. One must not be trivial and irresponsible in heart, but must strive to make deeds prove one’s words.
– Richard Wilhelm
Something will flood into
your chest
like air sweetened by
desert honeysuckle,
love that is too
strong.
– Dorothy Walters
First, I write down all I know about the story, at length, and in detail.
Then I sink the iceberg and let some of it float just a little.
– I. Bergman
The opposite of hunger is not satisfaction, it is birth. It is what makes a man chisel a face into stone. It is what drives the body to lie in the fresh snow. It is what quiets the world when she pulls you in close.
– Hieu Minh Nguyen
I’ve always felt that inside each of us there is profound anonymity. Sometimes I think that when you go deep inside, you meet everyone else on a sort of common ground – or you meet nobody. But whatever you meet, it is not yours though you enclose it. We are the container, and this nothingness is what we enclose. This is where Heidegger is very interesting to me. He describes the division between the world as nothing, as what he calls the “open,” and any act of conceptualizing which restores the world in a particular way.
Many of his texts are longings to experience that anonymity, the condition where we don’t have an “I” yet. It is as if we were in a room from which, paradoxically, we were absent. Everything is seen from the perspective of that absence. I suppose, in some ways, this is a mystical vision that brings to me a sense of the universe as an anonymous presence. The force of that sometimes frightens me, sometimes delights me.
– Charles Simic
To believe that our beliefs are permanent truths which encompass reality is a sad arrogance. To let go of that belief is to find safety.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
…that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.
– George Saunders
It hurts. Pain is exacerbated life. The process hurts. Coming-into-being is slow, slow, good pain. It’s a full stretching to the point a person can stretch no more. And the blood is thankful. I breathe, I breathe.
– Clarice Lispector
The head is the hardest part, the most painful part, as anyone knows who has given birth or witnessed a birth. It is the uniquely human part of the process; our big heads contain the minds that contain universes, from the cave paintings to Coltrane. We think we are different merely because our big heads make us smarter. But the human baby is born earlier, less developed, than it should be. Any longer a gestation period and the head would never get through. So we don’t get up running like zebras. We are only human because we can create community and care for one another. Our big heads can write symphonies; but they can also create nuclear bombs. Care is just as important as innovation.
– Theodore Richard’s, What Happened to Icarus
Be where you are and who you are. That’s how to cheer yourself up.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Another writer once asked me, ‘Don’t you hate it when people tell you they got your book from the library instead of buying it?’ I had to voice an emphatic NO. I’ve had a library card since I was eight.
– Beth Ann Fennelly
A Fire Season Sutra / ‘SMOKEY THE BEAR SUTRA’ by GARY SNYDER
Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a discourse to all the assembled elements and energies:
To the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings–even the grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.
“In some future time, there will be a continent called America. It will have great centers of power called such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur, Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon.
The human race in that era will get into troubles all over its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature.”
“The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings of volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth. My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that future American Era I shall enter a new form; to cure the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger: and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it.”
And he showed himself in his true form of SMOKEY THE BEAR
A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs, showing that he is aroused and watchful.
Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;
His left paw in the mudra of Comradely Display–indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that of deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma;
Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the countless men oppressed by a civilization that claims to save but often destroys;
Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the west, symbolic of the forces that guard the wilderness, which is the Natural State of the Dharma and the true path of man on Earth:
All true paths lead through mountains–
With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is contained vast and free in the Blue Sky and Green Earth of One Mind;
Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has food enough for everyone who loves her and trusts her;
Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs, smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism;
Indicating the task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned foods, universities, and shoes, master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn the leftover trash.
Wrathful but calm. Austere but Comic. Smokey the Bear will Illuminate those who would help him; but for those who would hinder or slander him…
HE WILL PUT THEM OUT.
Thus his great Mantra:
Namah samanta vajranam chanda maharoshana Sphataya hum traka ham mam
“I DEDICATE MYSELF TO THE UNIVERSAL DIAMOND BE THIS RAGING FURY BE DESTROYED”
And he will protect those who love the woods and rivers, Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children:
And if anyone is threatened by advertising, air pollution, television, or the police, they should chant SMOKEY THE BEAR’S WAR SPELL:
DROWN THEIR BUTTS
CRUSH THEIR BUTTS
DROWN THEIR BUTTS
CRUSH THEIR BUTTS
And SMOKEY THE BEAR will surely appear to put the enemy out with his vajra-shovel.
Now those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada.
Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick.
Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature.
Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts.
Will always have ripened blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at.
AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT
…thus we have heard…
(may be reproduced free forever)
NEWBORN SOUL
For an hour I held
the new child in my arms,
watched her eyes flutter
open and closed and open
and closed again, held
her through the jolt
of her startle reflex,
held her as she resettled
into quiet contentment
in the unfamiliar body.
The hands know what
the mind cannot fathom.
Just two days ago, I sat
beside an old man
with bright eyes and
a thick German accent.
He told me, Most people
don’t know how wonderful
they are. My whole body
startled at his words,
aware of all the insecurity
and worry I carry, then
softened, softened, as if I, too,
were newly born, learning
for the first time
what it means to be
wonderful.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
I watch the cars travel the twin lanes of the highway, gone in five seconds. Inside each are people living complex lives: seeking happiness, purpose, and freedom. I wonder what this world would become if they could see, just for five seconds, that we are branches on the same tree, trees in the same forest. I wonder what this world would become if we realized that freedom does not belong to us – that it is borrowed from this living world, borrowed from those without freedom, borrowed from the world of the future. I wonder if we could learn to seek individual freedom within collective freedom, individual liberation within collective liberation, individual prosperity within collective prosperity. I imagine, in this epoch of loneliness, what would happen if we reached toward freedom together.
– Ethan Tapper
Carbohydrates aren’t always your problem. Sodium isn’t always your problem. Cholesterol isn’t always your problem. Meat isn’t always your problem. One of the most overlooked contributors to poor health is chronic emotional stress. When your nervous system is stuck in survival mode, it can disrupt hormones, blood sugar, digestion, sleep, immunity and recovery. You can eat the healthiest diet in the world, but if your body never feels safe, healing becomes much harder. Sometimes the biggest thing standing between you and better health isn’t what’s on your plate, it’s the stress your body has been carrying for far too long.
– Anthony Goldsmith
Now we have to get back the cosmos, and it can’t be done by a trick. The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again. It has taken two thousand years to kill them. Who knows how long it will take to bring them to life. When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos. — It is nothing human and personal that we are short of. What we lack is cosmic life, the sun in us and the moon in us.
– D.H. Lawrence
WE ALMOST NEVER think of the present, and when we do, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future.
– Antonio R. Damasio
The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.
– Princess Irulan, Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib
Because getting to know the world happens anyway, by living in it, as soon as you walk out the door you’re confronted with the world directly. With the whole world. With up and down, back and front, ugliness and beauty, perfectly normal. There’s no need to want this. It happens of its own accord. And if you never leave the house, the process is the same.
