Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and …
Muriel Spark On Death
Dame Muriel Sarah Spark (February 01, 1918 – April 13, 2006) If I had life to live over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Without an ever-present sense …
Václav Havel On Power
Václav Havel (October 5, 1936 – December 18, 2011) All power is power over someone, and it always somehow responds, usually unwittingly rather than deliberately, to the state of mind and the behavior of those it rules over… No one can govern in a vacuum. The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions …
Albert Einstein On Living
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Martha Nussbaum On Emotions
Martha Nussbaum (May 06, 1947 -) Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.
David Frederick Attenborough On The Earth
Celebrate The Earth Every Day! David Frederick Attenborough (May 08 1926 -) At last nations are coming together and recognising we all live on the same planet. All these seven worlds are actually one and we are dependent on it for every mouthful of food we eat and every breath of air we …
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Aldous Huxley On Silence
Aldous Huxley (July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963) When the inexpressible had to be expressed, Shakespeare laid down his pen and called for music. And if the music should also fail? Well, there was always silence to fall back on. For always, always and everywhere, the rest is silence.
Donald Winnicott On Debt To A Woman
Donald Woods Winnicott (April 07, 1896 – January 25, 1971) Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman.
Rachel Carson On Truth
Celebrate The Earth Everyday! Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science… The winds, …
Alain de Botton On Communicators
Alain de Botton (December 20, 1969 -) What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can …
Nina Simone On Time
Nina Simone (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003) Sometime in your life, you will have occasion to say, “What is this thing called time?” What is that, the clock? You go to work by the clock, you get your martini in the afternoon by the clock and your coffee by the clock, and you …
Lewis Thomas On The Earth
Celebrate The Earth Every Day Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913 – December 3, 1993) Earth is a living system, an immense organism, still developing, regulating itself, making its own oxygen, maintaining its own temperature, keeping all its infinite living parts connected and interdependent, including us. It is the strangest of all places, and …
Christopher Hampton On Critics
Christopher Hampton (January 26, 1946 -) Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.
Dr Seuss On Being Weird
Theodor Seuss Geisel Dr Seuss (March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991) We’re all a little weird and life’s a little weird. And when we find someone who’s weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.
Rachel Carson On The Environment
Remember Earth Day, April 22, 2020 Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) For many years public-spirited citizens throughout the country have been working for the conservation of the natural resources, realizing their vital importance to the Nation. Apparently their hard-won progress is to be wiped out, as a politically minded …
William Goldman On Writing
William Goldman (August 12, 1931 -) Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own …
Marc Wittmann On Time And Space
Marc Wittmann In extraordinary states of consciousness — moments of shock, meditation, sudden mystical experiences, near-death experiences, under the influence of drugs — temporal consciousness is fundamentally altered. Hand in hand with this goes an altered consciousness of space and self. In these extreme circumstances, time and concepts of space and self are modulated together …
Naguib Mahfouz On Death
Naguib Mahfouz (December 11, 1911 – August 30, 2006) She told him what had kept her away was Death. But he rejected that excuse—for Death, he said, can never come between lovers.
Amanda Palmer On Art
Amanda Palmer (April 30, 1976 -) Art is what happens if you’re able to hold fast — with one angry, trembling hand — to your art-mirror, the one that reflects you, your trials, your thoughts, your audience, your insights, your attempts to try to figure out and express What It All Might Fucking Mean.
Norman Mailer On Writing
Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, “I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel.” The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love.
Oliver Sacks On Gratitude
Oliver Sacks (July 09, 1933 - August 30, 2015) I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an …
Anne Gilchrist On Happiness
Anne Gilchrist (February 25, 1828 – November 29, 1885) I used to think it was great to disregard happiness, to press on to a high goal, careless, disdainful of it. But now I see that there is nothing so great as to be capable of happiness; to pluck it out of “each moment and whatever …
Rachel Carson On Origin
Remember Earth Day, April 22, 2020 Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.
William Godwin On Language
William Godwin (March 3, 1756–April 7, 1836) Words are of the utmost importance to human understanding. Almost all the ideas employed by us in matters of reasoning have been acquired by words. In our most retired contemplations we think for the most part in words; and upon recollection can in most cases easily tell in …
Seneca On Immortality
Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65) We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us, that they were given to us by chance. But we can choose whose children we would like to be. There are households of the noblest …
Ruth Rendell On Aging
Ruth Rendell (February 17, 1930 – May 02, 2015) The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young.
Martin L King On The Promised Land
Martin L King (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. …
Emily Levine On Predictions
Emily Levine (October 23, 1944 - February 3, 2019) We don’t live in Newton’s clockwork universe anymore — we live in a banana peel universe, and we won’t ever be able to know everything, or control everything, or predict everything.
Richard Powers On Expectations
Richard Powers (June 18, 1957 -) But knowing too much can be its own kind of blindfold. Your expectations can start to impede your ability to observe and to be present…. It’s important to have sufficient expectation to make yourself present to something but not so much expectation that you blind yourself to what’s actually …
George Perkins Marsh On The Environment
Remember Earth Day, April 22, 2020 George Perkins Marsh (March 15, 1801 – July 23, 1882) Man cannot at his pleasure command the rain and the sunshine, the wind and frost and snow, yet it is certain that climate itself has in many instances been gradually changed and ameliorated or deteriorated by human …
