A notorious beginner of enterprises and non-finisher, partly through lack of time, partly through lack of single-minded concentration, I still wonder how and why I managed to peg away at this thing year after year, often under real difficulties…
– J.R.R. Tolkien
If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.
– Kenneth Goldsmith
YELLOW LADDER
by Elaine Equi
A yellow ladder
leans against
a redbrick wall
under a blue sky.
Beautiful.
But it doesn’t lead
to a window,
and it’s not tall enough
so someone could climb
over the wall.
Maybe a construction
worker left it there
temporarily.
But I don’t think
a builder put it there.
It must have been an artist.
Nevertheless,
don’t walk under it.
I tell my students, who believe passionately in explaining the work they’re sharing, You know, when you’re dead, you can’t go around explaining this thing—it has to be right there on the page.
– Louise Glück
BEAUTY OF THE BLUE SKY
Do we need to make a special effort to enjoy the beauty of the blue sky?
Do we have to practice to be able to enjoy it? No, we just enjoy it.
Each second, each minute of our lives can be like this.
Wherever we are, any time, we have the capacity to enjoy
the sunshine, the presence of each other, even the sensation of our breathing.
We don’t need to go to China to enjoy the blue sky.
We don’t have to travel into the future to enjoy our breathing.
We can be in touch with these things right now.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
What is being suggested is the initiation for enormous changes. In a man, or a woman, there is this potential energy that can just look, but can’t do more. We don’t know what will be the result of starting that process. Each time you start that process, it seems you forget, and forget again. But each time I start, I don’t know where I’ll forget or whether I’ll forget or not. I don’t know where it will lead. When I don’t know where it will lead, maybe then it will last longer. Maybe then I will be interested when I start. If it starts from some ego that wants to change something, it won’t last long. But if it starts from an energy that has awareness, that has the property which light has when it is transforming energy: do you understand what I mean by that? – if it has that property, maybe it will continue. I don’t know at the time I initiate this who is looking, whether I am using the right energy. There is a doing this and a self-observation. Maybe I’m cheating and trying to do something.
Or maybe I’m drawing on a possibility that exists, something universal, a chink of awareness. Maybe that awareness can ferment in me. I don’t know what is the process of that fermentation?
– Lord Pentland
It is only once in a while that you see someone whose electricity and presence matches yours at that moment.
– Charles Bukowski
The ancient world was settled so sparsely that nature was not yet eclipsed by man. Nature hit you in the eye so plainly and grabbed you so fiercely and so tangibly by the scruff of the neck that perhaps it really was still full of gods.
– Boris Pasternak
Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection …of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.
– David Whyte
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate…
– Anne Carson
It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.
– Anne Carson
To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.
– Michel Houellebecq
The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.
– Rollo May
Yet again, isn’t there something terrible in randomness—the idea that at the very bottom of its calculations, real depravity has no master plan of any kind, it’s just a dreamy whim that slides out of people when they are trapped or bored or too lazy to analyze their own mania.
– Aeschylus
Experiencing the radical present doesn’t mean detaching from what comes next.
– Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat Roshi
I am trying to write / a poem in which 1 am neither a monster nor a
martyr.
– Meghan O’Hern
You’re painfully alive in a drugged
and dying culture.
– Richard Yates
Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.
– Leo Tolstoy
After all those years of listening,
I thought you’d know
what a story was.
All you could do was weep.
You wanted everything told to you
and nothing thought through yourselves.
– Louise Glück
All the hardships of training teach you not only that nature can heal but also the importance of humility and surrender and recognizing that we’re part of something much larger. Surrender actually nourishes our sense of belonging.
– Hiroko Yoda
Not the blue the orthodoxy of the day
But a blue like intuition
The soft of the night into morning
Felt here. remembered
Under the hoofs of the cart
– Kamau Brathwaite
To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy.
– Robert Doisneau
Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.
– Dana Gioia
Happiness is to be outside, to walk, to look, to amalgamate with things. Sitting down, you fall victim to the worst of yourself. Man was not created to be nailed to a chair. But perhaps he doesn’t deserve any better.
– Emil Cioran
I was wedded to all the stars of the sky: There was not a single star left;
and I married every one of them with great spiritual pleasure…
Then I married the moon.
– Ibn Arabi
Fancy demanding feeling from poetry! That’s not the main thing at all. Radiant words, words of light, full of rhythm and music, that’s poetry.
– Théophile Gautier
The forces that are worked against you can only get through to you where your aura is weakened. Through your vices, your limiting beliefs, and what you’ve not made right within yourself.
– Nika Solé
There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever; everything useful is ugly.
– Théophile Gautier
There is a kind of dream we call kawaru yume. The Dream That Changes. There is the yochi yume, the dream in which you see what will happen. This is useful, to prepare for events that are otherwise unseen. The kawaru yume is more important. It’s seeing which world we are in, and whether we need to stay there. You not only see the future, you can lean in to make it change.
