Abbott Joseph “A. J.” Liebling (October 18, 1904 – December 28, 1963) The times were full of certainties: we could be certain we were right — and we were — and that certainty made us certain that anything we did was right, too. I have seldom been sure I was right since. … I know …
Maria Popova On Shoreless Seeds And Stardust
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a …
Continue reading "Maria Popova On Shoreless Seeds And Stardust"
Milton Glaser On Enough
Milton Glaser (June 26, 1929 – June 26, 2020) If you perceive the universe as being a universe of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as one of scarcity, then it will be… I always thought that there was enough of everything to go around - that there are enough …
Franz Kafka On Noise
Franz Kafka (July 03, 1883 – June 03, 1924) I want to write and there's a constant trembling in my forehead. I'm sitting in my room which is the noise headquarters of the whole apartment, doors are slamming everywhere. … Father breaks down the door of my room and marches through with the bottom of …
MC Richards On The Creative Spirit
M.C. Richards (July 13, 1916–September 10, 1999) The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch. We are not craftsmen only during studio hours. Any more than a man is wise only in …
William Bolcom On Songs Of Innocence
William Bolcom (May 26, 1938 -) I’ve been looking at these texts since I fell in love with them at 17. I thought that maybe they would make more sense sung than spoken. Singing spreads them out. When I read these poems aloud, they make a weird kind of sense. But people have gotten all …
Teresa of Ávila On Love
Teresa of Ávila (March 28, 1515 – October 04, 1582) The important thing is not to think much, but to love much, and so to do whatever best awakens you to love.
Viktor Frankl On Pleasure
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else — preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. …
Sylvia Plath On Self Doubt
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Ted Chiang On Timelines
Ted Chiang (1967 -) Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then …
Steve Jobs On Death
Steve Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is …
Stephen Edward Ambrose On Patriotism
Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) Today, Cajuns from the Gulf Coast have never met a black person from Chicago. Kids from the ghetto don't know a middle-class white. Mexican-Americans have no contact with Jews. Muslim Americans have few Christian acquaintances … But during World War II and the Cold War, …
Oliver Sacks On Bearing Witness
Oliver Sacks (July 09, 1933 - August 30, 2015) I would like it to be thought that I had listened carefully to what patients and others have told me, that I’ve tried to imagine what it was like for them, and that I tried to convey this. And, to use a biblical term, bear witness.
Mustafa Santiago Ali On Race
Mustafa Santiago Ali To be a person of color in America often means to be unseen and unheard. It means taking on the burdens of disproportionate impacts from pollution, wealth disparities, lack of healthcare and much more. In many cases these burdens begin at your birth and never fully end until you take your last …
John Robert Lewis On Love
John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020) Anchor the eternity of love in your own soul and embed this planet with goodness. Lean toward the whispers of your own heart, discover the universal truth, and follow its dictates. Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release …
Nizar Qabbani On Love
Nizar Tawfiq Qabbani(March 21, 1923 – April 30, 1998) Don’t love deeply, till you make sure that the other part loves you with the same depth, because the depth of your love today, is the depth of your wound tomorrow.
Nathaniel Hawthorne On Intermediate Space
Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; tomorrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space.
Mark Strand On Visual Sense
Mark Strand (April 11, 1934 – November 29, 2014) I started collaging as an escape from making meaning. I got tired of writing poems, of trying to make sense — verbal sense. It is a relief to make a different kind of sense — visual sense. One must think, of course, but it is an …
Walt Whitman On Nature
Walt Whitman(May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains.
John Updike On Writing
John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) No amount of learned skills can substitute for the feeling of having a lot to say, of bringing news. Memories, impressions, and emotions from your first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. …
Alan Watts On Trouble
Alan Wilson Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) We create trouble by doing good for other people. We wage wars for people's benefit and educate the poor for their benefit so they desire more things which they can't afford.
Anne Lamott On Beauty And Meaning
Anne Lamott (April 10, 1954 -) When you love something like reading — or drawing or music or nature — it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great. If you are lucky enough to know this, then your search for meaning involves whatever that Something is. It’s an alchemical blend of affinity …
Joseph Goldstein On Being
Joseph Goldstein (May 20, 1944 -) The rumors and teachings are true: We are luminous beings and awakening in our nature.
Pablo Neruda On Human Destiny
Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973), better known by Pablo Neruda There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted …
Octavio Paz On Solitude
Octavio Paz (March 31, 1914–April 19, 1998) All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence. Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall — …
Martha Nussbaum On Anger
Martha Nussbaum (May 06, 1047 -) All too often, anger becomes an alluring substitute for grieving, promising agency and control when one’s real situation does not offer control… Anger is often well-grounded, but it is too easy for it to hijack the necessary mourning process.
Tyler Mortensen-Hayes On Active Shooter Drills
I read recently that 39 U.S. states require their schools to hold regular active shooter drills. Imagine that. A country where we have to prepare our children for mass violence as if it were a fire, or an earthquake—unpredictable, unfathomable, yet entirely feasible. As if it comes from out of the very ground on which …
Continue reading "Tyler Mortensen-Hayes On Active Shooter Drills"
Viktor Frankl On The Moment
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming …
Paulo Coelho On Risks
Paulo Coelho de Souza (August 24, 1947 - ) You have to take risks,” he said. “We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen. Every day God gives us the sun - and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes …
Marilynne Robinson On Sundays
Marilynne Summers Robinson (November 26, 1943 -) Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it.
Keith Allen Haring On Individual Creativity
Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) It has been a long time since I have written anything down. A lot of things have happened. So many things I have been unable to write them. . . . In one year my art has taken me to Europe and propelled me into …
Continue reading "Keith Allen Haring On Individual Creativity"