– Thomas Bernhard
All around us, we can see people trying to solve by logical argument, or by the acquiring of information, problems that can only be dealt with by a change of heart.
– Mary Midgley
Everyone has that moment I think, the moment when something so momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there.
– Kathleen Glasgow
If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.
– Jasper Fforde
How we treat ourselves and each other at the smallest scale is how the world begins to be shaped.
– Daisy Lin
a soft sweater
carrying the faint scent
of another season
– @BashoSociety
The right kind of warrior takes on his own internal demons before he sails out to take on those of others. He takes his stand, and stands his ground, without giving in to the nihil of the age. He cleaves to what he believes in without falling into the traps laid by partisanship, anger and self-righteousness. Most of all, he works to clear out his own inner junkyard so that he can go searching for truth – and recognize it when he finds it. His war is against the worst of himself and for the best of the world, and what he is fighting for is the love he so often fails at. His most effective weapon is sacrifice.
– Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine
To live on words is to live in separation and hence in the conflict of duality.
– Krishnamurti
We’ll win what really matters.
We’ll win the right way.
– Ryan Holiday
I think that the task of philosophy is
not to provide answers, but to show
how the way we perceive a problem
can be itself part of a problem.
– Slavoj Žižek
The highest meditation is to think of nothing.
If you can remain without thought, great power will come.
Inward is not a Direction,
Inward is a Dimension.
– Sadhguru
The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror — going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing.
– Zhuangzi
I’d ask myself Montaigne’s question, What do I know? Which usually was not much.
– Lewis Lapham
Your evaluation of someone else’s inner state can be explained in three words:
1. Projection
2. Projection
3. Projection
Rather focus on your own inner state.
– Kenneth Folk
The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.
– Jane Goodall
We have to remember both our Buddhanature and our zip code.
– Jack Kornfield
Awakening doesn’t change those specific truths that we have to wrestle with daily,
rather, it changes how we relate to them. Spiritual oneness enables us to stop struggling for a moment, and that’s a great relief, but if we don’t pick the struggle back up, this isn’t wisdom, it’s acquiescence.
– Vince Horn
Historically, the English language is a muddle; actually it is a beautiful, personal, and highly sensitive creature.
– Owen Barfield
Don’t hate the arising of thoughts or stop the thoughts that arise. Just realize that our original mind is beyond thought.
– Bankei
When you revise it’s not just fixing or polishing, it’s really pulling it inside out again.
– Sam Lipsyte
Our spirit is the real part of us, the body but its garment. A man would not find peace at the tailor’s because his coat comes from there; neither can the spirit obtain true happiness from the earth just because his body belongs to earth.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan
the house painter
descending his ladder
blue sky
– Martin Lucas
Rigidity yielding a little, like justice swayed by mercy, is the whole beauty of the earth.
– G.K. Chesterton
What is the quickest way to ruin your life?
Becoming a post-modern screen gazer.
– Poetic Outlaws
I don’t like people. I don’t like any kind of people. When you get them together in a big lump they all get nasty and dirty and full of trouble. So I don’t like people including you. That’s what a misanthropist is.
– Mickey Spillane
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
– Sigmund Freud
I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some
backtalk
From the mute sky,
– Sylvia Plath
Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment.
– Nikola Tesla
To be one’s own mainstay is to be one’s own self-help. Teaching us to do that is the Buddha’s ultimate gift.
– Mary Talbot
The Mower
by Philip Larkin
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.
– Charles Bukowski
From the perspective of the vastness, the other does not exist. When the vastness sees everything out of itself to be made of itself, this is the ultimate intimacy. The moment-to-moment flavor of the vastness undulating within itself as it perceives itself through every particle of itself everywhere brings a love that is limitless, far surpassing anything that the mind could construct as the ideal love itself.
– Suzanne Segal
Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
– Thomas Jefferson
It’s a part of the spiritual responsibility of women to set the standard.
– Nika Solé
You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.
– Eckhart Tolle
The creative process has a feminine quality, and the creative work arises from unconscious depths—we might truly say from the realm of the Mothers.
– C. G. Jung
If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.
– Benjamin Franklin
When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head. Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self. This is the ego, a mind-made ‘me.’ That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious. That’s why fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces.
– Eckhart Tolle
Resenting a new technology
will not halt its progress.
– Marshall McLuhan
As I wend to the shores I know not,
As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women
wreck’d, As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and
closer, I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.
O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth,
Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my
mouth, Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil
upon me I have not once had the least idea who or
what I am, But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me
stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory
signs and bows,
– Walt Whitman
What brings fulfillment is gratefulness, the simple response of our heart to this given life in all its fullness.
– Br. David Steindl-Rast
In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.
– George Orwell
That is our hope. Because if we all start listening and helping, then surely, together, we can make the world a better place for all living things. Can’t we?
– Jane Goodall
Nothing even surprises or shocks me anymore. I 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
first date—
he tells me there’s an app
for the moon
– Melissa Allen
Entering into close relationship of any kind with people who don’t work on themselves like you do is a slow leak of your power. You’re better off by yourself than with people who don’t match your caliber of mastery.
– Nika Solé
They have annihilated all living things of language, and consider only their own subjective response as objective. The borrowed object of the rational organization of events in the work took the place of positivity.
– Yojūrō Yasuda
If intense cold strikes not to the bone, how can plum blossom be fragrant?
– Huang Po
Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
– Thomas Paine
God invites you always to your highest thought about yourself.
– Neale Donald Walsch
frosty evening —
the smell of a book
just arrived
– Ion Codrescu
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
– Albert Camus
Our love for ourselves does not mean that we like
ourselves. It means that we wish our own good.
– C.S. Lewis
Tis not enough to help the feeble up, but to support them after.
– William Shakespeare
Life will continue to send you the same challenges over and over-until you learn the lesson. If you see a pattern, seek the lesson!
– Karen Salmansohn
evening breeze
something close to Mozart
in the chimes
– Lane Parker
Easter morning
the new-born turtles
race to the sea
– Tony Virgilio
Having a simple no tolerance policy for bullshit or for weird energy is going to save you from so much. This world is full of it.
– Nika Solé
autumn sunset
the wake of a tugboat
sloshes ashore
– Christopher Herold
red pagoda
in swirling snow
the muffled gong
– Denis M. Garrison
I’ve watched a hundred people crash and burn within six months of declaring victory over suffering. Just don’t do it. You’ll still be here in six months, at which time you’ll either be licking your wounds or thanking providence that you remained silent.
– Kenneth Folk
Normally we try to avoid suffering and problems permanently by using external methods.
– Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
[The Democrats] would do better to welcome socialists into the party and to adopt some of their ideas, which are no more radical than Social Security was during the New Deal.
