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 …
Robert Frost On Life
Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life. "It goes on."
Albert Camus On Death
Albert Camus (November 07, 1913 – January 04, 1960) What doesn't kill me makes me stronger.
Alice Koller On Loving
Alice Koller Perhaps loving something is the only starting place there is for making your life your own.
Jyoti Donovan On Enlightenment And God
Jyoti Donovan Enlightenment is all there is. It's already here, and it's always here. It's you and me and all of this totality. It's the only thing going on, eternally. It's recognizing that all is God—not God as an all-knowing deity separate from the world, answering prayers or delivering judgments, but God as the source …
David Frederick Attenborough On Climate Change
David Frederick Attenborough (May 08 1926 -) This is an urgent problem that has to be solved and, what's more, we know how to do it - that's the paradoxical thing, that we're refusing to take steps that we know have to be taken... Every year that passes makes those steps more and more difficult …
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Marie Corelli On Death
Marie Corelli (May 01, 1855 – April 21, 1924) There is no death. What we think of as death is merely one of life's greatest transitions.
Hannah Arendt On Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 04, 1975) What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No …
Joy Harjo On Responsibility
Joy Harjo (May 09, 1951 -) I feel strongly that I have a responsibility to all the sources that I am: to all past and future ancestors, to my home country, to all places that I touch down on and that are myself, to all voices, all women, all of my tribe, all people, all …
Fanny Howe On The Present
Fanny Howe (October 15, 1940 -) Wherever I step I am stepping into a place that was just finished at the moment I arrived... If I freeze here, one foot poised to go forward, to land on the path, I will at least be living in the present and the past will know it.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross On Living
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (July 8, 1926 – August 24, 2004) It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive — to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions …
Alexander Hamilton On Sacred Rights
Alexander Hamilton (January 11, 1755 – July 12, 1804) The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the divinity itself and can never be erased or obscured by …
Martin L King On Freedom And Oppression
Martin L King (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and give up their unjust posture; but … groups are more immoral than individuals. We know through painful experience that …
Fyodor Dostoyevsky On Life
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821 – February 9, 1881) When I look back at the past and think how much time was spent in vain, how much of it was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in the inability to live; how I failed to value it, how many times I sinned against my …
Ed Simon On The Collapse Of Democracy
Ed Simon Today democracy is imperiled not by civil war but by a citizenry torn apart by warring ideologies, in part because of the compelling, if nihilistic, story that authoritarians have told about nationality. An authoritarian promises a shallow union with others who look like you; the true democrat ensures that such a union is …
A Letter From Home
Hazel L Phillips (January 06, 1926 - July 12 2013) True wisdom comes to us in many varied forms and from many sources. My mother was and continues to be a deep well of wisdom in my life. Her letter was handwritten but is typed out below. I received this letter following the tragic death …