– Robert Moss
Mister Rogers once talked about how if you asked a room full of people to draw a tree, every single one would look different.
Even though we all know what a tree is.
And I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.
When we’re little, we create so freely.
Purple trees.
Crooked trees.
Trees with giant swirls and strange colors and wild ideas.
Children don’t begin by asking,
“Is this cool?”
They begin by asking,
“What if?”
But somewhere along the way, many of us slowly learn to stop drawing our own tree.
We start noticing what gets approval.
What gets likes.
What helps us fit in.
And little by little, some people begin hiding the parts of themselves that made them unique in the first place.
I know I did.
I spent a lot of years trying to fit in somewhere.
Trying to figure out who I was supposed to be.
And honestly, it wasn’t until I became a father—and really, maybe not even until my 30s—that I started circling back to something I knew naturally as a child:
There is only one me.
Only one person with my ideas, my imagination, my voice, my perspective, my way of seeing the world.
And the same is true for you.
Sometimes growing up is actually the process of finding the courage to become yourself again.
To stop apologizing for your creativity.
To stop shrinking your ideas.
To stop believing you have to draw the same tree as everybody else.
The world doesn’t need another copy.
It needs the tree only you would draw.
– Lauren Loveless
‘Jesus’ life didn’t go well. He didn’t reach his earning potential. He didn’t have the respect of his colleagues. His friends weren’t loyal. His life wasn’t long. He didn’t meet his soul mate. And he wasn’t understood by his mother.
…Yet I think I deserve all those things because I’m so spiritual.
– Hugh Prather
Cynics are only in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves.
– George Meredith
We must never be afraid to be a sign of contradiction for the world.
– Mother Teresa
Developing compassion is the most fruitful way of “getting even” with people who make you angry.
– Chögyam Trungpa
That outering or uttering of sense which is language and speech is a tool which ‘made it possible for man to accumulate experience and knowledge in a form that made easy transmission and maximum use possible.ʼ
– Marshall McLuhan
Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
– Charles Mingus
As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has-or ever will have-something inside that is unique to all time.
– Fred Rogers
Empaths did not come into this world to be victims, we came to be warriors. Be brave. Stay strong. We need all hands on deck.
– Anthon St. Maarten
A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a shortcut to meet it.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Of course everybody knows without telling that the king is naked: that the metaphysicians not only are unable to explain anything, but that hitherto they have not been able to present even a single hypothesis free from contradiction.
– Lev Shestov
There is no small act of kindness.
Every compassionate act makes large the world.
– Mary Anne Radmacher
In short, the medium is the message signifies not only the end of the message, but also the end of the medium. There are no longer media in the literal sense of the term … that is to say, a power mediating between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another — neither in content nor in form.
– Jean Baudrillard
My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.
– Jodi Picoult
People of uncommon abilities generally fall into eccentricities when their sphere of life is not adequate to their abilities.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When a society has no mythological anchor, no soul-affirming rites-of-passage, a society doesn’t know which story it’s in. When you lose the metaphor, a hand moves briskly to a rusty blade. We are adrift in an epidemic of the literal.
– Dr. Martin Shaw
You don’t really exist in the way that you think you do, so you are constantly trying to secure your existence.
– Chögyam Trungpa
A personal library is a quiet anchor.
– Rachel Carson
It’s interesting watching people underestimate you until they realize you were being humble, not incapable.
– J.
All ‘scholars’ are apt to be quarrelsome…
– J.R.R. Tolkien
In early morning
I gaze at the sweep of the sky
cloud formations I’ve never seen before
then realize that this particular sky
with its clouds, colors, curves
is unique
Each person is their own sky
never before present on earth
which a breath created long ago
in a singular garden
– Mark Gordon
We do not know what the psyche is, this noun taken from a verb psychein, ‘to breathe’. But therein lies the clue that the psyche is a verb and not a noun, a process and not an entity. To think of the psyche, even the unconscious, as an entity leads to the fallacy of literalism wherein one is more easily seduced by the fantasy of measurement or manipulation, rather than the more respectful effort to track those energies as intentions and to possibly align oneself with them.
– James Hollis
The fun of this whole thing is to make patterns, to figure out games, to do something with it.
– Alan Watts
If we think that things are being repeated, it is generally because we don’t pay attention to all of the details. But if we pay attention we see that there is no such thing as repetition.
– John Cage
We wholly overlook the essential fact that the achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.
– CG Jung
You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.
– Haruki Murakami
With an ambiguity I want to clarify: I hide from language inside language. When something–including nothingness–has a name, it seems less hostile. Nevertheless, I suspect that the essential is unspeakable.