– Michael Greenberg
Such people use obscure words to disguise the triteness of what they have to say and retort that there has been a misunderstanding as soon as you think you have understood what they are saying – that is, precisely, something trite.
– Jacques Rancière
I’m filled with a desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither.
– Albert Camus
Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.
– Eckhart Tolle
At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
– Albert Camus
Can you look without the voice in your head commenting, drawing conclusions, comparing, or trying to figure something out?
– Eckhart Tolle
When the whole world is globalized, you’re going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match.
– René Girard
Meditation is the understanding of the movement of thought, not its suppression.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
To write is also to not speak, it is to be silent, it is to scream without sound.
– Marguerite Duras
If it wasn’t for clouds,
you would see into the sky.
If it wasn’t for dirt,
you would see into the diamond.
If it wasn’t for waves,
you would see into the water.
Likewise,
if it wasn’t for your obscurations,
you would see into the nature of your mind.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
– Erich Fromm
And when the sweetness is adjusted,
why, we’ll know more than some do now.
– John Ashbery, Strange Cinema
white people don’t say “hobby” anymore. they say “i’m low key autistic and this is my current special interest and hyperfixation”
– @francis__wolf
LET THE DAY GO
who needs it
I had another day in mind
something like this one
sunny green the earth
just right having suffered
the assault of what is called
torrential rain the pepper
the basil sitting upright
in their little boxes waiting
I suppose for me also the
cosmos the zinnias nearly
blooming a year too late
forget it let the day go
the sweet green day let it
take care of itself
– Grace Paley
To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.
– David Viscott
I’ve always felt strongly that a writer shouldn’t be engaged with other writers, or with people who make books, or even with people who read them. I think the farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.
– Nelson Algren
Never mind what’s going on. Do not concern yourself with this world, or get caught up in it, and it will be like the world will come and go. Sitting back from the world, you remember who you really are, what you really are.
– Robert Adams
People that belong
together, do not
need to be glued
together.
– Anne Sexton quoting Sigmund Freud
The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
– Philip Hoffman
He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
– 1 John 4:8
Narrative, far from being merely a form of discourse that can be filled with different contents, real or imaginary as the case may be, already possesses a content prior to any given actualization of it in speech or writing.
– H. White
I can’t do anything without sleep, except vacuum.
– Henri Cole
The fact that desire is not articulable is no reason for its not being articulated.
– Jacques Lacan
Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself is a slave, whatever he may be.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
There is something
grotesque in having
my own evils save my
life.
– Sophocles
Train yourself to be indifferent to false claims about you. Without such indifference you can’t be free.
– Leo Tolstoy
If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.
– Stephen Hawking
The joy of wading
across a summer stream
sandals in hand.
– Yosa Buson
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing.
– Emerson
Poetry puts language in a state of emergence.
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
8 years on the same job and just as broke as if I were not working.
– Charles Bukowski
He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.
– Goethe
Germany is not poorer than the US. It has just chosen to cash out more of its productivity in the form of free time than the US has. The other Western European countries have made similar decisions.
Even with France, which is the only country that has a lower employment rate than the US, a little digging reveals that this is mostly driven by decisions it has made about retirement and student life.
– Matt Bruenig
Do not just slay your demons; dissect them and find what they’ve been feeding on.
– Andres Fernandez
The climate movement is a peace movement, a movement to end this war and its casualties.
– Rebecca Solnit
I saw clearly that I
was lying to myself.
And it was because
the lie was a sweet
one.
– Albert Camus
My art originates from hallucinations only I can see.
– Yayoi Kusama
As wildfires rage, the right’s denial of the climate crisis has gone up in smoke.
To love our planet, to marvel at nature and the beauty of life on Earth transcends left and right. Economy, society and nature are intimately interdependent.
– Will Hutton
We believe that God sees us from above, but in truth, God looks at us from within.
– Shams Tabrizi
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
– Richard Feynman
Capitalism and colonialism have set up the inevitable destruction of the dystopia they created. We are in the process of suffering a shift into broadly unsurvivable conditions. We should stop denying this.
– Ben See
After getting what you manifested, ask for discipline to keep it and wisdom to multiply it.
– Reads with Ravi
There was no fight left in me. Not because I was weak, but because nothing felt worth the effort. I didn’t give up-I drifted out.
– Franz Kafka
It’s hard to beat a guy when he’s got his mind made up that he’s going to win.
– Muhammad Ali
The poor and the middle class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers, and the ultra-rich pay politicians.
– attributed to author and journalist George Monbiot
More than any earthly power,
More than all the joys in heaven,
More than rule over all the world,
is the Entrance to the Stream.
– Dhammapada 178
The same God that doesn’t answer your prayers right away, is the same God that doesn’t punish you right after you sin.
– Rumi
The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct.
– Nietzsche
He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.
– Circe
If language is incorrect, then what is said does not concord with what was meant; and if what is said does not concord with what was meant, what is to be done cannot be effected. […] The people will stand about in helpless confusion.
– Confucius
Place the arrow like a marzipan rose, a hoofprint / In resolution blue. Voiced
in the coliseum without / Speech. And heard in the mind without thought. /
Released into the motes that become large white / Butterflies and
greenveined moths flying like books.
– Lucian Codas
Life is so robust, it seems to come cascading, blind and green, and at times it is frightening, because we too are alive, but we live in what amounts to a controlled environment, which makes us fear whatever is blind, wild, chaotic, stretching towards the sun, but most often also beautiful, in a deeper way than the purely visual, for the soil smells of rot and darkness, teems with scuttling beetles and convulsing worms, the flower stalks are juicy, their petals brim with scents, and the air, cold and sharp, warm and humid, filled with sunrays or rain, lies against skin, accustomed to the indoors, like a soothing compress of hereness.
– Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn
trapped in the nightmare
of four more years of this man-child …
we wake each morning
as if we’re living
the Groundhog Day loop
– Chen-ou Liu
Thinking aims at and ends in contemplation, and contemplation is not an activity but a passivity; it is the point where mental activity comes to rest.
– Hannah Arendt
None sing as purely as those in deepest hell; it is their singing we take for the singing of angels.
– Franz Kafka
The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
– Murray Bookchin
The language of the wilderness is the most beautiful language we have and it is our job to sing it, until and even after it is gone, no matter how much it hurts.
– Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country
The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.
– George Bernard Shaw
Every thought and act of ours is saved and comes back to us in some form or other.
– Osho, The Book of Secrets
Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
– Marilynne Robinson
Don’t write so that you can be understood,
write so that you can’t be misunderstood.
– William Howard Taft
The work grows as it is being made.
– Joan Miró
Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
– Etty Hillesum
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
The world is a reflection of your own consciousness; be pure.
– Adi Shankara
Is there psychological time, or is it merely a deceptive convenience of the mind?
– Krishnamurti
To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.
