John Berryman (October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.
Joseph Brodsky On Life And Work
Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940 – January 28, 1996) After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
Alain de Botton On Charity
Alain de Botton (December 20, 1969 -) At its most basic, charity means offering someone something they need but can’t get for themselves. This is normally and logically understood to mean something material. We overwhelmingly associate charity with giving money. But, in its widest sense, charity stretches far beyond financial donations. Charity involves offering someone …
Jean de La Fontaine On Death
Jean de La Fontaine (July 08, 1621 – April 13, 1695) Death never takes the wise man by surprise, he is always ready to go.
Kate Murphy On Habits
Kate Murphy The point is to find what works for you. It just needs to be regular and help you achieve your goals, whether intellectually, emotionally, socially or professionally. The best habits not only provide structure and order but also give you a sense of pleasure, accomplishment or confidence upon completion. It could be as …
Kay Ryan On Poetry
Kay Ryan (September 21, 1945 -) Poems should leave you feeling freer and not more burdened. I like to think of all good poetry as providing more oxygen into the atmosphere; it just makes it easier to breathe.
Walt Whitman On Be A Poem
Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) Love the earth and the sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labors to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, re-examine all you have been told at school or …
Maeve Binchy On Love
Maeve Binchy Snell (28 May 1939[1] – 30 July 2012) We're nothing if we're not loved. When you meet somebody who is more important to you than yourself, that has to be the most important thing in life, really. And I think we are all striving for it in different ways.
George Orwell On Liberty
George Orwell (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950) What is sinister is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. They do not see that any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought.
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi On Music
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (October 10, 1813 – January 27, 1901) I adored and adore this art; and when I am alone and wrestling with my notes, then my heart pounds, tears stream from my eyes, and the emotions and pleasures are beyond description.
Frank Lloyd Wright On Houses
Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.
Charles M Blow On Move On, But Never Forget
Charles McRay Blow (August 11, 1970 -) There is a legitimate argument to be made that a spiral of recriminations will always descend into a hole of collective harm... There has to be some acknowledgment that children were taken from their parents, some locked in cages, and that many may never be reunited with their …
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Viktor Frankl On Attitude
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905– September 02, 1997 We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: …
Harriet Tubman On The Underground Railroad
Harriet Tubman (March 1822 – March 10, 1913) I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say — I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger.
Iris Murdoch On Art And Truth
Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919 – February 08, 1999) Art is truth as well as form, it is representational as well as autonomous. Of course the communication may be indirect, but the ambiguity of the great writer creates spaces which we can explore and enjoy because they are openings on to the real world and …
Hermann Hesse On Death
Hermann Hesse (July 02, 1877 – August 09, 1962) When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do.
Huston Smith On Art And The Zen Life
Huston Cummings Smith (May 31, 1919 – December 30, 2016) India never had the notion until our century of art for art’s sake. Art was a spiritual technology, and it is really very miraculous how art makes easy what otherwise would be difficult. Now, what is otherwise difficult? And the answer is to behave decently …
James Baldwin On Oneself
James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) But if one can reach back, reach down — into oneself, into one’s life — and find there some witness, however unexpected or ambivalent, to one’s reality, one will be enabled, though perhaps not very spiritedly, to face another day… What one must be enabled to …
Jane Goodall On Reading
Dame Jane Morris Goodall (April 03, 1934 -) I loved to read in bed, and after I had to put the lights out I would read under the bedclothes with a torch, always hoping my mother would not come in and find out! I used to read curled up in front of the fire on …
Jane Hirshfield On Experience
Jane Hirshfield (February 24, 1953 -) The ability to stay in the moment, to investigate it through my own body and mind, was what I most needed to learn at that point in my life. To stay within my own experience more fearlessly. I think that’s why I needed to practice Zen, rather than go …
Audre Lorde On Living While Dying
Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going …
John Cheever On Art
John Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of …
Teju Cole On Photography
Teju Cole (June 27, 1975 -) Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs. … [Photography] is about retention: not only the ability to make an image directly out of the interaction between …
Virginia Woolf On The Thing Itself
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
Rebecca Solnit On Democracy And Authoritarianism
Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) Democracy is a set of agreements to make decisions together and respect the outcome whether you like them or not. The kind of violence we saw on Capitol Hill (Jan 06, 2021) is authoritarian, a way to try to force other people to submit to the will of the …
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Maria Popova On Dying
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) We die. All of us — atoms to atoms, stardust to stardust, the mountain to the sea — you and I. The dual awareness of our improbable life and our inevitable death is what allows us to animate the interlude with love and beauty, with poems and fairy tales …
Ursula K Le Guin On Suffering
Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) Suffering is a misunderstanding… It exists… It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You …
Jean Cocteau On Death
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (July 05, 1889 – October 11, 1963) Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
Helen Fisher On Love As Addiction
Helen Fisher (May 31, 1945 -) If the love object breaks off the relationship, the lover experiences signs of drug withdrawal, including protest, crying spells, lethargy, anxiety, insomnia or hyper-somnia, loss of appetite or binge eating, irritability, and loneliness. Lovers, like addicts, also often go to extremes, sometimes doing degrading or physically dangerous things to …
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov On Death
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (April 10, 1899 – July 02, 1977) This, then, is it: not the crude anguish of physical death, but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.
Vita Sackville-West On Love
Vita Sackville-West (March 09, 1892 – June 02, 1962) I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia (Woolf). I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb …
