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
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 …
Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790) ...I believe I shall, in some shape or another, always exist; and, with all the inconveniences human life is liable to, I shall not object to a new edition of mine; hoping, however, that the errata of the last may be corrected.
Stephen J. Dobyns (February 19, 1941 -) Writing is a job, a craft, and you learn it by trying to write every day and by facing the page with humility and gall. And you have to love to read books, all kinds of books, good books. You are not looking for anything in particular; you …
Jeannette Napolitano I don’t want to look back in five years’ time and think, ‘We could have been magnificent, but I was afraid.’ In five years, I want to tell of how fear tried to cheat me out of the best thing in life, and I didn’t let it.
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell (February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977), known professionally as Anaïs Nin When we are in conflict we tend to make such sharp oppositions between ideas and attitudes and get caught and entangled in what seems to be a hopeless choice, but when the neurotic ambivalence …
Mary Wollstonecraft (April 27, 1759 – September 10, 1797) The endeavor to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless.
Keith Allen Haring(May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) People keep asking me how success has changed me. I always say that success has changed people’s responses and behavior toward me and that has affected me, but it has not really changed me. I feel the same on the inside as I did 10 years …
Marc Pietrzykowski I have been thinking lately about what it would be like to lose the compulsion to create, to make poems, or any kind of art. Would I miss it? My life would surely be less hectic, spiritually speaking. I am curious, but curious the way I am curious about what it is like …
Lou Andreas-Salomé (February 12, 1861 – February 5, 1937) To Rilke: A great deal of poetic work has arisen from various despairs, certainly; but if it arose out of that despair, the despair of not being capable of just such poetic syntheses, there’d be a contradiction, don’t you think? To your consciousness of yourself it …
Dame Jane Morris Goodall (April 03, 1934 -) The window is closing. Business as usual – using up natural resources faster and faster – can’t carry on. In some cases, we are already using resources faster than they can be replenished. And we can see the consequences. Look at climate change. It is not something …
Maria Konnikova (1984 -) That’s the thing about life: You can do what you do but in the end, some things remain stubbornly outside your control. You can’t calculate for dumb bad luck… My reasons for getting into poker in the first place were to better understand that line between skill and luck, to learn …
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Like love, grief swells into an entire inner universe that comes to color the whole of the outside world. Like love — that rapturous raw material for most of the songs and poems and paintings our species has produced — grief lives itself through the grieving and can’t but …
Alan Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. …
Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770 – March 26, 1827) Born with a passionate and excitable temperament, keenly susceptible to the pleasures of society, I was yet obliged early in life to isolate myself, and to pass my existence in solitude. If I at any time resolved to surmount all this, oh! how cruelly was …
Continue reading "Ludwig van Beethoven On Defective Hearing And Solitude"
Edward Wadie Said (November 1935 – 24 September 2003) Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder …
Brian Greene (February 09, 1963 -) We emerge from laws that, as far as we can tell, are timeless, and yet we exist for the briefest moment of time. We are guided by laws that operate without concern for destination, and yet we constantly ask ourselves where we are headed. We are shaped by laws …
James Maxwell Anderson (December 15, 1888 – February 28, 1959) This modern craze for biographical information leaves me cold for many reasons. For one thing, it's always inaccurate; for another, it's so bound up with publicity and other varieties of idiocy that it gags a person of any sensibility. For another, to be heralded is …
Avram Noam Chomsky (December 7, 1928 -) If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom …
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?
Angela Yvonne Davis (January 26, 1944 -) There is this freedom movement and then there is an attempt to narrow the freedom movement so that it fits into a much smaller frame, the frame of civil rights. Not that civil rights is not immensely important, but freedom is more expansive that civil rights. And as …
John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) Open-mindedness is not the same as empty-mindedness. To hang out a sign saying "Come right in; there is no one at home" is not the equivalent of hospitality. But there is a kind of passivity, willingness to let experiences accumulate and sink in and ripen, which …
Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.
Barack Obama (August 04 1961 -) You just have to get started. You just put something down. Because nothing is more terrifying than the blank page.
Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926 -) We have a great, habitual fear inside ourselves. We’re afraid of many things — of our own death, of losing our loved ones, of change, of being alone. The practice of mindfulness helps us to touch nonfear. It’s only here and now that we can experience total relief, …
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65) You ask where you will lie after your death? Where lie the souls unborn?
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) Today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely. If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines what and how far something “progresses.” In …
Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and, lastly, the solid cash.
Naguib Mahfouz (December 11, 1911 – August 30, 2006) She told him what had kept her away was Death. But he rejected that excuse—for Death, he said, can never come between lovers.
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
