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 …
Marianne Williamson On Fear
Marianne Williamson (July 08, 1952 -) Our deepest fear, is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? …
Jim Harbaugh on The Norm
Jim Harbaugh (December 23, 1963 -) For we cannot pioneer and invent if we are fearful of deviating from the norm, damaging our public perception or—most important—harming our own personal interests.
Rob Brezsny On Freedom
Rob Brezsny ...But that’s only partly useful if you have not yet won the most important struggle for liberation, which is the freedom from your own unconscious habits and conditional responses. Becoming an independent agent who’s not an unwitting slave to his or her past is one of the most heroic feats a human being …
Denise Levertov On To Be A Poet
Denise Levertov (October 24, 1923 - December 20, 1997) To be a poet you must be crazy about language; and you must believe in the uniqueness of every person, and therefore in your own. To find your voice you must forget about finding it, and trust that if you pay sufficient attention to life you …
Steve Paul Jobs On Trust
Steve Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never …
May Sarton On Poets
May Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) You choose to be a novelist, but you're chosen to be a poet. This is a gift and it's a tremendous responsibility. You have to be willing to give something terribly intimate and secret of yourself to the world and not care, because you have to …
Mary Oliver On The Journey
Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935 - January 17, 2019)🌹 One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice— though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. "Mend my life!"each …
James Baldwin On Say Yes To Life
James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987 I know we often lose, and that the death or destruction of another is infinitely more real and unbearable than one’s own. I think I know how many times one has to start again, and how often one feels that one cannot start again. And yet, …
Woody Allen On Why Is Life Worth Living?
Woody Allen (December 01, 1935 -) Why is life worth living? Okay, for me, I would say...well, Groucho Marx, to name one thing, and Willie Mays and the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony and Louis Armstrong's recording of 'Potato Head Blues', and um, Swedish movies, naturally. Sentimental Education by Flaubert, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, …
Annemarie Roeper On The Core Of Your Being
Annemarie Roeper (August 27, 1918 – May 11, 2012) You are the core of our being; all of the other parts of the body are felt to be part of you. When any part of the body is hurt, you feel hurt. When our body feels well, you feel well. We know we are alive …
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Annie Dillard On A Good Life
Annie Dillard (April 30, 1945 -) There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires …
Henry Louis Mencken On Truth
Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) As for me, I am never absolutely certain that I am right, and for the plain reason that I am never absolutely certain that anything is true. It may seem to me to be true but I may be quite unable to imagine any proof …
Neil deGrasse Tyson On Who We Are
Neil de Grasse Tyson (October 05, 1958 -) Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others? That’s who we are! We’re not who we say we are, we’re not who we want to be — we are the sum of the influence and impact that we have, in our lives, on others.
EM Foster On Betrayal
EM Forster (January 01, 1879 – June 07, 1970) If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
Hank Tusinski On Brush Painting
Hank Tusinski Brush painting is one of the many practices used to awaken one's participation and manifestation of the Tao. By focusing and directing the painter's awareness, it is an expedient way to uncover and clarify a painter's state of mind. A brush painter selects a subject, studies it to determine a minimum number of …
Tao Writer On Moments
Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -) It was the music that drew me into the park this afternoon. I was heading home. The park was out of my way, but the music. I knew the tune seemingly by heart and memory. I could not remember who made it famous, but it was played on a …
Joseph Campbell On Bliss
Joseph Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) When you follow your bliss...doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors, and where there wouldn’t be a door for anyone else.
Adyashanti On Beliefs
Adyashanti (October 26, 1962 -) Our philosophy determines how far our realization goes; our beliefs limit how free we can become.
Billy Collins On Aimless Love
Billy Collins (March 22, 1941 -) This morning as I walked along the lakeshore, I fell in love with a wren and later in the day with a mouse the cat had dropped under the dining room table. In the shadows of an autumn evening, I fell for a seamstress still at her machine in …
Carter G Woodson On Race And History
Carter G. Woodson (December 19, 1875 – April 3, 1950) If a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated. The American Indian left no continuous record. He did not appreciate the value of tradition; …
Edward Hall On Language
Edward T Hall (May 16, 1914 – July 20, 2009) The paradox of culture is that language, the system most frequently used to describe culture, is by nature poorly adapted to this difficult task. It is too linear, not comprehensive enough, too slow, too limited, too constrained, too unnatural, too much a product of its …
Alan Watts On The Universe
Alan Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad …
Albert Einstein On Kindness, Beauty, And Truth
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. The trite subjects of human efforts, possessions, outward success, luxury have always seemed to me contemptible.
Georgia O’Keeffe On Living Your Life
Georgia O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 - March 06, 1986) I decided to start anew — to strip what I had been taught, to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. I was alone and singularly free working on my own, unknown — no one to satisfy …
