George Bernard Shaw (July 26, 1856 – November 02, 1950) I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want …
Meshell Ndegeocello On Books And Reading
Meshell Ndegeocello (August 29, 1968 -) You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever …
Megan Rapinoe On Choice
Megan Rapinoe (July 05, 1985 -) But you have a choice of what you do in the world. You just have to be prepared to wear the consequences of your actions.
Oscar-Claude Monet On Unhappiness
Oscar-Claude Monet (November 14, 1840 – December 05, 1926) I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf… To think I was getting on so well, more absorbed than I've ever been and expecting to achieve something, but I was forced to change my tune and give up a lot of promising beginnings and …
Simone de Beauvoir On The Past And The Present
Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986) We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible. There have been war, plague, scandal, and treason, and there is no way of our preventing their having taken place; the executioner became an executioner and …
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Andrew Carnegie On Wealth
Andrew Carnegie (November 25, 1835 – August 11, 1919) The amassing of wealth is one of the worse species of idolatry. No idol more debasing than the worship of money.
William Vogt On Environmental Destiny
William Vogt (May 15, 1902–July 11, 1968) If we ourselves do not govern our destiny, firmly and courageously, no one is going to do it for us. To regain ecological freedom for our civilization will be a heavy task. It will frequently require arduous and uncomfortable measures. It will cost considerable sums of money. Democratic …
Bertrand Russell On Critical Thinking
Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social …
Alan Watts On Time
Alan Wilson Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) Time is an artificial concept… Our concept of time is the hairline second hand of a watch. We believe that the hairline is now. The now is eternal. Time is the eternal now. It is not a journey. It is NOW!
Anne Lamott On Connection
Anne Lamott (April 10, 1954 -) Most of us have figured out that we have to do what’s in front of us and keep doing it… Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice…When you love something like …
Abbott Joseph “A. J.” Liebling On War
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 …
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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.