Eleanor Roosevelt
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
– Henry David Thoreau
An arrogant person is a dangerous leader. Effective leaders know they need to continuously learn. “Learning requires humility. It requires the ability to sit with someone who sees the world differently and absorb what they know instead of insisting you already know it better. This is our country, the people’s country. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
– Heather Cox Richardson
You were a phonograph, I was a kid
I sat with an ear, close, listening.
I was there when the rain tapped down your face.
You were a miracle, I was just holdin’ your space.
– Gregory Alan Isakov
Of course my life is ruined. But I was right in those days: everything for happiness, against the world which surrounds us with its violence and it’s stupidity.
– Albert Camus
We will not have peace by afterthought.
– Norman Cousins
These days I am in a super-acute, a hyped-up life. It never goes to sleep. And yet all the events of this hyped-up life seem to be cut from the hyperdream. All of them turn up accompanied by a voice that murmurs to my heart “it’s not going to last.”
– Hélène Cixous
In the blink of an eye, something happens by chance – when you least expect it – sets you on a course that you never planned, into a future you never imagined.
– Nicholas Sparks
Failure can be divided into those who thought and never did and into those who did and never thought.
– John Charles Salak
The free enterprise people who cry out loudly are the ones who want to grab freely and who will not acknowledge that in order to make things really free for the majority of the people there probably must be some control vested in government which will prevent the strong from removing all opportunities from the weak.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
I’ll miss the sea, but a person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens.
– Dune (1984)
The only defensible war is a war of defense.
– Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The path to freedom is earned by fighting your inner demons and not giving into what feels easy in the beginning because there are consequences later.
– Shi Heng Li
If we’re going to imagine God at all, we should sometimes imagine him as very angry. Especially angry about injustice to his special people—the poor and the helpless.
– Herbert McCabe
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
– George Washington
The love that does not discriminate against us, condemns us. Whoever loves everything in us, loves nothing in us.
– Fernando Pessoa
The politician is an acrobat. He keeps his balance by saying the opposite of what he does.
– Maurice Barres
We grow used to living before we grow used to living. In that little room where we learn to live, the heart stores up its bitterness. Later on, solitude is no longer a matter of being alone; it is a matter of not being able to be alone, of being swamped by a crowd of memories and ghosts.
– Albert Camus
I’m trying to take advantage of the person I’ve had to become because I don’t get to be the person I was.
– Sue Gordon
She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.
– Gillian Flynn
There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.
– Haruki Murakami
Scrutinizing ever so carefully, crafty in wisdom, parading your arrogance — all this invites mistrust.
– Zhuangzi
If you clear your blood of animal flesh energy, then you will better understand the true nature of your human spirit soul.
– Jay Quion
Use information as a tool for transformation. Only. Do not use it for its own sake.
A warrior doesn’t stay at home reading books about weapons.
She chooses her weapon and ventures out.
– Steve Chandler
In troubled times, if we stop to ask ourselves what will really come of all our agitation, when our thoughts go back and forth from one idea to another; what will come of all our worries and fears, all our wishes and hopes, in the end—and if we are willing to have an answer from the Bible—what we will hear is: There will be just one thing in the end, and that is the love that was in our thoughts, worries, wishes, and hopes.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
For the sake of who I am to become, I will sacrifice who I am now.
– Miyamoto Musashi
The saddest people on earth are those who end their days with no relationships in which they are truly known and truly loved.
– Dr. Henry Cloud
No river reaches the sea without first making peace with every stone.
– Irish Proverb
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Subtle is the Lord but malicious He is not.
– Einstein
Some are born to enjoy illusions, others are cursed to see the truth.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Art that ignores the remarkable
persistence of the cheerful and
silly parts of life will miss
something profound about
the human experience.
– James Marriott
To challenge a dogma is not an act of hate; it is an act of intellectual liberation.
– Ayaan Hirsi Ali
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
– Jonathan Swift
It is ‘where we are’ that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.
– Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea
Courtship is finding the ten thousand ways of giving something to someone that they need for their lives without recourse to asking them what it is they might need. Courtship needs slowness, elegance, discernment, some cunning in the name of life, and a well-cooked heart. …[it] gives with a deep respect for the need or the struggle of the recipient.
– Stephen Jenkinson
Like wild horses, anything you chase after will always run away. Don’t pursue love. Don’t chase peace; don’t pursue the Holy or God. Don’t chase after what you want. You will spook ‘em; they’ll always run faster than you can. You can’t catch ‘em. But what would happen if you did catch ’em? They’d be terrified of you and hate your presumptuous arrogance that you deserve love, peace, or the presence of the Holy. Instead of chasing to possess, better to learn the deepest and marvelous details of all those wild “horses“ and things you would capture, then, promising never to capture them, find out what each of these things loves the most. Then make a feast of gift-giving to that thing and learn to “call” God, love, peace, or wild horses by singing beauty to them in the way they would love the most. Leave the offerings, don’t stare at them if they do come, and don’t try to get them to stay. Thank them for allowing you to be in their rare presence. Then maybe in the process you might become worth knowing. Maybe you shall have learned how to admire and serve what you do not need to possess and enslave to serve you. Then maybe you might become a real person.
– Martin Prechtel
Jealousy and awards are not always the best or healthiest motivations for poetry… Instead, leaning on gratitude, how poetry can elevate the mundane, empower the voiceless & marginalized, bring light in while still confronting the difficult, complex. To me these are more interesting, inspiring modes of motivation….
– Jose Hernandez Diaz
“Everything can be integrated” is actually a core myth of Rational Individualism, not of Meta-Rational Integralism.
This has long been my critique of the Integral scene, that, developmentally it’s made up primarily of Individualists cosplaying as Integralists. I know because in my 20s, I too was a professional integral cosplayer—self-assured and self-absorbed in my own little world of personal development, totalizing frameworks, & self-assured rightness.
Show me you’ve actually incorporated the truths of post-modernism—that you’ve stretched well beyond your native sensemaking in service of understanding someone whose suffering is being enabled by the status quo you’re comfortable with—and then we can start talking about inclusiveness and integration.
– Vince Horn
The sun coming out of a cloud and shining brightly on patches of cudweed reminds me of frost on the grass in the morning. A splendid entire rainbow after a slight shower, with two reflections of it, outermost broad red, passing througli yellow to green, then narrow red, then blue or indigo…then faint red again. It is too remarkable to be remarked on.
– Thoreau
People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
– Doris Lessing
The loss of a loved person is one of the most intensely painful experiences any human being can suffer.
– John Bowlby
clouds passing
over the quiet house
nothing stays heavy forever
– @BashoSociety
Inflation is going to impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.
– Terence McKenna
My defense is of God, which saveth the upright in heart.
– Psalm 7:10
With Buddhism, I always felt like it needed it to be passionate and moving for it to work for me. I’ve never been interested in religion for religion’s sake. It had to have that passion.
