Percy Bysshe Shelley August 04, 1792 – July 08, 1822) Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Zadie Smith On Love
Zadie Smith (October 25, 1975 -) Love is not something to do, but something to be experienced, and something to go through — that must be why it frightens so many of us and why we so often approach it indirectly. Here is this novel, made with love. Here is this banana bread, made with …
Tobias Wolff On Stories
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (June 19, 1945 -) We love hearing stories of other people’s misfortunes — not terrible misfortunes, we don’t like that, but if somebody has taken a really expensive holiday, we don’t mind hearing that their flight was canceled and they had to sleep on the airport floor, and that there was …
Ursula K Le Guin On Suffering
Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, …
David Abram On Imagination
David Abram (June 24, 1957 -) That which we call imagination is from the first an attribute of the senses themselves; imagination is not a separate mental faculty (as we so often assume) but is rather the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative …
Anita Loos On Women’s Liberationists
Corinne Anita Loos (April 26, 1889 – August 18, 1981) The people I’m furious with are the Women’s Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men. That’s true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket.
Albert Einstein On Relativity
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.
Alain Badiou On Love
Alain Badiou (January 17, 1937 -) Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea …
Euripides On Death
Euripides (c. 480 – c. 406 BC) There is something in the pang of change — More than the heart can bear, Unhappiness remembering happiness.
Nick Cave On Loss
Nick Cave (September 22, 1957 -) The paradoxical effect of losing a loved one is that their sudden absence can become a feverish comment on that which remains. That which remains rises in time from the dark with a burning physicality — a luminous super-presence — as we acquaint ourselves with this new and different …
Edward Hirsch On Poetry
Edward M Hirsch (January 20, 1950 -) I would like to speak in my poems with what the Romantic poets called ‘the true voice of feeling.’ I believe, as Ezra Pound once said, that when it comes to poetry, ‘only emotion endures.’
Martha Nussbaum On Anger
Martha Nussbaum (May 06, 1047 -) We are prone to anger to the extent that we feel insecure or lacking control with respect to the aspect of our goals that has been assailed — and to the extent that we expect or desire control. Anger aims at restoring lost control and often achieves at least …
Alain de Botton On Listeners
Alain de Botton (December 20, 1969 -) Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they’ve been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its place.
Virginia Woolf On Writing And Sex
Adeline Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
Wilson Bentley On Snowflakes
Wilson Bentley (February 9, 1865–December 23, 1931) Every snowflake has an infinite beauty which is enhanced by knowledge that the investigator will, in all probability, never find another exactly like it. Consequently, photographing these transient forms of Nature gives to the worker something of the spirit of a discoverer. Besides combining her greatest skill and …
Anne Frank On Ideals
Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (June 12, 1929 – March 1945) It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, …
Franklin Delano Roosevelt On Fear
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945) This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche On Endurance
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, …
Haemin Sunim On Imperfection
Haemin Sunim (December 12, 1973 -) Even if you feel there are many things in your life that are imperfect, if you look at them in a compassionate way, you discover that imperfection, in and of itself, is beautiful and has meaning.
Haruki Murakami On Loss
Haruki Murakami (January 12, 1949 -) By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no …
Tao Writer On Time
Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -) There are four things I know about time so far. (1) It cannot be stored or saved. The moment must be savored in the moment. (2) It is finite for all living creatures. Everyone and every living thing will experience death. (3) Time can be remembered but you cannot …
Edward Hirsch On Poetry
Edward M Hirsch (January 20, 1950 -) I would like to speak in my poems with what the Romantic poets called ‘the true voice of feeling.’ I believe, as Ezra Pound once said, that when it comes to poetry, ‘only emotion endures.’
Andrew Wyeth On Painting
Andrew Newell Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) The brain must not interfere. You're painting so constantly that your brain disappears, and your subconscious goes into your fingers, and it just flows. If you think you're painting a good watercolor you can be sure it's lousy. It is important to forget what you …
Sophia Loren On Solitude
Sophia Loren (September 20, 1934 -) Extravagant though it may sound, solitude is the filter of my soul. It nourishes me, and rejuvenates me. Left alone, I discover that I keep myself good company.
Bernard Augustine DeVoto On The Martini
Bernard Augustine DeVoto (1897 – 1955) The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth, and one of the shortest lived.
Ananda Coomaraswamy On Artists
Ananda Coomaraswamy (August 22, 1877 − September 09, 1947) The artist is not a special kind of person: rather each person is a special kind of artist.
Iris Murdoch On The Good
Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919 – February 08, 1999) The concept of Good… is a concept which is not easy to understand partly because it has so many false doubles, jumped-up intermediaries invented by human selfishness to make the difficult task of virtue look easier and more attractive: History, God, Lucifer, Ideas of power, freedom, …
Cheryl Strayed On People Watching
Cheryl Strayed (September 17, 1968 -) As long as I live I'll never tire of people-watching. On city buses and park benches. In small-town cafes and crowded elevators. At concerts and swimming pools. To people-watch is to glimpse the mysterious and the banal, the public face and the private gesture, the strangest other and the …
Maria Popova On Art From Heartache
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) To make art out of heartache is, of course, the most beautiful thing one could do with one’s sorrow, as well as the most generous — no artist knows how the transfiguration of their pain into beauty will salve another heart, give another sorrower the language of their own …
Michael Singer On The Human Heart
Michael A Singer (May 06, 1947 -) In most human beings, the heart does its work unattended. Even though its behavior governs the course of our lives, it is not understood. If at any given point in time the heart opens, we fall in love. If at any given point in time it happens to …
Alvin Toffler On Change
Alvin Toffler (October 4, 1928 – June 27, 2016) Change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it.
Martin L King On Injustice
Martin L King (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality… Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Wole Soyinka On Power
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 …
