James R McManus I wouldn’t do anything for money that I wouldn’t do for nothing… What I mean is, a little old lady comes in and wants a favor. I do it. A big law firm wants a favor. I say, buy 50 tickets for my cocktail party. They’re not bribing me. They’re just supporting …
Thomas Michael Bond On Fantasy
Thomas Michael Bond (January 13, 1926 – June 27, 2017) One of the nice things about writing for children is their total acceptance of the fantastic. Give a child a stick and a patch of wet sand and it will draw the outline of a boat and accept it as such. I did learn though, …
Oliver Sacks On Perspective
Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933 –August 30, 2015) I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global …
Maria Popova On Chance and Choice
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Chance and choice converge to make us who we are, and although we may mistake chance for choice, our choices are the cobblestones, hard and uneven, that pave our destiny. They are ultimately all we can answer for and point to in the architecture of our character.
Shilpa Bhatia On “Fitting In”
Shilpa Bhatia Why fit in, when you're born to stand out!
William Lewis Safire On Writing
William Lewis Safire (December 17, 1929 – September 27, 2009) Composition is a discipline; it forces us to think. If you want to 'get in touch with your feelings,' fine — talk to yourself; we all do. But, if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put …
Samuel Levenson On Mistakes
Samuel Levenson (December 28, 1911 – August 27, 1980) You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long enough to make all of them yourself.
Rainer Maria Rilke On Death
Rainer Maria Rilke (December 04, 1875 – December 29, 1926) Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.
Betty Friedan On Inequality
Betty Friedan (February 4, 1921 – February 4, 2006) The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. …
Ronald Reagan On Freedom
Ronald Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down — up to a man's age-old …
Carl Edward Sagan On Expectations
Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) Once we leave those domains of human experience, there’s no reason to expect the laws of nature to continue to obey our expectations, since our expectations are dependent on a limited set of experiences.
Wilhelm Nietzsche On Life
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.
Lauren Elizabeth Oaks On Hope
Lauren E Oaks I don’t do hope… Here’s the substance of it: In the modern world, I think it’s intellectually dishonest to be hopeful, but it’s equally stupid to be hopeless. You can’t live out of a hopeless life… The best thing for me to do is to develop my inner voice and to steer …
Tao Writer On God
Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -) God is a concept not a being. God is the black face of the universe, the stars, the planets, the solar systems, the dragonfly, the elephant, the mouse, the spider, the woman, and the man, but these are life forms we know exist. There are obviously countless others in …
Hugh Macleod On Find Your Own Shtick
Hugh MacLeod It’s about what YOU are going to do with the short time you have left on this earth… Put your whole self into it, and you will find your true voice. Hold back and you won’t. It’s that simple... You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted …
Immanuel Kant On Wonder
Immanuel Kant (April 22, 1724 - February 12, 1804) Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe [...] the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Alan Paige Lightman On Faith
Alan Paige Lightman (November 28, 1948 -) …And I do not believe in the existence of a Being who lives beyond matter and energy, even if that Being refrains from entering the fray of the physical world. ...There are things we take on faith, without physical proof and even sometimes without any methodology for proof. …
Langston Hughes On Books
Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.
Rachel Corbett On In-Seeing
Rachel Corbett If faced with a rock, for instance, one should stare deep into the place where its rockness begins to form. Then the observer should keep looking until his own center starts to sink with the stony weight of the rock forming inside him, too. It is a kind of perception that takes place …
Justina Chen On The Precipice Of A Decision
Justina Chen (1968 -) There must be a few times in life when you stand at a precipice of a decision. When you know there will forever be a Before and an After...I knew there would be no turning back if I designated this moment as my own Prime Meridian from which everything else would …
Continue reading "Justina Chen On The Precipice Of A Decision"
David Whyte On Love
David Whyte(November 02, 1955 -) We name mostly in order to control but what is worth loving does not want to be held within the bounds of too narrow a calling. In many ways love has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it, before we can utter the right …
Sue Hubbell On Childhood
Sue Hubbell (January 28, 1935 – October 13, 2018) No one expected much from little girls growing up in the 1930s in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Mine was a family of high-aspirers, but they gave up on me [...] I was left pretty much alone. I look at today's youngsters with their enrichment programs, after-school lessons and …
New York Times On Existence
New York Times December 31, 1999 Even those of us who have not filled the bathtub with emergency water, withdrawn extra cash from the bank and stocked up on food will be entering the new millennium sobered by the awareness that unknown problems of our own making are an enduring part of existence.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov On Marriage
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (January 29, 1860 – July 15, 1904) By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: Everything must be as it has been hitherto — that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her. ... …
Oliver Sacks On Thinking
Oliver Sacks (July 09, 1933 - August 30, 2015) I say I love writing but really it is thinking I love — the rush of thoughts — new connections in the brain being made. And it comes out of the blue…In such moments: I feel such love of the world, love of thinking.
Martha Graham On Progress
Martha Graham (May 11, 1894 – April 1, 1991) This is why it is so important to know what came before you. It is also important to understand that things will follow you, and they may come along and make your work look pedestrian and silly. This is fine; this is progress. We have to work …
Naomi Shihab Nye On Poetry
Naomi Shihab Nye (March 12, 1952 -) To me the world of poetry is a house with thousands of glittering windows. Our words and images, land to land, era to era, shed light on one another. Our words dissolve the shadows we imagine fall between.
Steven Johnson on Creativity
Steven Johnson (June 06, 1968 -) Our lives are surrounded and supported by a whole class of objects that are enchanted with the ideas and creativity of thousands of people who came before us: inventors and hobbyists and reformers who steadily hacked away at the problem of making artificial light or clean drinking water so …
Dani Shapiro On Writing
Dani Shapiro (April 10, 1962 -) When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don’t want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn’t just …
John Cheever On Living
John Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) But I awoke at three, feeling terribly sad, and feeling rebelliously that I didn't want to study sadness, madness, melancholy, and despair. I wanted to study triumphs, the rediscoveries of love, all that I know in the world to be decent, radiant, and clear.
