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 On Hoary Establishments
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 On Success
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 On Being
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 On Despair
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 …
Jane Goodall On Nature
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 On Chance
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 On Grief
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 On Egos
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 On Defective Hearing And Solitude
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 …
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Edward Said On Empires
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 On Laws
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 On Biography
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 …
Noam Chomsky On Freedom Of Speech
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 On Unjust Laws
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 On Freedom
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 …
Keith Allen Haring On Art
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 On Writing
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 Hahn On Fear
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 On Imagination
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Seneca On Death
Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65) You ask where you will lie after your death? Where lie the souls unborn?
Viktor Frankl On Progress
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 On Literature
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 Mahdouz On Death
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.
Jack Kerouac On Friendships
Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn like fabulous yellow …
May Sarton On Success And Failure
May Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) So much of my life here is precarious. I cannot always believe even in my work. But I have come in these last days to feel again the validity of my struggle here, that it is meaningful whether I ever “succeed” as a writer or not, …
Robinson Jeffers On Religion
Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962) It is a sort of tradition in this country not to talk about religion for fear of offending — I am still a little subject to the tradition, and rather dislike stating my “attitudes” except in the course of a poem. However, they are simple. I believe that …
Robert Louis Stevenson On Travel
Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850 – December 03, 1894) I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and to find the globe granite …
Neil Simon On Life And Pain
Marvin Neil Simon (July 4, 1927 – August 26, 2018) If you can go through life without ever experiencing pain, you probably haven't been born yet. And if you've gone through pain and think you know exactly why, you haven't examined all the options.
Miles Davis On The Origin Of Music
Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) We’d be walking on these dark country roads at night and all of a sudden this music would seem to come out of nowhere, out of them spooky-looking trees that everybody said ghosts lived in. […] Somebody would be playing a guitar the way …
Rebecca Solnit On Holidays
Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) Half our holidays are punitive, at least for those left out of what the the holiday is supposed to celebrate. If you don’t have money for gifts and a thriving family life or just avoid events at the intersection of Jesus and shopping, Christmas can be unpleasant; Valentine’s Day …
Hannah Arendt On Fearlessness
Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 04, 1975) Fearlessness is what love seeks. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.
Albert Einstein On Creation
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.
