Doris May Lessing (October 22, 1919 – November 17, 2013) While the cruelties of the white man toward the black man are among the heaviest counts in the indictment against humanity, colour prejudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in …
Audre Lorde On Death
Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) We all have to die at least once. Making that death useful would be winning for me. I wasn’t supposed to exist anyway, not in any meaningful way in this fucked-up whiteboys’ world. I want desperately to live, and I’m ready to fight for that living …
Patrick White On Success
Patrick White (May 28, 1912 – September 30, 1990) What I do know for certain is that what is regarded as success in a rational materialistic society only impresses superficial minds. It amounts to nothing and will not help us rout the destructive forces threatening us today. What may be our salvation is the …
Kahlil Gibran On Love
Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931) And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of …
Subhash Vyam On Nature
Subhash Vyam We were poor and worked hard, but most people didn’t go hungry. We foraged in the forest, caught fish, kept cows and goats, and grew a few crops. We had enough to eat, provided the harvest was good. But we didn’t have money to spend, and we lived from one day to another. …
Voltairine de Cleyre On Anarchism
Voltairine de Cleyre (November 17, 1866 – June 20, 1912) Let me keep the intensity of my soul, with all the limitations of my conditions, rather than become the spineless and ideal-less creation of material needs.
Rebecca Solnit On Rape
Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) We have been here before. We have been here over and over in an endless, Groundhog Day loop about how rape and sexual abuse happen: offering the same explanations, hearing the same kind of stories from wave after wave of survivors, hearing the same excuses and refusals to comprehend from …
James Baldwin On Ignorance
James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not …
Michael Chertoff On Divisions
Michael Chertoff (November 26, 1953 -) We have got to take a serious look at why we have reached a point that we have this level of social fracture.
Thich Nhat Hanh On Love
Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926 -) Often, when we say, “I love you” we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love that’s being offered. This is because we are caught by the idea of self. We think we have a self. …
Ursula K Le Guin On Time
Ursula K Le Guin (October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living. An increasing part of living, …
Rainer Maria Rilke on Love
Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are …
Louise Bourgeois On Solitude
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (December 25 1911 – May 31, 2010) Solitude, a rest from responsibilities, and peace of mind, will do you more good than the atmosphere of the studio and the conversations which, generally speaking, are a waste of time. You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between …
Epictetus On Loss
Epictetus (c. 55 – 135 AD) Who is good if he knows not who he is? And who knows what he is, if he forgets that things which have been made are perishable, and that it is not possible for one human being to be with another always?
Mary Prince On Slavery
Mary Prince (1788 – 1833) I have been a slave myself. I know what slaves feel—I can tell by myself what other slaves feel, and by what they have told me. The man that says slaves be quite happy in slavery—that they don't want to be free—that man is either ignorant or a lying person. …
Lydia Susanna Hunter On Secrets
Lydia Susanna Hunter (April 02, 1945 -) Secrets are easier to keep when you have no one to share them with.
Fleur Adcock On Weathering
Fleur Adcock (February 10, 1934 -) Literally thin-skinned, I suppose, my face catches the wind off the snow-line and flushes with a flush that will never wholly settle. Well: that was a metropolitan vanity, wanting to look young for ever, to pass. I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy …
Hannah Arendt On Pursuit Of Happiness
Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 04, 1975) Among the many surprises this country holds in store for its new citizens… there is the amazing discovery that the “pursuit of happiness,” which the Declaration of Independence asserted to be one of the inalienable human rights, has remained to this day considerably more than a …
William Howard Gass On Mischance
William Howard Gass (July 30, 1924 – December 6, 2017) I have met with some mischance, wings withering, as Plato says obscurely, and across the breadth of Ohio, like heaven on a table, I’ve fallen as far as the poet, to the sixth sort of body, this house in B, in Indiana, with its blue …
Rebecca Mead On Being Uncommitted
Rebecca MeadI’m not a joiner by nature, and being uncommitted—to a country, to a cause—suited me. In becoming a journalist, I had leveraged a preference for observation over participation into a career.
Saul Leiter On Success
Saul Leiter (December 3, 1923 – November 26, 2013) In some secret place in my being was a desire to avoid success. I simply looked at the world, not prepared for anything…There is a tremendous advantage of being unimportant.
Anaïs Nin On The Artist’s Task
Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) …It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar, unwilling to explore the unfamiliar. In science, we respect the research worker. In literature, we should not always read the books blessed by the majority. …The suppression of inner patterns in favor of …
Michael Pollan On Habits
Michael Pollan (February 06, 1955 -) Over time, we tend to optimize and conventionalize our responses to whatever life brings. Each of us develops our shorthand ways of slotting and processing everyday experiences and solving problems, and while this is no doubt adaptive — it helps us get the job done with a minimum of …
Thich Nhat Hanh On Love
Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926 -) In a deep relationship, there’s no longer a boundary between you and the other person. You are her and she is you. Your suffering is her suffering. Your understanding of your own suffering helps your loved one to suffer less. Suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. …
Kathy Bates On The Artist’s Task
Kathy Bates (June 28, 1948 -) We all fear death and question our place in the universe. The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence. * As Gertrude Stein In The Movie — Midnight In Paris
Frederick Douglass On Crimes Of The Unites States
Frederick Douglass (February 01, 1818–February 20, 1895) There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour…At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, …
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Adyashanti On Being
Asyashanti (1962 -) There's really just the experience of being in any moment. This is all we'll ever have. Our life always unfolds in the current experience of being.
Annie Dillard On Giving
Annie Dillard April 30, 1945 -) Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
Niels Bohr On Language And Religion
Niels Bohr (October 7, 1885–November 18, 1962) We ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, …
Franz Kafka On Music And Poetry
Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924) Music creates new, subtler, more complicated, and therefore more dangerous pleasures… But poetry aims at clarifying the wilderness of pleasures, at intellectualizing, purifying, and therefore humanizing them. Music is a multiplication of sensuous life; poetry, on the other hand, disciplines and elevates it.
Gaston Bachelard On Reverie
Gaston Bachelard (June 27, 1884 – October 16, 1962) In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down.