– Chris Kelley
Write, just write. Write what you remember, what’s happening now, what you predict will happen. Write in any form: fiction, nonfiction, autofiction, poetry, drama, screenplay, memoir, journal, scraps and aphorisms. Somebody has got to keep culture alive.
– Janet Burroway
It becomes apparent that the author cannot mold characters as he pleases, that they have a certain autonomy.
– Mario Vargas Llosa
Took me like five decades to realize that if someone can’t hear you, they can’t hear you—there are no amount of words that will change that.
– Lisa Lucas
It will come all right in the end. There is the steady impulse of your determination that sets you on your feet again after every downfall and breakdown. Gradually, the obstacles are all overcome and your current becomes stronger.
– Ramana Maharshi
Everything comes right in the end. Steady determination is what is required.
– Ramana Maharshi
When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I’m going to show them, this time.
– Kingsley Amis
Faith is much richer and far more expansive than the narrow, confining view that tends to come with adhering to dogma. . . . In Pali, the word for faith, saddha, is a verb—not a commodity we do or do not possess but something we actively do.
– Sharon Salzberg
I have a tendency to become infatuated with people who are distant and difficult to understand, who share themselves sparingly, and rarely with their whole hearts.
I adore the mysteries and enigmas of people. The harder to solve, the better.
– Beau Taplin
Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.
– Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Perhaps never before have the peoples of the world been so close to losing the very core of their humanity; for of what use are cosmic energies, if they are handled by disoriented and demoralized men?
– Lewis Mumford
You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don’t see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it.
– Carl Sagan
Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.
– Zora Neale Hurston
Meditation, if done right, if done well, over time creates a psychological stability within you, so that when these big experiences happen, if stability has been created, they’re less likely to knock you totally off balance.
– Adyashanti
Lonely, ain’t it?
Yes, but my lonely is mine.
Now your lonely is somebody else’s.
Made by somebody else and handed to you.
Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.
– Toni Morrison
Life is a long lesson in humility.
– J.M. Barrie
We’re not asking white people to apologize for their ancestors. We’re asking them to dismantle the systems of oppression they built, still maintain, and benefit from.
– Lance Cooper
Sometimes I am
empty for a very
long time.
I have no identity.
– Marguerite Duras
For the moment / she is all right. / She hasn’t had a drink // for two days. She had to stop on the leaf- / strewn hill / not to catch her breath // but because my legs won’t work
– Charles Kell
It is science that has destroyed the belief in witchcraft, magic and sorcery. It is science that has made the old creeds and the old superstitions impossible for intelligent men to accept. It is science that has made it laughable to suppose the earth the center of the universe and man the supreme purpose of the creation. It is science that is showing the falsehood of the old dualisms of soul and body, mind and matter, which have their origin in religion. It is science that is beginning to make us understand ourselves, and to enable us, up to a point, to see ourselves from without as curious mechanisms. It is science that has taught us the way to substitute tentative truth for cocksure error.
– Bertrand Russell
Someone loves everything you hate about you.
– Frank Ocean
Wake Turbulence
by Elizabeth Metzger
After leaving my old life
I return often
the way a dried
chickpea
soaked overnight
comes back
to its first form,
not the same as
floating all along
in the aluminum
of origins.
My brain has
suffered a wake
turbulence
as when a plane
banks to the left
due to another
plane above.
Each time I feel
the fact of me
die out I read
my children
like a stranger’s
punctuation
beckoning me
for directions.
Some days
I will not eat
unless it’s tart
au nothing
longing for
not quite love
again, but the lip
of the jar of love
is just as nice.
My heart says
Bad bad bad
flicking two
packs of sugar
against a cup
and my spine
remains my favorite
part of me because
I cannot see it.
In the conference
moonlight, several
workshops of stars
neglect their work,
backbiting Earth
in the most beautiful
voices. Upon landing
my wish is to be
done returning
like a Cycladic
figure in a tomb
leaning faceless
but absolutely femme
against what was.
The dead so dead
the statue flaunts
her future. She never
left. I left yes yes
and in the end
I will still be praying
not to die
when and if I do.
More cops have been arrested for using flock cameras to stalk women than there are transgender athletes in youth sports.
– Rebekah Jones
Mind, It’s like space. You can’t possess it and you can’t lose it.
– Bodhidharma
Because love is not enough, because it neither heals sadness nor saves from the abyss, and yet we seek it with the hunger of shipwrecked souls.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
Everything seems to me like a place. The city and its mud is a place, as is a daydream.
– Carolina Ebeid
The humiliation I go through
when I think of my past
can only be described as grace.
We are created by being destroyed.
– Franz Wright
In purest song one plays the constant fool
As changes shimmer in the inner eye.
– Theodore Roethke
THE NEXT TIME
Perfection is out of the question for people like us,
so why plug away at the same old self when the landscape
has opened its arms and given us marvelous shrines
to flock towards? The great motels to the west are waiting,
in somebody’s yard a pristine dog is hoping that we’ll drive by,
and on the rubber surface of a lake people bobbing up and down
will wave. The highway comes right to the door, so let’s
take off before the world out there burns up. Life should be more
than the body’s weight working itself from room to room.
A turn through the forest will do us good, so will a spin
among the farms. Just think of the chickens strutting,
the cows swinging their udders, and flicking their tails at flies.
And one can imagine prisms of summer light breaking against
the silent, haze-filled sleep of the farmer and his wife.
– Mark Strand
Oh thank God. I can’t imagine explaining “sleep” to someone who had never heard of it. Hey, I’m going to fall unconscious and hallucinate for a while. By the way, I spend a third of my time doing this. And if I can’t do it for a while, I go insane and eventually die. No need for concern.
– Andy Weir
These days I can see us clinging to each other
as we are swept along by the current
I am clinging to you to keep you from
being swept away and you are clinging to me
to keep me from being swept away from you
we see the shores blurring past as we hold
each other in the rushing current
the daylight ruses unheard far above us
how long will we be swept along in the daylight
how long will we cling together in the night
and where will it carry us together
– W.S. Merwin, Here Together
To make a stone stonier, that is the purpose of art.
– Viktor Slovski
Structural violence creates lopsided structures of the imagination. Those on the bottom of the heap have to spend a great deal of imaginative energy trying to understand the social dynamics that surround them—including having to imagine perspectives of those on the top—while the latter wander about largely oblivious to much of what is going on around them. That is, the powerless not only end up doing most of the actual, physical labor that is required to keep society running, they also do most the interpretive labor as well.
– David Graeber
I knew then that he was a liar, that for all his reportage and his honesty he was determined to keep himself untouched, to take without giving, to hoard himself like a greedy child.
– Rachel Cusk
And me / I travel the old roads again and again / wearing a different life.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
When people ask me what Emily Dickinson poems are about, I want to run away and hide, simply because for me, some poems are not about the ‘about’. They are metaphysical spells that you hold close and don’t really want to elaborate on. They help you to go on when you have nothing else left to go on with, the kind of poems you remember even when you don’t want to remember them.
