Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974) There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning, in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning, in the outcry from the kettle that heats my coffee each …
Martha Nussbaum On Inner Experience
Martha Nussbaum (May 06, 1947 -) Do not despise your inner world... Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. …
David Stephen Mitchell On Midlife
David Stephen Mitchell (January 12, 1969 -) Midlife crisis. Age. The heart gets more interesting than structure. I've got kids, I've got a wife, we're stuck with each other for a while. And suddenly there's an understanding that this is what life is — it's actually the mess, it's the mud, it's the tangle. It's …
Walt Whitman On Being
Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) The quality of being, in the object’s self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing there from and there to — not criticism by other standards, and adjustments there to — is the lesson of Nature... Re-examine all you have been told …
Aldous Huxley On Enlightenment
Aldous Huxley (July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963) To be enlightened is to be aware always of total reality in its emanate otherness. To beware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. To think and feel as a human being to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning. Our …
Rebeca West On The Universe
Rebecca West (December 21. 1892 – March 15, 1983) If during the next million generations there is but one human being born in every generation who will not cease to inquire into the nature of his fate, even while it strips and bludgeons him, some day we shall read the riddle of our universe.
Jean Houston On Entelechy
Jean Houston (May 10, 1937 -) It is inside of you, like the butterfly is inside of the caterpillar. He then used a word that I heard for the first time, a word that became essential to my later work...A great word, a Greek word, entelechy. It means the dynamic purpose that is coded in …
