Yuval Noah Harari (February 24, 1976 -) One thing that history teaches us is that we should never underestimate human stupidity…It's one of the most powerful forces in the world…You can't trust humans and even human leaders to do what is best for humanity. You can hope for it, but it's not certain.
Henry David Thoreau On Solitude
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) But alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even on a black and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself …
Stanley Kunitz On Language
Stanley Kunitz (July 29, 1905– May 14, 2006) I used to sit in that green Morris chair and open the heavy dictionary on my lap, and find a new word every day. It was a big word, a word like eleemosynary or phantasmagoria - some word that, on the tongue, sounded great to me, and …
Maria Popova On Communication
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly …
Antonio Damasio On Culture And Life
Antonio Damasio February 25, 1944 -) What one hopes for and how one faces the life ahead depend on how the past has been lived, not only in objective, factually verifiable terms, but also in the experience or reconstruction of the objective data in one’s remembrances. Recollection is at the mercy of all that makes us …
Arthur Rimbaud On My Bohemian Life
Arthur Rimbaud (October 20, 1854 – November 10, 1891) I went off with my hands in my torn coat pockets; My overcoat too was becoming ideal; I travelled beneath the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal; Oh dear me! what marvelous loves I dreamed of! My only pair of breeches had a big …
Mark Boyle On Simplicity
Mark Boyle (May 08, 1979 -) Life is an unceasing trade-off between comfort and feeling fully alive. My experiences have taught me that perhaps the law of diminishing returns might apply to comfort – and the technologies that promise it – too. I love the simple, complex life. While it is not a realistic solution …
Junichiro Tanizaki On Beauty
Junichiro Tanizaki (July 24, 1886–July 30, 1965) We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates... Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty…The quality that we call beauty ... must always grow from the realities of …
Mohsin Hamid On Art
Mohsin Hamid (July 23, 1971 –) Art is bigger than notions of black or white, male or female, American or non. Human beings don’t necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them. It’s a mistake to ask literature to reinforce such …
Alexandra Horowitz On Stimuli
Alexandra Horowitz Each individual creates his own personal umwelt, full of objects with special meaning to him. You can most clearly see this last fact by letting yourself be led through an unknown city by a native. He will steer you along a path obvious to him, but invisible to you. But the two of …
Ernest Hemingway On Paris
Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight. 🎂Happy Bithday Ernest Hemingway …
Alan Alda On Truth
Alan Alda (January 28, 1936 -) The trouble with truth is that not only is the notion of eternal, universal truth highly questionable, but simple, local truths are subject to refinement as well. Up is up and down is down, of course. Except under special circumstances. Is the North Pole up and the South Pole …
Albert Camus On Awareness
Albert Camus (November 07, 1913 – January 04, 1960) Life is short, and it is sinful to waste one’s time. They say I’m active. But being active is still wasting one’s time, if in doing one loses oneself. Today is a resting time, and my heart goes off in search of itself. If an anguish …
Belkis Ayón On Art
Belkis Ayón (January 23, 1967 – September 11, 1999) These are the things I have inside that I toss out because there are burdens with which you cannot live or drag along. Perhaps that is what my work is about — that after so many years, I realize the disquiet.
Richard Feynman On Imagination
Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) Our imagination is stretched to the upmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
James Broughton On Wondrous The Merge
James Broughton (November 10, 1913 – May 17, 1999) Had my soul tottered off to sleep taking my potency with it? Had they both retired before I could leaving me a classroom somnambulist? Why else should I at sixty-one feel myself shriveling into fadeout? Then on a cold seminar Monday in walked an unannounced …
Hokusai On Drawing
Hokusai (October 31, 1760 – May 10, 1849) Ever since the age of six I have had a mania for drawing the forms of objects. Towards the age of fifty I published a very large number of drawings, but I am dissatisfied with everything I produced before the age of seventy. It was at the …
Pema Chödrön On Meditation
Pema Chödrön (July 14, 1936 -) Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives. It’s about seeing how we react to all these things. It’s seeing our emotions and …
Sylvia Plath On Life
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) I want to be affected by life deeply, but never so blinded that I cannot see my share of existence in a wry, humorous light...
Alan Watts On A Happening
Alan Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) For when you see that the universe cannot be distinguished from how you act upon it, there is neither fate nor free will, self nor other. There is simply one all-inclusive 'Happening,' in which your personal sensation of being alive occurs in just the same way …
Karen Reyes On DACA
Karen Reyes There’s so much pressure to be a perfect immigrant. They basically want us to save babies from burning buildings, have a 5.0 GPA and become doctors. But I’m just teaching these tiny humans to be great Americans.
Lewis Thomas On Possibilities
Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913–December 3, 1993) Provided we do not kill ourselves off, and provided we can connect ourselves by the affection and respect for which I believe our genes are also coded, there is no end to what we might do on or off this planet. At this early stage in our evolution, …
Oliver Sacks On The Sabbath
Oliver Sacks (July 09, 1933 – August 30, 2015) And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I …
Ursula K Le Guin On Love
Ursula K Le Guin (October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) There is no less or greater in an absolute thing. All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it is …
Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin On Immigration
Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin also known as Michael I. Pupin (October 4, 1858–March 12, 1935) If the present standards had prevailed forty-eight years ago I should have been deported. There are, however, certain things which a young immigrant may bring to this country that are far more precious than any of the things which the present …
John O’Donohue On Inner Experience
John O’Donohue (January 1, 1956–January 4, 2008) Each one of us is privileged to be the custodian of this inner world, which is accessible only through thought, and we are also doomed, in the sense that we cannot unshackle ourselves from the world that we actually carry… All human being and human identity and human …
Hannah Arendt On Silent Intercourse
Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 04, 1975) A person who does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will …
John Brennan on Donald Trump
John Brennan (September 22, 1955 -) When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you (Donald Trump) will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history.
Franz Kafka On Art
Franz Kafka (July 03, 1883 – June 03, 1924) 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. 🎂Happy Birthday Franz Kafka (July 03, 1883 – June 03, 1924) In Memoriam🌹
James Baldwin On Poets
James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.
Bill Hayes On Kindness
Bill Hayes I make a point of waving or nodding hello when I can. I have come to believe that kindness is repaid in unexpected ways and that if you are lonely or bone-tired or blue, you need only come down from your perch and step outside…Just remember: Ask first, don’t grab, be fair, say …
