Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) I exist as I am, that is enough. If no other in the world be aware I sit content, and if each and all be aware I sit content... I am larger, better than I thought; I did not know I held so much goodness. All …
Seneca On Time
Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65) Set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands… Certain moments are torn from us… some are gently removed… others glide beyond our reach. The most disgraceful …
Duke Ellington On Jazz And Freedom
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) Jazz is a good barometer of freedom. In its beginnings, the United States spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free, that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of …
Yehuda Amichai On Poets
Yehuda Amichai (May 03, 1924 – September 22, 2000) I think when you’re a poet you have to forget you’re a poet — a real poet doesn’t draw attention to the fact he’s a poet. The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.
Bruce Lee On Simplicity
Bruce Lee (November 27, 1940 – July 20, 1973) It is not daily increase but daily decrease; hack away the unessential.
May Sarton On Rinsing The Eye
May Sarton pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) Between me and everything I see. The glass is pain. How to slide it away, Unblur my vision? “We must rinse the eye,” My old friend, the poet, Used to say. But that was in Belgium Many years ago. Raymond …
Karen Armstrong On Compassion
Karen Armstrong (November 14, 1944 -) Compassion... asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.
Charles Bukowski On Creativity And Writing
Charles Bukowski (August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) Somebody [...] asked me: 'What do you do? How do you write, create?' You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: 'not' to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a …
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Blaise Pascal On Mankind
Blaise Pascal (June 19, 1623 – August 19, 1662) Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
Lauren Elkin On Walking
Lauren Elkin I walk because, somehow, it’s like reading. You’re privy to these lives and conversations that have nothing to do with yours, but you can eavesdrop on them. Sometimes it’s overcrowded; sometimes the voices are too loud. But there is always companionship. You are not alone. You walk in the city side by side …
Susan Cooper On Solstices
Susan Cooper (May 23, 1935 -) If you live on a planet that circles a sun, your time is governed by the patters of light and darkness, summer and winter, warmth and cold. And, of course, life and death. Once our forebears learned to farm, they planted and harvested at the equinoxes, but it was …
Alice Childress On Kindness
Alice Childress (October 12, 1916[1] – August 14, 1994) Life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave, and it sure behooves us to be kind to one another along the way.
Rod McKuen On Absolutes
Rod McKuen (April 29, 1933 – January 29, 2015) How true is truth how absolute? If I say love do I mean loving you to the intrusion of all else and of all others? And do I know if I mean that? There are wild roses that have bloomed far into December, seemingly without a …
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle On Truth
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (May 22, 1859 – July 07, 1930) Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Linda Pastan On Poetry
Linda Pastan May 27, 1932 -) I often write poems in my head to distract myself during hard times. … Years ago, after a car crash, while I lay waiting for the ambulance, I actually finished a poem I had been working on, determined not to die before I had it right.
Alan Gerard Fletcher On Imagination
Alan Gerard Fletcher (September 27, 1931 – September 21, 2006) I find going to bed and pulling my imagination over my head often means waking up with a solution to a design problem. That state of limbo, the time between sleeping and waking, seems to allow ideas to somehow outflank the sentinels of common sense. …
Oliver Sacks On Truth, Beauty And The Periodic Table
Oliver Sacks (July 09, 1933 - August 30, 2015) I had an overwhelming sense of Truth and Beauty when I saw the periodic table, a sense that this was not a mere human construct, arbitrary, but an actual vision of the eternal cosmic order, and that any future discoveries and advances, whatever they might add, …
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn On Evil
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (December 11, 1918 – August 3, 2008) If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of …
May Swenson On Poetry
May Swenson (May 28, 1913 – December 4, 1989) The best poetry has its roots in the subconscious to a great degree. Youth, naivety, reliance on instinct more than learning and method, a sense of freedom and play, even trust in randomness, is necessary to the making of a poem.
Victoria Woodhull On Reform And Love
Victoria Woodhull (1838 – June 9, 1927) They cannot roll back the rising tide of reform. The world moves… I am a free lover. (the freedom to marry, divorce and bear children without social restriction or government interference) I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long …
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov On Creativity
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (April 22, 1899 – July 02, 1977) Perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.
James Kavanaugh On There Are Men Too Gentle To Live Among Wolves
James Kavanaugh (September 17, 1928 – 29 December 2009) There are men too gentle to live among wolves Who prey upon them with IBM eyes And sell their hearts and guts for martinis at noon. There are men too gentle for a savage world Who dream instead of snow and children and Halloween And wonder …
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William Morris On Beauty
William Morris (March 24, 1834 – October 03, 1896) With the arrogance of youth, I am determined to do no less than to transform the world with Beauty. If I have succeeded in some small way, if only in one small corner of the world, amongst the men and women I love, then I shall …
Marcel Proust On Death
Marcel Proust (July10, 1871 – November 18, 1922) I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it — our life — hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, …
Enrico Fermi On Atomic Weapons
Enrico Fermi (September 29, 1901 – November 28, 1954) It is clear that such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground... The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily …
Søren Kierkegaard On Respect
Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855) There is a form of envy of which I frequently have seen examples, in which an individual tries to obtain something by bullying. If, for instance, I enter a place where many are gathered, it often happens that one or another right away takes up arms against me …
Ursula K Le Guin On Beauty
Ursula K Le Guin (October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) For old people beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young… It has to do with who the person is.
Rebecca Solnit On The Man In The White House
Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) The man in the white house sits, naked and obscene, a pustule of ego, in the harsh light, a man whose grasp exceeded his understanding, because his understanding was dulled by indulgence. He must know somewhere below the surface he skates on that he has destroyed his image, and …
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Samuel Johnson On Libraries
Samuel Johnson (September 18, 1709 – December 13, 1784) No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
AJ Liebling On News
Abbott Joseph "A. J." Liebling (October 18, 1904 – December 28, 1963) It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered …
Viet Thanh Nguyen On Humanity
Viet Thanh Nguyen (March 13, 1971 -) Our failures — and our successes — are due to our complicated humanity, not because of our ethnic or national origins… To love, to laugh, to live, to work, to fail, to despair, to parent, to cry, to die, to mourn, to hope: These attributes exist whether we …
