James Baldwin(August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) Four AM can be a devastating hour. The day, no matter what kind of day it was is indisputably over; almost instantaneously, a new day begins: and how will one bear it? Probably no better than one bore the day that is ending, possibly not as well. …
Brian Greene On Purpose
Brian Greene (February 09, 1963 -) When you recognize that we are the product of purposeless, mindless laws of physics playing themselves out on our particles — because we are, all, bags of particles — it changes the way you search for meaning and purpose: You recognize that looking out to the cosmos to find …
Etel Adnan On The Future
Etel Adnan (February 24, 1925 -) When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive.
Frederick Douglass On Truth
Frederick Douglass (February 01, 1818–February 20, 1895) I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold …
Walt Whitman On Living Your Life
Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and …
Alain Badiou On Love
Alain Badiou (January 17, 1937 -) Love… is a quest for truth… truth in relation to something quite precise: what kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point …
Edward Hirsch On Reading Poetry
Edward M Hirsch (January 20, 1950 -) Read these poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read the poem while you’re alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them whem you’re wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. …
Anne Frank On Courage
Annelies Marie (Anne) Frank (June 12, 1929 – February or March 1945) In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the …
Dorothea Lange On Photography
Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
Huston Smith On Religion
Huston Cummings Smith (May 31, 1919 – December 30, 2016) The fact that all the enduring traditions make the same claim on this point, and the claim being that everything proceeds from an absolute perfection. Now, let me pause on that. You know, the Taoists, the Tao -there is a being, wondrous, perfect, how quiet …
Christopher Eric Hitchens On Death
Christopher Eric Hitchens (April 13, 1949 – December 15, 2011) I personally want to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.
Leonard Michaels On Cats And Loneliness
Leonard Michaels (January 2, 1933–May 10, 2003) When it comes to loneliness, a cat is excellent company. It is a lonely animal. It understands what you feel. A dog also understands, but it makes such a big deal of being there for you, bumping against you, flopping about your feet, licking your face. It keeps …
Eudora Welty On Life
Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
Gabriel García Márquez On Journalism
Gabriel García Márquez (March 06, 1927 – April 17, 2014) I learned a lot from James Joyce and Erskine Caldwell and of course from Hemingway ... [but the] tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It …
David Lynch On Ideas
David Lynch (January 20, 1946 -) Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very …
Lewis Thomas On The Earth
Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913 – December 3, 1993) At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.
Gilda Radner On Life
Gilda Susan Radner (June 28, 1946 – May 20, 1989) It is so hard for us little human beings to accept this deal that we get. It's really crazy, isn't it? We get to live, then we have to die. What we put into every moment is all we have. … What spirit human beings …
Irving Kristol On Equal Distribution
Irving Kristol (January 22, 1920 – September 18, 2009) In the same way as men cannot for long tolerate a sense of spiritual meaninglessness in their individual lives, so they cannot for long accept a society in which power, privilege, and property are not distributed according to some morally meaningful criteria.
Oswald Spengler On Freedom
Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler (May 29, 1880 – May 08, 1936) The press to-day is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor …
Louise Glück On Writing
Louise Glück (April 22, 1943 -) The fantasy exists that once certain hurdles have been gotten through, this art turns much simpler, that inspiration never falters, and public opinion is always affirmative, and there's no struggle, there's no torment, there's no sense that the thing you've embarked on is a catastrophe.
Iris Murdoch On Happiness
Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919 – February 08, 1999) Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.
Franz Kafka On Books
Franz Kafka (July 03, 1883 – June 03, 1924) The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a …
Virginia Woolf On Reading And Mind
Adeline Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) I read a great deal… Besides this I write… But the books are the things that I enjoy — on the whole — most. I feel sometimes for hours together as though the physical stuff of my brain were expanding, larger & larger, throbbing quicker …
Anaïs Nin On Friends
Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) Each friend represents a world in us possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Keith Allen Haring On Fear And Loving
Keith Allen Haring(May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) I guess it’s because I’m afraid. Afraid I’m wrong. And I guess I’m afraid I’m wrong, because I constantly relate myself to other people, other experiences, other ideas. I should be looking at both in perspective, not comparing. I relate my life to an idea or …
Kim Addonizio On Poetry
Kim Addonizio (July 31, 1954 -) Poetry is not a means to an end, but a continuing engagement with being alive.
Viktor Frankl On Living
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) It is not only through our actions that we can give life meaning — insofar as we can answer life’s specific questions responsibly — we can fulfill the demands of existence not only as active agents but also as loving human beings: in our loving dedication to the …
Frida Kahlo On Honesty
Frida Kahlo (July 06, 1907 – July 13, 1954) You deserve the best, the very best, because you are one of the few people in this lousy world who are honest to themselves, and that is the only thing that really counts.
Raymond Thornton Chandler On Writing
Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never …
Stanley Kunitz On Poetry
Stanley Kunitz Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of …
Marcus Aurelius On Philosophy
Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121 – March 17, 180) It stares you in the face. No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now.
Grace Paley On Language
Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 - August 22, 2007) My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
Mirabai Starr On Taking Refuge
Mirabai Starr The essential insight at the heart of the concept of taking refuge in the Buddha is that the man known as Siddhartha Gautama showed us what true awakening looks like, right? As it turns out, to awaken mostly means to live with compassion and wisdom, resting in our interconnectedness with all beings, recognizing …