– Alejandra Pizarnik, (tr. Cole Heinowitz)
We can faithfully adhere to a precept, and yet end up doing irreparable harm. We can never trace the ultimate consequence of our choices, but it’s safe to conclude that whatever we decide to do will be fraught with certain error and fall short of the best intent.
– Lin Jensen
If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.
– Haruki Murakami
The antidote to wrongs done in the past is restitution. But the only antidote to feelings of guilt, whether individual or collective, is repentance.
– Owen Barfield
Hard truth: If you are looking for perfect consistency in a relationship you are not going to find it. A human being is not a machine.
– Yung Pueblo
It’s always interesting that people search so tirelessly outside of themselves, for who they are.
– Nika Solé
Even if we are not at a meditation center, we can still practice at home, because around us the dharma is present. Each pebble, each leaf, each flower is preaching the dharma.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
A life based on thought and its activities becomes mechanical; however smoothly it may run, it is still mechanical action.
– Krishnamurti
VICTIMS OF CAPTOLOGY
I don’t look outside
or talk to the night
sky. I fall asleep
with my hands
holding my phone
like it’s your face.
– Kyla Jamieson
The Madman knows that once God is dead, man must live like a god: man must go beyond the limits of his own being, leave his own nature behind and assume the burden, the risk, and the pleasure of divinity.
– Octavio Paz
The work of art lives and develops, like any other natural organism, through the conflict of opposing principles. Opposites reach over into each other within it, taking the idea out into infinity.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
The metaphors we use to describe the world (such as a machine, a jungle, a seamless whole, a mother, a living being) affect ways we live.
– Lisa M Christie, PhD
You don’t need to seek awakening. Just notice where you’re resisting life, and soften there. Freedom is already here.
– Amoda Maa
Besides, I’m not in the mood for all this today. I have no desire to demonstrate, surprise, amuse, or persuade. My goal is absolute rest. To know nothing, to teach nothing, to want nothing, to sense nothing, to sleep, and then to sleep more.
– Charles Baudelaire
Clear-seeing comes not from mind-based beliefs or knowledge, but from the absence of the overlay of beliefs on what we see.
– Amoda Maa
I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way, we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
– Hermann Hesse
It’s also a basic misunderstanding about the nature of translation–cherry-picking a single word isn’t very useful or productive.
– Alicia E. Stallings
As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around.
– Haruki Murakami
Identification with our mind causes thought to become compulsive.
– Eckart Tolle
When the spiritual war on the planet heats up, those with the purest hearts and most active divine connection are chosen to lead humanity through it.
– Nika Solé
I think it’s okay if writers don’t have the answers to what happened in a story, as long as an emotional truth was discovered.
– Melissa Lozada-Oliva
Floating Sweet Dumpling
by Ho Xuan Huong
Translated by Marilyn Chin
My body is powdery white and round
I sink and bob like a mountain in a pond
The hand that kneads me is hard and rough
You can’t destroy my true red heart
The older I get, the more I understand people who move to the countryside, grow their own vegetables, get a dog, and only talk to about three people. That life gets more appealing every year.
– Introvert Problems
The universe has an odd habit of making the strongest souls wait the longest for the things meant for them.
– Nithya Shri
We are defined and controlled by all that we have not transcended.
– Adi Da
The legitimate function of the mind is to tell you what is not.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
We cannot let the oil companies, the gas companies, and petro states tell us what is permissible.
– Al Gore
Those who don’t want to change, let them sleep.
– Rumi
Wires
The widest prairies have electric fences,
For though old cattle know they must not stray
Young steers are always scenting purer water
Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires
Leads them to blunder up against the wires
Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter.
Young steers become old cattle from that day,
Electric limits to their widest senses.
– Philip Larkin
Human Mind
I dealed in love, baby
In good words, baby, from above
Ain’t always easy to supply
But I ain’t giving up, baby
Burning hillsides
Children dying by machines of war
And I know every tear that I’ve cried
Through the worst in my life
Was love in full supply
God bless the human mind
Who would dream the sweet design?
Even in these days I find
This far down the line
I find good in it sometimes
God bless the human mind
Find a reason, Lord, to keep on trying
With every tear you cry
You find good in it sometimes
I dealed in loss, daddy
I am the last, daddy, last of us
Ain’t always easy to believe
I miss my family, daddy
Spinning B-sides, singing “By and By”
Will mean once more and I
Know everyone can still fly
The best in my life is love in full supply
God bless the human mind
Who would dream the sweet design?
Even in these days I find
This far down the line
I find good in us sometimes
God bless the human mind
Find a reason, Lord, to keep on trying
With every tear you’ve cried
Find good in it sometimes
– Mavis Staples
I tell the rogues to read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the internet or watch too much television lose it… Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.
– Werner Herzog
I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.
– Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
There’s a dream I have in which I love the world.
