The truest philosophy, is not to long for anything in particular, but to accept everything as it comes, and find out the reason of it coming. — Marie Corelli
José Ortega y Gasset (May 9, 1883–October 18, 1955) “Falling in love” is a phenomenon of attention… Our spiritual and mental life is merely that which takes place in the zone of maximum illumination. The rest — the zone of conscious inattention and, beyond that, the subconscious — is only potential life, a preparation, an …
David Herbert Lawrence (September 11, 1885 – March 02, 1930) I am unwilling to leave this deck-chair; I refuse to swot; let me write to you then, me lounging here on the grass, where the still warm air is full of the scent of pinks, spicy and sweet, and a stack of big red lilies …
Barbara Lee (July 16, 1946 -) But we will only succeed if we reject the growing pressure to retreat into cynicism and hopelessness. … We have a moral obligation to "stay woke," take a stand and be active; challenging injustices and racism in our communities and fighting hatred and discrimination wherever it rises.
J. D. “Sandy” McClatchy (August 12, 1945 – April 10, 2018) To hide something is to conceal it; to disguise something is to reveal it but only to those who know how and where to look. The very conventions of poetry were devised to encode experience, to make it less obvious and thereby more true. …
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (May 24, 1940 – January 28, 1996) The surest defense against evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even eccentricity. Evil is a sucker for solidarity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balance sheets.
John Griffith (Jack) London (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) It was my pride that I was taken in as an equal, in spirit as well as in fact. From then on, everything was beautiful, and the voyage promised to be a happy one.
Olivia Laing Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That’s what art is, it’s the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together. The irrepressibility of the life in the works, regardless of the times, the histories, the life stories, it’s …
Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) Money itself is not evil, in fact it can actually be very effective for good if it is used properly. You have to be objective about money to use it fairly. It doesn’t make you any better or more useful than any other person. Even …
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) So, life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be “willed into being” as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness …
William Stanley Merwin (September 30, 1927 – March 15, 2019) When a poem is really finished, you can’t change anything. You can’t move words around. You can’t say, ‘In other words, you mean.’ No, that’s not it. There are no other words in which you mean it. This is it.
Jane Hirshfield (February 24, 1953 -) I don’t think poetry is based just on poetry; it is based on a thoroughly lived life. And so I couldn’t just decide I was going to write no matter what; I first had to find out what it means to live.
William Vogt (May 15, 1902–July 11, 1968) Drastic measures are inescapable. Above everything else, we must reorganize our thinking. If we are to escape the crash we must abandon all thought of living unto ourselves. We form an earth-company, and the lot of the Indiana farmer can no longer be isolated from that of the …
Alan Wilson Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) If you do not get it from yourself, where will you go for it?
Romain Rolland (January 29, 1866 – December 30, 1944) Music develops in its own elect that power of concentration on an idea, that form of yoga, that is purely European, having the traits of action and domination that are characteristic of the West: for music is an edifice in motion, all the parts of which …
William De Witt Snodgrass (January 5, 1926 – January 13, 2009) The only reality which [a poet] can ever surely know is that self he cannot help being. … If he pretties it up, if he changes its meaning, if he gives it the voice of any borrowed authority, if in short he rejects this …
Continue reading "William De Witt Snodgrass On Personal Poetry"
Samin Nosrat (November 7, 1979 -) There is so little joy to be had these days. I’m learning that we have to take it where we can get it, even if it’s just in a pot of beans. So if you prefer to cook yours in an Instant Pot or with any other tool, then …
Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) The skull quadruples in size in the first few years, and if the bones knit together too soon, they restrict the growth of the brain; and if they don’t knit at all the brain remains unprotected. Open enough to grow and closed enough to hold together is what a …
Anna Deavere Smith (September 18, 1950 -) We who work in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair, you should probably pick another profession. Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship to these chaotic and unfair realities. …
Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) I want to write down everything I know about being afraid, but I’d probably never have enough time to write anything else. Afraid is a country where they issue us passports at birth and hope we never seek citizenship in any other country. The face of …
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) When I walk — which I do every day, as basic sanity-maintenance, whether in the forest or the cemetery or the city street — I walk the same routes, walk along loops, loops I often retrace multiple times in a single walk. This puzzles people. Some simply don’t get …
Louisa Elizabeth Miller Lulu Miller Picture the person you love the most. Picture them sitting on the couch, eating cereal, ranting about something totally charming, like how it bothers them when people sign their emails with a single initial instead of taking those four extra keystrokes to just finish the job — Chaos will get …
Stephen William Hawking (January 08, 1942 – March 14, 2018) For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (January 03, 1892 – September 02, 1973) There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off. …
Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) I cannot but hate it. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world… A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently …
Freeman John Dyson (December 15, 1923 – February 28, 2020) You sit quietly gestating them, for nine months or whatever the required time may be, and then one day they are out on their own, not belonging to you any more but to the whole community of scientists. Whatever it is that you produce, a …
Howard Nemerov (February 29, 1920 – July 5, 1991) Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Alfred Russel Wallace (January 08, 1823‐November 07, 1913) One of the most prominent features of our century has been the enormous and continuous growth of wealth, without any corresponding increase in the well-being of the whole people; while there is ample evidence to show that the number of the very poor — of those existing …
Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America — this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as …
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Try to will yourself into — or out of — loving someone, try to will someone into loving you, and you collide with the fundamental fact that we do not choose whom we love. We could not choose, because we do not choose who and what we are, and …
Martha Nussbaum (May 06, 1047 -) To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.
Doris Kearns Goodwin (January 04, 1943 -) Even when you’ve lived through an era, you’re only seeing a part of it, understandably. It’s been a wonderful feeling to hear from them that I’ve given them an understanding of what was happening in the home front as a whole so that they feel their sense of …
Maria Konnikova Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events — smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better… The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and …
William Vogt (May 15, 1902–July 11, 1968) We must — all of us, men, women, and children — reorient ourselves with relation to the world in which we live… We must come to understand our past, our history, in terms of the soil and water and forests and grasses that have made it what it …
If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation. —Jiddu Krishnamurti
When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses... We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. — John F. Kennedy
...If one looks long enough at almost anything, looks with absolute attention at a flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, grass, snow, a cloud, something like revelation takes place. — May Sarton
The most we can do is to write — intelligently, creatively, evocatively — about what it is like living in the world at this time. — Oliver Sacks
The truest philosophy, is not to long for anything in particular, but to accept everything as it comes, and find out the reason of it coming. — Marie Corelli
