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