Keith Allen Haring(May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) I guess it’s because I’m afraid. Afraid I’m wrong. And I guess I’m afraid I’m wrong, because I constantly relate myself to other people, other experiences, other ideas. I should be looking at both in perspective, not comparing. I relate my life to an idea or …
Kim Addonizio On Poetry
Kim Addonizio (July 31, 1954 -) Poetry is not a means to an end, but a continuing engagement with being alive.
Viktor Frankl On Living
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) It is not only through our actions that we can give life meaning — insofar as we can answer life’s specific questions responsibly — we can fulfill the demands of existence not only as active agents but also as loving human beings: in our loving dedication to the …
Frida Kahlo On Honesty
Frida Kahlo (July 06, 1907 – July 13, 1954) You deserve the best, the very best, because you are one of the few people in this lousy world who are honest to themselves, and that is the only thing that really counts.
Raymond Thornton Chandler On Writing
Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never …
Stanley Kunitz On Poetry
Stanley Kunitz Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of …
Marcus Aurelius On Philosophy
Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121 – March 17, 180) It stares you in the face. No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now.
Grace Paley On Language
Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 - August 22, 2007) My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
Mirabai Starr On Taking Refuge
Mirabai Starr The essential insight at the heart of the concept of taking refuge in the Buddha is that the man known as Siddhartha Gautama showed us what true awakening looks like, right? As it turns out, to awaken mostly means to live with compassion and wisdom, resting in our interconnectedness with all beings, recognizing …
Primo Levy On Humanity
Primo Levi (July 31, 1919 – April 11, 1987) …for good or evil, we are a single people: the more we become conscious of this, the less difficult and long will be humanity’s progress toward justice and peace.
Percy Bysshe Shelley On Poetry
Percy Bysshe Shelley August 04, 1792 – July 08, 1822) Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Zadie Smith On Love
Zadie Smith (October 25, 1975 -) Love is not something to do, but something to be experienced, and something to go through — that must be why it frightens so many of us and why we so often approach it indirectly. Here is this novel, made with love. Here is this banana bread, made with …
Tobias Wolff On Stories
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (June 19, 1945 -) We love hearing stories of other people’s misfortunes — not terrible misfortunes, we don’t like that, but if somebody has taken a really expensive holiday, we don’t mind hearing that their flight was canceled and they had to sleep on the airport floor, and that there was …
Ursula K Le Guin On Suffering
Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, …
Anna Akhmatova On Poetry And Love
Anna Akhmatova (June 23, 1889 – March 05, 1966) I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love.
David Abram On Imagination
David Abram (June 24, 1957 -) That which we call imagination is from the first an attribute of the senses themselves; imagination is not a separate mental faculty (as we so often assume) but is rather the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative …
Anita Loos On Women’s Liberationists
Corinne Anita Loos (April 26, 1889 – August 18, 1981) The people I’m furious with are the Women’s Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men. That’s true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket.
Albert Einstein On Relativity
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.
Alain Badiou On Love
Alain Badiou (January 17, 1937 -) Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea …
Euripides On Death
Euripides (c. 480 – c. 406 BC) There is something in the pang of change — More than the heart can bear, Unhappiness remembering happiness.
Nick Cave On Loss
Nick Cave (September 22, 1957 -) The paradoxical effect of losing a loved one is that their sudden absence can become a feverish comment on that which remains. That which remains rises in time from the dark with a burning physicality — a luminous super-presence — as we acquaint ourselves with this new and different …
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.’
Martha Nussbaum On Anger
Martha Nussbaum (May 06, 1047 -) We are prone to anger to the extent that we feel insecure or lacking control with respect to the aspect of our goals that has been assailed — and to the extent that we expect or desire control. Anger aims at restoring lost control and often achieves at least …
Alain de Botton On Listeners
Alain de Botton (December 20, 1969 -) Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they’ve been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its place.
Virginia Woolf On Writing And Sex
Adeline Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
Wilson Bentley On Snowflakes
Wilson Bentley (February 9, 1865–December 23, 1931) Every snowflake has an infinite beauty which is enhanced by knowledge that the investigator will, in all probability, never find another exactly like it. Consequently, photographing these transient forms of Nature gives to the worker something of the spirit of a discoverer. Besides combining her greatest skill and …
Anne Frank On Ideals
Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (June 12, 1929 – March 1945) It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, …
Franklin Delano Roosevelt On Fear
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945) This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche On Endurance
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, …
Haemin Sunim On Imperfection
Haemin Sunim (December 12, 1973 -) Even if you feel there are many things in your life that are imperfect, if you look at them in a compassionate way, you discover that imperfection, in and of itself, is beautiful and has meaning.