– Ilya Kaminsky
To read is to cover one’s face, I thought.
To read is to cover one’s face. And to
write is to show it.
– Alejandro Zambra
The blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul.
– Leonard Cohen
I always make the mistake of trying to force my way toward being, as if I could oblige being to appear. The opposite is true. It is being that constantly strives toward the light of consciousness. It needs a passage that allows it to radiate. But on the way it meets the hard crust of the ego and is blocked by it. In order for being to have an action, a void must appear before it in which a finer vibration can be sensed. Only in emptiness can its vivifying power be felt, only when there are no tensions or any disordered movements of the ego wanting at all costs to prove its identity, to affirm its authority. Each tension is testimony of my ego. In each tension the whole of me is engaged.
I now understand that conscious sensation is the first sign of obedience to something greater, the first step toward a true feeling. Here I glimpse the possibility of a direct perception. My tyrannical “I” submits and no longer dominates, no longer trying to show its strength. I feel another force, not a power that I possess but one in which I am. At this moment there appears an energy coming from a higher emotional current, irresistible so long as it is obeyed. It is this energy, a cosmic force passing in us, that all traditions call “love.”
– Jeanne De Salzmann
I do not see emotions and feelings as the intangible and vaporous qualities that many presume them to be. Their subject matter is concrete, and they can be related to specific systems in body and brain, no less so than vision or speech.
– Antonio R. Damasio
While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality… true art lies in a reality that is felt.
– Odilon Redon
Only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.
– Carl Jung
When we see God in each other we will be able to live in peace.
– Mother Teresa
gotta say spending time during the dog days of summer immersed in the writings and lives of Rilke and Baudelaire is just really good for the ol’ mental health.
– Geoff Wilt
Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
– Sigmund Freud
I watched life and wanted to be a part of it but found it painfully difficult.
– Anaïs Nin
It is EVERYWHERE!!!! Christ returning, is people waking up and becoming Christ like!
– Laura Eisenhower
We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
– Audre Lorde
Why is it always only a matter of choosing between something bad and something worse?
– Charles Bukowski
The funniest thing about art: first you’re “weird,” then you’re “ahead of your time”
– Ramin Nasibov
We became wretched,
dear younger self.
Will you forgive me?
– Touhida K.
The mystery of existence lies in finding something to live for.
– Dostoevsky
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
– Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Weightlifting
[Verse 1]
I discover the wheel and watch the buildings go by
You talk a little soft, turn off the radio
I just want to hear all the past times
The rushed hours, the endless lives
Don’t become a burden
Say the word and be free (Oh la, la la la)
[Chorus]
You will find (Oh la, oh la)
A great weight lifting (Oh la, la la la)
Easing your mind (Oh la, oh la)
A great weight lifting (Oh la, la la la)
Just leave it behind (Oh la, oh la)
A great weight lifting (Oh la, la la la)
And you will find (Oh la, oh la)
A great weight lifting
[Verse 2]
It’s been a lonely winter, hibernatin’ away
You need a little sunlight on that face
How long can you stay in the darkness?
Dust ’round the empty nest?
You could make your way out if you lay down
The load (Oh la, la la la)
[Chorus]
And you will find (Oh la, oh la)
A great weight lifting (Oh la, la la la)
Easing your mind (Oh la, oh la)
A great weight lifting (Oh la, la la la)
Leave it behind (Oh la, oh la)
A great weight lifting (Oh la, la la la)
You will find (Oh la, oh la)
A great weight lifting (Oh la, la la la)
Just leave it behind (Oh la, oh la)
A great weight lifting (Oh la, la la la)
And you will find (Oh la, oh la)
A great weight lifting (Oh la, la la la)
[Outro]
Oh la, oh la
Oh la, la la la
Oh la, oh la
Oh la la, la (You will)
Oh la la, la (You will, ooh)
Oh la la, la (You will, ooh)
Oh la la, la (You will, ooh)
– Trashcan Sinatras
Inexplicable and unforeseeable events will produce new conditions, technologies, experiences, and incite new art. The bases for judgment and criticism will undergo upheaval, also.
– Lynne Tillman
Knights ought to be humble among their friends, proud and bold against their foes, tender and merciful towards those who need assistance, cruel avengers against their enemies, and pleasant and amiable with all others.
– Geoffroi De Charny
since the bright beams cannot cut the cloud in two, the light gathers into itself.
– Anaximenes, (tr. Dan Beachy-Quick)
It is one of life’s bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.
– Lemony Snicket
Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
– Walter Benjamin
Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.
– Milan Kundera
…tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.
– Henry David Thoreau
Science rejects many a thing today which she may find herself forced to accept tomorrow.
– Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
What stays without force is yours by dharma; what leaves despite effort came only to teach you.
– Krishna
Serve the living God!
God comes to you in the blind, in the halt,
in the poor, in the weak, in the diabolical.
– Vivekananda
You’re not gonna solve everybody’s problems. In fact, you’re not gonna solve anybody’s problems. So, you know what you should do? Anything. As much of it, and as often as you can.
– Casey McCall
Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.
– Mary Ritter Beard
So much alike is our historical And spiritual pattern, a heap Of stones anywhere is consecrated By love’s terrible need.
– fr. Lough Derg, Patrick Kavanaugh
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
– George Orwell
If you discovered something that made you tighten inside, you had better try to learn more about it.
– Nicholas Sparks
The challenge for us is that no amount of studying or open-mindedness can genuinely recreate the power of fear and uncertainty.
– Morgan Housel
You’re going to come across people in your life who will say all the right words at all the right times. But in the end, it’s always their actions you should judge them by. It’s actions, not words, that matter.
– Nicholas Sparks, The Rescue
People with 6 teeth defending people with 8 yachts is one of the greatest political achievements in modern history.
– Mr. Global
It seems to me that all good stories are told with varying degrees of reluctance – and in my case, the author, too, is reluctant to go in. But not writing is almost always more difficult than writing.
– Claire Keegan
Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself.
– Thomas Merton
Spiritual materialism is attachment to the spiritual path as a solid accomplishment or possession.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Awkward in a hundred ways,
clumsy in a thousand,
still I go on.
– Yakusan
Imagine if you made something and then you always had to be seen through what you’d made, as if the thing you’d made became you.
– Ali Smith, How to Be Both
For the thinking person there is no such thing as idleness… By contrast, one might say that the thinking person is at his most active when he is supposedly doing nothing. This is beyond the comprehension of genuinely idle people.
– Thomas Bernhard
I started writing because no one had yet given me the words I needed. So I wrote them myself.
– Ingeborg Bachmann
I want community, not conformity.
– Kirstin Allio
summer moon
the pine tree’s shadow
upon the gate
– Basho
It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.
