Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 05, 2005) Only art penetrates … the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.
Evelyn Fox Keller On Inner Experiences
Evelyn Fox Keller (March 20, 1936 -) I can imagine a world…in which persons with highly developed inner worlds became the exception rather than the rule we used to think them to be.
Bruce Hood On The Self and Freewill
Bruce Hood We know the self is constructed because it can be so easily deconstructed – through damage, disease, and drugs. It must be an emergent property of a parallel system processing input, output, and internal representations. It’s an illusion because it feels so real, but that experience is not what it seems. The same …
Sam Killmeyer On Inheritance
Sam Killmeyer I’ve been thinking about inheritance and what has made me who I am. Not just family inheritance, but cultural inheritance. As I follow the current news cycle, I’m thinking about how we can respond to power as poets. Art is always the first thing to be suppressed by authoritative regimes. Why? Because art …
CK Williams On Poetry
CK Williams (November 4, 1936 – September 20, 2015) I don’t have to spend so much time mastering my craft, because I pretty much have that under control. But it’s still hard to find the right inspiration and the right voice and the right music to embody the inspiration. That’s the primary business of the …
Countess Constance Markievicz On Equality
Countess Constance Markievicz (February 04, 1868 – July 15, 1927) I would work for it anywhere, as one of the crying wrongs of the world, that women, because of their sex, should be debarred from any position or any right that their brains entitle them a right to hold.
Vincent van Gogh On Change
Vincent van Gogh (March 30, 1853–July 29, 1890) What has changed is that my life was less difficult then and my future less dark, but as far as my inner self, as far as my way of seeing and thinking are concerned, they haven’t changed. But if in fact there were a change, it’s that …
DH Lawrence On Design In Art
DH Lawrence (September 11, 1885 – March 02, 1930) Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
Denise Levertov On Writing
Denise Levertov (October 24, 1923 - December 20, 1997) Strength of feeling, reverence for mystery, and clarity of intellect must be kept in balance with one another. Neither the passive nor the active must dominate, they must work in conjunction, as in a marriage.
David Whyte On Maturity
David Whyte (November 02, 1955 -) Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts; most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses, to courageously inhabit the past the present and the future all at once. The wisdom that comes from maturity is recognized through a disciplined refusal to choose between …
Viktor Frankl On Humor
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
Chinua Achebe On Art And Politics
Chinua Achebe (November 16, 1930 - March 21, 2013) Those who tell you ‘Do not put too much politics in your art’ are not being honest. If you look very carefully you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is… What they are saying is …
Carl Jung On Being
Carl Jung (July 26, 1875 – June 06, 1961) The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.
Emily Levine On Life, Death And Dying
Emily Levine (October 23, 1944 - February 3, 2019) I love being in sync with the cyclical rhythms of the universe. That’s what’s so extraordinary about life — it’s a cycle of generation, degeneration, regeneration. “I” am just a collection of particles that is arranged into this pattern, then will decompose and be available, all …
Rob Brezsny On Transformation
Rob Brezsny Humans invented the plow in 4,500 BC, the wheel in 4,000 BC, and writing in 3,400 BC. But long before that, by 6,000 BC, they had learned how to brew beer and make psychoactive drugs from plants. Psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel points to this evidence to support his hypothesis that the yearning to transform …
Carol S Dweck On Personal Growth And Mindset
Carol S Dweck (October 17, 1946) There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is …
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William S Burroughs On Truth
William S Burroughs (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) Truth may appear only once; it may not be repeatable.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov On Marriage
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (January 29, 1860 – July 15, 1904) Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way, and besides, neither of them loses anything through my infidelity.
Jean-Pierre Weill On Existence
Jean-Pierre Weill Our existence is not an accident but a mystery... We can entrust ourselves to this mystery, for we are part of it. Indeed we are it.
Niall Williams On Happiness
Niall Williams We’ve lost our ability to take comfort in small things. When I want a holiday, I go over the road as far as the meadow. I go in there, take off my jacket, and lay down on it. I watch the world turning for a bit, with me still in it. That’s happiness.
Thomas Bernhard On Self Observation
Thomas Bernhard (February 09, 1931 – February 12, 1989) If we observe ourselves, we are never observing ourselves but someone else. Thus we can never talk about self-observation, [for then] we are talking as someone we never are when we are not observing ourselves, and thus when we observe ourselves we are never observing the …
Rebecca Solnit On Hope
Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline On Travel
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (May 27, 1894 – July 01, 1961) Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It’s a novel, just a fictitious narrative. Littré says so, …
Philip Pullman On Story Telling
Philip Pullman (October 19, 1946 -) A poem is not a lecture; a story is not an argument. The way poems and stories work on our minds is not by logic, but by their capacity to enchant, to excite, to move, to inspire.
Stanley Kubrick On Existence
Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928–March 07, 1999) The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make …
Kiley Reid On Race And Class
Kiley Reid Any conversation about race without bringing up class is a bit of a moot point. Whenever people want to talk about race in the States, there’s a lot of push to even the playing field and find a common ground. In a lot of cases it’s very easy to do that with race, …
Marcelo Gleiser On Listening
Marcelo Gleiser (March 19, 1959 -) We are a story, each of us. And a story with no listener is the same as silence, as oblivion. Some stories are harder to listen to, or can't be listened to in ordinary ways, and so, take a very special kind of listener. (Speaking of Oliver Sacks)
Iris Murdoch On Beauty
Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919 – February 08, 1999) Beauty is the convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience and change of consciousness. I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of …
Marx Planck On Self Observation
Marx Planck (April 23, 1858 – October 04, 1947) Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
Adyashanti On Truth And Love
Adyashanti (October 26, 1962 -) Truth and love are the two most powerful embodiment tools you will ever have. They are the two tools you have to lead a benevolent, beautiful, and enlightened life.
Brunello Cucinelli On Living
Brunello Cucinelli (September 03, 1953 If we lose these very important, very beautiful moments of debate, of polemos as Heraclitus called it, we lose the real sense of an encounter — and we’ll lose the joy of living.
