Albert Szent-Györgyi (September 16, 1893 – October 22, 1986) The universe is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.
Albert Einstein On Great Spirits
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.
Alan Watts On Connection
Alan Wilson Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) What do you feel when you look out at the galaxies where the sky is clear? You see this colossal affair that you are involved in. It makes a lot of people feel very small, but it shouldn't. It should make you feel as big …
Al Gore On The Environment
Albert Arnold Gore Jr. (March 31, 1948 -) You look at that river gently flowing by. You notice the leaves rustling with the wind. You hear the birds; you hear the tree frogs. In the distance you hear a cow. You feel the grass. The mud gives a little bit on the river bank. It’s …
Aesop On Kindness
Aesop(c. 620 – 564 BCE) No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
John Malkovich On Insanity
John Malkovich as Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom From The Film: Con Air What if I told you insane was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years, at the end of which they tell you to pissoff. Ending up in some retirement village in Florida hoping to die before suffering the indignity of …
Spike Lee On Patriotism
Shelton Jackson “Spike” Lee March 20, 1957 -) We (Black Americans) have always believed in the promise of what this country could be; we’re very patriotic. But I think that patriotism is when you speak truth to power. It’s patriotic to speak out about the injustices in this country. That is being an American patriot.
Adyashanti On Death
Adyashanti (October 26, 1962 -) Death is nothing more than a change of form. But only someone who really knows who they are knows that. And only someone who knows that can actually live life.
Adlai Stevenson On Leadership
Adlai Ewing Ferd Stevenson II (February 5, 1900 – July 14, 1965) What counts now is not just what we are against, but what we are for. Who leads us is less important than what leads us — what convictions, what courage, what faith — win or lose.
Milton Glaser On Together
Milton Glaser (June 26, 1929 – June 26, 2020) I have no faith in my own prediction. I don’t think there’s any way of telling what’s going to happen. I know this [pandemic] is a cosmic change and that nothing will ever be the same again. But I do know that if there’s a collective …
Rainer Maria Rilke On Questions
Rainer Maria Rilke (December 04, 1875 – December 29, 1926) ...have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not look now for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not …
Edward M Hirsch On The Elegy
Edward M Hirsch (January 20, 1950 -) Elegy: A poem of mortal loss and consolation. The elegy does the work of mourning. It allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance and it delivers an inheritance. It opens a space for retrospection and drives wordless anguish, wordless torment toward the consolations of verbal …
Megan O’Grady On Art And The Reflected Life
Megan O’Grady In any reflected life, there will be clarifying moments in which you travel to the edge of the shore. Art, at its best, does this mimetically, challenging us to see things differently by offering a set of open questions, rather than a verdict delivered from on high: a field of view that speaks …
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Stephen John Fry On The Cosmos
Stephen John Fry (August 24, 1957 -) The Greek word for “everything that is the case,” what we could call “the universe,” is COSMOS. And at the moment — although “moment” is a time word and makes no sense just now (neither does the phrase “just now”) — at the moment, Cosmos is Chaos and …
Constance Wu On Beauty
Constance Wu (March 22, 1982 -) When we become aware of life’s beauty, that’s when we are most alive.
May Swenson On Poetry
May Swenson (May 28, 1913 – December 04, 1989) The best poetry has its roots in the subconscious to a great degree. Youth, naivety, reliance on instinct more than learning and method, a sense of freedom and play, even trust in randomness, is necessary to the making of a poem.
Sherwin Bernard Nuland On Understanding
Sherwin Bernard Nuland (December 8, 1930 – March 3, 2014) If someone truly feels that you understand them, an awful lot of neurotic behavior just disappears – disappears on your part, disappears on their part. So if you're talking about what motivates this world to continue existing as a community, you've got to talk about …
Winston Churchill On The Independent Person
Winston Churchill (November 30, 1874 – January 24, 1965) The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is some one outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; some one strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammeled by convention, moving independent of the ordinary currents of human action.
William Godwin On Multiple Languages
William Godwin (March 3, 1756–April 7, 1836) He that is acquainted with only one language, will probably always remain in some degree the slave of language… But the man who is competent to and exercised in the comparison of languages, has attained to his proper elevation. Language is not his master, but he is the …
Albert Einstein On Compassion
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) Our task must be to free ourselves… by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Margaret Mead On Love And Hate
Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) Love and hate are two aspects of the same human capacity to react to other human beings in terms of experience. The infant whose world is warm, giving and reliable responds with love that echoes the love he has received. But the infant who is continually …
Jill Lepore On The Past
Jill Lepore (August 27, 1966 -) The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can’t be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald On Intelligence
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
Henry Miller On Getting Along
Henry Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) The greatest problem is not how to get along with one’s neighbor but how to get along with one’s self. Trite, you say. But true, nevertheless.
Rachel Carson On Mankind
Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) Mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself. Therein lies our hope and our destiny.
Zen Saying
Zen The knife does not cut itself, the finger does not touch itself, the mind does not know itself, the eye does not see itself.
Johnny Cash On Imagination
Johnny Cash (February 26, 1932 – September 12, 2003) There's nothing that stirs my imagination like the sound of a steam locomotive — that lonesome whistle cutting through the night and that column of black smoke and steam throwing shadows across the land. When I was a boy, the trains ran by my house and they …
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche On Being Yourself
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) Any human being who does not wish to be part of the masses need only stop making things easy for himself. Let him follow his conscience, which calls out to him: “Be yourself!” All that you are now doing, thinking, desiring, all that is not …
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Seneca On Friendship
Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65) Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul. Speak as boldly with him as with yourself… Regard him as loyal and you will make him …
David Whyte On Crisis
David Whyte (November 02, 1955 -) Crisis is unavoidable. Every human life seems to be drawn eventually, as if by some unspoken parallel, some tidal flow or underground magnetic field, toward the raw, dynamic essentials of its existence, as if everything up to that point had been a preparation for a meeting, for a confrontation …
Václav Havel On Hope
Václav Havel (October 5, 1936–December 18, 2011) The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the …
John Green On Enough
John Green (August 24, 1977 -) Don’t make stuff because you want to make money — it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous — because you will never feel famous enough.
David Abram On Interconnectness
David Abram (June 24, 1957 -) We may acknowledge, intellectually, our body’s reliance upon those plants and animals that we consume as nourishment, yet the civilized mind still feels itself somehow separate, autonomous, independent of the body and of bodily nature in general. Only as we begin to notice and to experience, once again, our …