– Donald Woods Winnicott
I do not know what windings in the waste
Of those strange sea-lanes brought me home once more
– H. P. Lovecraft
The most effective way to do it, is to do it.
– Amelia Earhart
Jung said to me: “You can’t analyze people really if you don’t know how they live. If you haven’t gotten a whiff of the country in which they live, if you haven’t gotten a feeling of the atmosphere in which they normally live, you can’t understand them.”
– Marie Louise von Franz
In the age of the selfie, the true traveler is, more than ever, the one who’s ready to take himself out of the picture. Almost everything in the world is more interesting than our tiny selves and hopes.
– Pico Iyer
I would rather be the child of a mother who has all the inner conflicts of the human being than be mothered by someone for whom all is easy and smooth, who knows all the answers, and is a stranger to doubt.
– Donald Woods Winnicott
I had my breakdown in New York. I lived there for two years. That was enough.
– Fanny Howe
His stories are sea swells…
– Elias Canetti
In Platonic language, the task of the human being is to “remember” more than his or her personal experience. The larger task is to remember the lost wisdom or legacy of the human soul, and the origins of consciousness from its spiritual source.
– David Tacey
Empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person.
– Heinz Kohut
Since we never cease to change, the same must hold true of the dharma.
– Kurt Spellmeyer
Play like dreams serves the function of self realization.
– Donald Woods Winnicott
…man can no more survive psychologically in a psychological milieu that does not respond empathetically to him, than he can survive physically in an atmosphere that contains no oxygen.
– Heinz Kohut
Even when we imagine extraordinary, interplanetary voyages, we take our baggage with us.
– Anastasia Klimchynskaya
As a child, it seemed obvious; now older, I see why they told us.
So many, don’t learn the lessons; and take fashion, as the guide to virtue.
The wrongness, so loudly proclaimed as right; if only we knew, as children.
– @AmericanSijo
Few men think, yet all will have opinions. Hence men’s opinions are superficial and confused.
– John Locke
You need to let little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you …
– Andy Warhol
The Buddha’s teaching is revolutionary. It starts with the shocking announcement that you aren’t going to get what you want.
– Kenneth Folk
Reading does not mean withdrawing from the world; it means entering the world through other doors.
– Bernard Pivot
It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.
– Donald Woods Winnicott
If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth.
– Václav Havel
Beginners often argue and boast about the superiority of their way, but one who has trodden the path knows that all paths lead to the same destination. There is no superior or inferior path.
– Anandamayi Ma
It is immaterial which path one follows, but one should carefully watch one’s own modifications of mind and learn not to identify with them.
– Anandamayi Ma
If thinking were wisdom, nerds would be sages.
– Kenneth Folk
I am not the kind of writer who steps outside of the work, figures out what needs to happen, then steps back in to make it happen. I have rarely written with the purpose of saying anything particularly. I have written so as to be writing.
– Renee Gladman
There are poisons that blind you,
and poisons that open your eyes.
– August Strindberg
As you find the light in you, you begin to see the light in everyone else.
– Ram Dass
What happens around you is not always your choice, but what happens within you is always your choice.
– Sadhguru
The biggest thing I’ve learned about writing is that we tend to underestimate and marginalize the irrational, intuitive aspects of it.
– George Saunders
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
– Bertrand Russell
Life is an adventure, it’s not a package tour.
– Eckhart Tolle
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.
– John Ashbery
…the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.
– C.S. Lewis
Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?
– Sigmund Freud
It may be that not until many years have elapsed will we recall that the most important events in our emotional life occurred without our having time to give it any prolonged attention.
– Marcel Proust
Everyone encountered the same Andy Warhol, but each came away with a different notion of who he was …
– Gary Indiana
It is only through inner silence can you bring out happiness and celebration in life.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
People have a need to feel they are a part of some sustainable project. Something that will go on without them. . . . I believe that the need for that kind stability is as basic and desperate as some of the other, more obvious needs.
– Neal Stephenson
Good literature has always been about the details. Write me a letter and fill it with every grimy corner of Main Street, every angry dog next door, every dish on the menu at your local diner.
– Elizabeth J. Wenger
For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on
people’s faces.
– Osamu Dazai
When the presence of God emerges from our inmost being into our faculties, whether we walk down the street or drink a cup of soup, divine life is pouring into the world.
– Father Thomas Keating
Arguments don’t destroy relationships. The inability to let go of them does.
– Mark Manson
Nobody ever finds God until God finds them first.
Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.
– C.S. Lewis
Put a period deeply
into the desert
at the center of the new world
– Ban’ya Natsuishi
putting the setting sun
in place of a period
– Kumiko Mashima
we don’t need new governments
new revolutions
we don’t need new men
new women
we don’t need new ways
we just need to care.
– Charles Bukowski
Before you sleep, read something that is exquisite, and worth remembering.
– Erasmus
A disciplined life includes mental hygiene; if you wouldn’t pollute your home, don’t pollute your mind with what degrades you.
– Dandapani
Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
– George Santayana
To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim.
– Mark Nepo
Silence. You must learn that art,
it is the only way to survive.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
One day, the things you do for your health will stop feeling like sacrifices.
They will feel like the reason you still have your energy, strength, independence, and joy.
Keep going.
– Mark Hyman, M.D.
So the problem is not so much to see what nobody has yet seen, as to think what nobody has yet thought concerning that which everybody sees.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
I’m ashamed to recall how often I failed to live according to my conscience and instead submitted to foolish customs and rules that everyone else accepts.
– Leo Tolstoy
Whenever I sat down to write, it felt like a tragic fate I had to endure. There is pleasure only in retrospect.
– Imre Kertész
A contemplative practitioner grows like a plant. Skills are important, and you must apply yourself diligently over years. But the conceptual framework you use to make sense of the world does not determine or constrain your growth. All plants grow toward the sun.
– Kenneth Folk
Reason cannot check a racing pulse by demanding that it act differently. Nor can it fill an empty heart.
– Marion Woodman
We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say “It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.” Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.
– Fred Rogers
How often I have wished time with you was / More than dreams my mind keeps, though any real / Time with you seemed a dream, too. Between us / Time meant everything yet nothing—the seal / For an empty tomb when we had to part, / Some sense of timelessness together. Still, / There’s no need to roll a stone from this soul, / For eternity won’t matter without your heart / To save my own. And the world that waits will / Never offer enough beauty to hold / My attention or affection as you / Do. Now time’s all wrong; each day’s a year, each / Year a lifetime, yet there’s no life without / Your breath to breathe, eyes to see, heart to be.
– Greg Sellers
I don’t act, anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.
– Buster Keaton
As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.
– Stephen Fry
He wanted opulent solitude. His dark vision burned on kingdoms under the sea, on windy castle crags, and on the deep elf kingdoms at the earth’s core. He groped for the doorless land of faery, that illimitable haunted country that opened somewhere below a leaf or a stone. And no birds sing.
