Bob Herbert (March 07, 1945 -) One of the essential problems of our society is that we have a tendency, amid all the craziness that surrounds us, to lose sight of what is truly human in ourselves, and that includes our own individual needs — those very special, mostly nonmaterial things that would fulfill us, …
Ann Patchett On Writing
Ann Patchett (December 2, 1963 -) You don't step out of the stream of your life to do your work. Work was the life, and who you were as a mother, teacher, friend, citizen, activist, and artist was all the same person. People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say …
Albert Einstein On Solitude
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) My passionate interest in social justice and social responsibility has always stood in curious contrast to a marked lack of desire for direct association with men and women. I am a horse for single harness, not cut out for tandem or teamwork. I have never …
Albert Camus On Opening The Heart
Albert Camus (November 07, 1913 – January 04, 1960) A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.
Hermann Hesse On God
Hermann Hesse (July 02, 1877 – August 09, 1962) If you are now wondering where to look for consolation, where to seek a new and better God, a new and better faith, you will surely realize, in your present loneliness and despair, that this time you must not look to external, official sources, to Bibles, …
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil On Experts
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (February 03, 1830 – August 22, 1903) No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require …
Rebecca Solnit On The Media
Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) I think of the mainstream media as having not so much a rightwing or leftwing bias but a status quo bias, a tendency to believe people in authority, to trust institutions and corporations and the rich and powerful and pretty much any self-satisfied white man in a suit; to …
Eleanor Porter On The Unknown
Eleanor Porter (December 19, 1868 – May 21, 1920) You know I have been made to suffer from the Pollyanna books. ... People have thought that Pollyanna chirped that she was 'glad' at everything. ... I have never believed that we ought to deny discomfort and pain and evil; I have merely thought that it …
Hannah Arendt On Thinking
Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 04, 1975) What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow-men, are together with no one but ourselves? By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning, men establish themselves as question-asking beings. Behind all the cognitive …
Marie Corelli On Souls
Marie Corelli (May 01 1855 – April 21, 1924) Now realize that there is no soul on this earth that is complete, alone. Like everything else, it is dual. It is like half a flame that seeks the other half, and is dissatisfied and restless till it attains its object. Lovers, misled by the blinding …
Neil deGrasse Tyson On Connections
Neil deGrasse Tyson (October 05, 1958 -) Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. …
Willa Cather On Memories
Willa Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
Frank Delaney On Poets
Frank Delaney (October 24, 1942 -) The people we call “poets,” by which I mean true, real poets — they are merely very keen listeners who have learned to recognize when a poem is dropping by. Then they copy down what the poem is telling them in their heads. After that, they tidy up the …
Arthur Koestler On Living Your Life
Arthur Koestler (September 05, 1905 – March 01, 1983) Everybody has a given amount of calories to burn up — you either burn them up by living or by creating. You can't burn the same calories both ways. You make poetry out of your unhappiness, and you might argue that you can also make poetry …
Xialou Guo On Love
Xiaolu Guo (1973 -) "Love," this English word: like other English words, it has tense. "Loved" or "will love" or "have loved." All these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is (ai). It has no tense, no past, no future. Love …
Rainer Maria Rilke On God
Rainer Maria Rilke (December 04, 1875 – December 29, 1926) You are the deep innerness of all things. The last word that can never be spoken. To each of us you reveal yourself differently: to the ship as a coastline, to the shore as a ship.
Ortega Y Gasset On Interests
Ortega Y Gasset (May 09, 1883 – October 18, 1955) So many things fail to interest us, simply because they don't find in us enough surfaces on which to live, and what we have to do then is to increase the number of planes in our mind, so that a much larger number of themes …
John Muir On Nature
John Muir (April 21, 1838 – December 24, 1914) One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature — inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is …
Pablo Neruda On Poetry
Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 - September 23, 1973) And it was at that age . . . poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don't know how or when, no, they were not voices, they were not words, not …
Wesley Morris On Race
Wesley Morris To live in this country in this century, and still be talking about white men impersonating black people, is to suspect that it’s probably always 1884 somewhere.
Gerard De Nerval On My Universe
Gerard De Nerval (May 22, 1808 – January 26, 1855) I did not ask of God that he should change anything in events themselves, but that he should change me in regard to things, so that I might have the power to create my own universe, to govern my dreams, instead of enduring them.
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. …
Stanley Kunitz On Aging
Stanley Kunitz (July 29, 1905 – May 14, 2006) Maybe I enjoy not-being as much as being who I am. Maybe it's time for me to practice growing old. The way I look at it, I'm passing through a phase: gradually I'm changing into a word. Whatever you choose to claim of me is always …
Elizabeth Gilbert On A Rich Life
Elizabeth Gilbert (July 18, 1969 -) Keep your living expenses LOW. The smaller you live (materially-speaking), the bigger you can live (creatively-speaking). This way the stakes aren’t so high…you aren’t demanding of your passion that it keeps you living a rich life. Then you can stretch and grow with the most possible freedom. This was …
Jorges Luis Borges On Time
Jorges Luis Borges ( August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986) Ts'ui Pen did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time — the strands of which approach one another, …
Bertrand Russell On Religion And Fear
Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872 – February 2, 1970) Religion, since it has its source in terror, has dignified certain kinds of fear, and made people think them not disgraceful. In this it has done mankind a great disservice: all fear is bad.
Marie Howe On Singularity
Marie Howe (1950 -) Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?…For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Remember?…before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness.
Steve Biko On Blackness
Steven Biko (December 18. 1946 – September 12, 1977) Merely by describing yourself as black you have started on a road toward emancipation, you have committed yourself to fight against all forces that seek to use your blackness as a stamp that marks you out as a subservient being.
