Haruki Murakami (January 12, 1949 -) By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no …
Tao Writer On Time
Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -) There are four things I know about time so far. (1) It cannot be stored or saved. The moment must be savored in the moment. (2) It is finite for all living creatures. Everyone and every living thing will experience death. (3) Time can be remembered but you cannot …
Edward Hirsch On Poetry
Edward M Hirsch (January 20, 1950 -) I would like to speak in my poems with what the Romantic poets called ‘the true voice of feeling.’ I believe, as Ezra Pound once said, that when it comes to poetry, ‘only emotion endures.’
Andrew Wyeth On Painting
Andrew Newell Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) The brain must not interfere. You're painting so constantly that your brain disappears, and your subconscious goes into your fingers, and it just flows. If you think you're painting a good watercolor you can be sure it's lousy. It is important to forget what you …
Sophia Loren On Solitude
Sophia Loren (September 20, 1934 -) Extravagant though it may sound, solitude is the filter of my soul. It nourishes me, and rejuvenates me. Left alone, I discover that I keep myself good company.
Bernard Augustine DeVoto On The Martini
Bernard Augustine DeVoto (1897 – 1955) The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth, and one of the shortest lived.
Ananda Coomaraswamy On Artists
Ananda Coomaraswamy (August 22, 1877 − September 09, 1947) The artist is not a special kind of person: rather each person is a special kind of artist.
Iris Murdoch On The Good
Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919 – February 08, 1999) The concept of Good… is a concept which is not easy to understand partly because it has so many false doubles, jumped-up intermediaries invented by human selfishness to make the difficult task of virtue look easier and more attractive: History, God, Lucifer, Ideas of power, freedom, …
Cheryl Strayed On People Watching
Cheryl Strayed (September 17, 1968 -) As long as I live I'll never tire of people-watching. On city buses and park benches. In small-town cafes and crowded elevators. At concerts and swimming pools. To people-watch is to glimpse the mysterious and the banal, the public face and the private gesture, the strangest other and the …
Maria Popova On Art From Heartache
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) To make art out of heartache is, of course, the most beautiful thing one could do with one’s sorrow, as well as the most generous — no artist knows how the transfiguration of their pain into beauty will salve another heart, give another sorrower the language of their own …
Michael Singer On The Human Heart
Michael A Singer (May 06, 1947 -) In most human beings, the heart does its work unattended. Even though its behavior governs the course of our lives, it is not understood. If at any given point in time the heart opens, we fall in love. If at any given point in time it happens to …
Alvin Toffler On Change
Alvin Toffler (October 4, 1928 – June 27, 2016) Change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it.
Martin L King On Injustice
Martin L King (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality… Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Wole Soyinka On Power
Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka (July 13, 1934 -) Wole Soyinka My conviction simply is that power must always be defeated, that the struggle must always continue to defeat power. I don't go looking for fights. I'm really a very lazy person. I enjoy my peace and quiet. There's nothing I love better than just to …
Charles M Blow On Mass Shootings
Charles M Blow (August 11, 1970 -) Mass shootings have become part of the American motif. Republicans and the gun lobby have resisted efforts to address the epidemic of gun violence in this country, so the carnage has become an ambient terror in our society. The mass shootings have not only increased in frequency, they …
Anaïs Nin On Maturity
Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) If you intensify and complete your subjective emotions, visions, you see their relation to others’ emotions. It is not a question of choosing between them, one at the cost of another, but a matter of completion, of inclusion, an encompassing, unifying, and integrating which makes maturity.
David Whyte On Courage
David Whyte (November 02, 1955 -) Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities …
Molière On The Ills of Mankind
Molière Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (January 15, 1622 - February 17, 1673) All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.
John Cleese On Trivial Things
John Marwood Cleese (October 27, 1939 -) It’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent. It’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.
Kurt Vonnegut On Enough
Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel …
Mukti On The Present Moment
Mukti Whatever degree you give yourself to the present moment affects future moments.
Anne Lamott On Intuition
Anne Lamott (April 10, 1954 -) You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn’t nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is …
Henry David Thoreau On Knowing
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) Can he who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale? Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have “seen the elephant”? These are petty …
Andre Gide On Discovery
André Paul Guillaume Gide (November 22, 1869 – February 19, 1951) One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of shore for a very long time.
Allen Ginsberg On Poetry
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
Paul Celan On Poetry
Paul Celan (November 23, 1920 – April 20, 1970) A poem, as manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the — not always greatly hopeful — belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense, too, …
TH White On Learning
T.H. White (May 29, 1906–January 17, 1964) The best thing for being sad… is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may …
Barack Obama On Equality
Barack Obama (August 04 1961 -) We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths –- that all of us are created equal –- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, …
Elif Shafak On Women Writers
Elif Shafak (October 25, 1971 -) I’d definitely say read more women. Read women writers, women journalists, women poets, women academics. And when I say women, I mean women of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds: Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, Jewish, Greek. Turkey is a country of collective amnesia. Read those writers who bear witness to the …
André Aciman On Beauty
André Aciman (January 02, 1951 -) Under the spell of beauty, we experience a rare condition called plenitude, where we want for nothing.
Rachel Carson On The Mysterious
Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) A large part of my life has been concerned with some of the beauties and mysteries of this earth about us, and with the even greater mysteries of the life that inhabits it. No one can dwell long among such subjects without thinking rather deep thoughts, without asking …