– Thomas Wolfe
Trees know when we are close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes of their leaves pump out change when we’re near…when you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you.
– Richard Powers
People’re a nestful of needs. Dull needs, sharp needs, bottomless-pit needs, flash-in-the-pan needs, needs for things you can’t hold, needs for things you can. Adverts know this. Shops know this. Specially in arcades, shops’re deafening. I’ve got what you want! I’ve got what you want! I’ve got what you want! But walking down Regents Arcade this afternoon, I noticed a new need that’s normally so close-up you never know it’s there. You and your mum need to like each other. Not love, but like.
– David Mitchell
Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.
– Don DeLillo
The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.
– Cheryl Strayed
Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.
– Richard Powers
But whenever you speak, you spoil the thought; whenever you think, you spoil the intuition; whenever you try to be intuitive, you kill your perception. So, remain nude in the Void. Then things will come to you.
– Sri Anirvan
Confronted with the teaching, we are like children sent to bring water from a pool and carry it to some far-off place with no other utensils than their hands. The pool is enormous. Every time they scoop up vast quantities of water in their hands, most of it to be lost the moment their hands leave the water. What they do manage to keep is scattered wildly over the rough road, and only very occasionally do they manage to bring a few drops back. Added to together, these drops become the living water of knowledge.
– Henri Thomasson
… to remember that a waterfall is a girl coming down the stairs dying of laughter, to see the sun and its planets swinging on the trapeze of the horizon, to learn to see so that things will see us and come and go through our seeing, living alphabets that send out roots, shoot up, bud, flower, fly off, scatter, fall.
– Octavio Paz
Throughout the human life span there remains a constant two-way interaction between psychological states and the neurochemistry of the frontal lobes, a fact that many doctors do not pay enough attention to. One result is the overreliance on medications in the treatment of mental disorders. Modern psychiatry is doing too much listening to Prozac and not enough listening to human beings; people’s life histories should be given at least as much importance as the chemistry of their brains. The dominant tendency is to explain mental conditions by deficiencies of the brain’s chemical messengers, the neurotransmitters.
As Daniel J. Siegel has sharply remarked, “We hear it said everywhere these days that the experience of human beings comes from their chemicals.” Depression, according to the simple biochemical model, is due to a lack of serotonin — and, it is said, so is excessive aggression. The answer is Prozac, which increases serotonin levels in the brain. Attention deficit is thought to be due in part to an undersupply of dopamine, one of the brain’s most important neurotransmitters, crucial to attention and to experiencing reward states. The answer is Ritalin. Just as Prozac elevates serotonin levels, Ritalin or other psychostimulants are thought to increase the availability of dopamine in the brain’s prefrontal areas.
This is believed to increase motivation and attention by improving the functioning of areas in the prefrontal cortex. Although they carry some truth, such biochemical explanations of complex mental states are dangerous oversimplifications — as the neurologist Antonio Damasio cautions: “When it comes to explaining behavior and mind, it is not enough to mention neurochemistry… The problem is that it is not the absence or low amount of serotonin per se that “causes” certain manifestations.
Serotonin is part of an exceedingly complicated mechanism which operates at the level of molecules, synapses, local circuits, and systems, and in which sociocultural factors, past and present, also intervene powerfully. The deficiencies and imbalances of brain chemicals are as much effect as cause. They are greatly influenced by emotional experiences. Some experiences deplete the supply of neurotransmitters; other experiences enhance them. In turn, the availability — or lack of availability —of brain chemicals can promote certain behaviors and emotional responses and inhibit others. Once more we see that the relationship between behavior and biology is not a one-way street.”
– Gabor Maté
In Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explained a groundbreaking discovery he made. Studying people who had damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated, he found that they all had something peculiar in common: They couldn’t make decisions. They could describe what they should do in logical terms, but they found it impossible to make even the simplest choice. In other words, while we may use logic to reason ourselves toward a decision, the actual decision making is governed by emotion.
– Chris Voss
Then I admired myself. What’s more, I felt tenderness about my personality and my choices for delight.
– Jenny Slate
Resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there.
– Alice Walker
All beings are encompassed within one all-encompassing great energy: So I understood from the coolness of this morning’s passing breeze.
– Mumon Ekai
Wash the plate not because it is dirty nor because you are told to wash it, but because you love the person who will use it next.
– St. Teresa of Calcutta
The everyday world drags us along, like a slave behind a conquerors chariot. One must learn to sever the rope, to allow the mind to stand still, to become aware of its affinity with mountains and stones.
– Colin Wilson
Swimming and Believing
by Maxine Kumin
Each time I tear this seam to enter,
all that I carry is taken from me,
shucked in the dive.
Lovers, children, even words go under.
Matters of dogma spin off in the freestyle
earning that mid-pool spurt, like faith.
Where have I come from? Where am I going?
What do I translate, gliding back and forth
erasing my own stitch marks in this lane?
Christ on the lake was not thinking
where the next heel-toe went.
God did him a dangerous favor
whereas Peter, the thinker, sank.
The secret is in the relenting,
the partnership. I let my body work
accepting the dangerous favor
from the king-size pool of waters.
years in exile …
moonlight rippling
the Pacific,
this narrow path
to the (M)otherland
– Chen-ou Liu
Beauty lives with kindness.
– William Shakespeare
WANT
They say men want freedom
and girls want love,
but I’ve seen women leave
lovers and countries and kingdoms
of comfort just for the chance
to sleep unbothered, to bathe
unwatched, to waltz around
apartments all their own,
wearing nothing but lipstick—
the color of desire.
– Joy Sullivan
Of wildflowers
When I was young,
I heard so much about being
a child/man/woman of God
but then I grew up and all
I ever wanted
was to be of wildflowers,
of willow, toad, and bone,
of swallowtails, sow thistle
and cedar, of birds.
– J. Sullivan
I wage war with myself and I will destroy myself,
or I will be reborn, that is all.
– Albert Camus
It is too much. You steadfastly love and serve everyone, see people through tribulation, savor the relief, and give thanks. Then boing—a new setback. It’s like tucking an octopus into bed at night: new arms keep popping out.
– Anne Lamott
In the midst of a storm,
a moment of mindfulness
will serve you well.
– Kenneth Folk
Profanity is the parlance of the fool. Why curse when there is such a magnificent language with which to discourse?
– Theodore Roosevelt
Stay away from people who have a weird obsession with trying to HUMBLE you. They are insecure & miserable.
– @_Chemist1
The same thing again. One glittering drop of hope, followed by a raging sea of despair, and nothing but pain, more pain, more anguish, always the same thing.
– Leo Tolstoy
Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.
– Carl Jung
Thinking was
torment; why not
give up thinking,
and drift and
dream?
– Virginia Woolf
The time has come
to reweave the
future with different
threads.
– Yaakov Jerome Garb