– Cameron Awkward-Rich
One hour devoted to mourning and lamenting the stolen equality of the weak is nobler than a century filled with greed and usurpation.
– Kahlil Gibran
In a world in which we have a diagnostic term for every “abnormal” state of mind, we overlook the pathology of the “normal”: the unreflective participation in a destructive pursuit of status, wealth, and power.
We are so profoundly sick as a society that we do not see how spiritually ill that society asks us to be: it wants our souls lost in the doomscroll; it wants us addicted to flickering images, distracted by meaningless bickerings, all while the powerful do what they wish with our world.
In such a distorted world, those who are spiritually stationary appear “healthy.” Those who are spiritually searching, however, appear “ill”—and indeed they often are, as they are the rightly restless ones; they are the seekers; they are carrying the burden of something ancient, something new, something that has no place in a world that has abandoned the pursuit of Truth for the pursuit of winning the meaningless Game at all costs—even at the cost of lives, futures, souls.
Such a Truth needs solitude, patience, and deep communion in which to grow. If it does not become itself, it turns into bitterness, rage, destruction.
And that is just more currency for the Players of the Game.
But Truth has another chance to appear. If it does, it will come from the outcasts, from the thinkers, from the feelers; it will come from the artists who risk everything; it will come from the children who refuse to play the false game and choose the real one; it will come in some inconspicuous place, on some distant day, in the eyes of someone who has gone deep enough into the fear and the solitude and the mystery to be changed, to see the self and the other, to see the heart of the real.
And when that life speaks, when it comes with its clarity and mystery, we will be judged by whether we can hear it, by whether we have lost the capacity to do so, by whether we destroy it because we cannot bear the challenge of its simple and transformative truth.
We will be judged by whether we make a space for it at the table or crown it again in thorns.
Because that is what the lost do with Truth, with Beauty, with Love. They come face to face with the devastating clarity of its command—”love one another”—and they nail it in the air among the birds.
They build systems and wage wars to cover up that simple mystery. They slay that Truth and then wear its symbols in a mockery of what it came for.
They slay whatever wakens them too soon.
Our only hope is to not be so lost. Our only hope is in cultivating the ability to listen. Not just to speak, not just to opine, not just to consume mindlessly, but to listen.
Can we listen, really listen—to ourselves, to each other, to the voices that rise up in solitude, to the ancient things within us, trying to tell us what they have always known? Can we hear the great questions instead of the sham ones? Can we live? Do we even want to?
The command is simple but the way is hard. But it is a joyful difficulty. Because it is both rest and work. Both stillness and motion. Because all this listening and all this becoming and all this search for Truth is one thing: love.
What is the rain saying? What is your neighbor going through? What is that voice whispering in you, that hunger you’ve learned to ignore, that calling you’re told you’d be absolutely mad to follow through the dark of the door?
– Joseph Fasano
If we don’t have true perception of visual dharma, a lot of things can go wrong.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Empty, I echo to the least footfall.
– Sylvia Plath
Do not act out words. Never act out words. Never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. Never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death. Do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love.
– Leonard Cohen
Poetry Will Save the World
I prefer not to make definitive or
bold claims. But consider that this
is neither definitive nor bold, just
a noted truth. Not that the world
needs saving. Not that poetry has
a grand plan. Just that it is nearly
impossible to act in violence when
in full attendance of your life,
which a poem asks of you to be.
Just that an awakened heart, for
which poetry is a key, has no desire
beyond the greatest of desires—
to love the earth, to protect its
possibility, and then to pass it on,
to let it all go.
– Moudi Sbeity
The Document
by Noor Hindi
The document mistranslates. You live / to collect your loved one’s losses / Their archive. Their quiet. What did you leave behind, oh ache ? / Oh whimper? / You are everyone I kn(o/e)w. When I stood in Al Akhdar I heard the streets calling your name. I heard the men / stomping their feet & I wept & I wept & I wept across the Dead Sea, across (mis)memories of my mother pacing / that miserable street. Somewhere you are smoking argeela Playboy / sunglasses clasped to your shirt. Somewhere I am sleeping next to you & you are asking me about death & I am too young too young too young to know loss / & I promise you we’ll live forever. There at the edge / of Jaafar Al-Husseini Street my father returns / home all briefcase & sweaty hands. Once, a rooftop wedding. Once, a certificate of death. My father collected / every report card of mine growing up — A Pleasure to Have in Class A Pleasure / to grow up in the states, a pleasure to be untouched by the news to hold a Certificate / of Participation for Your Obedience to the State. You Live Long Enough in the United States & You Mistake an Israeli Warplane for A Shooting Star my friend says / her eyes / offering me a photo of the Sea. In Amman, I Don’t Have an Address to Your Grandmother’s Home, my 3amo says, but I Can WhatsApp You the Coordinates. From Dearborn Ramleh is 5,977 miles or 9619.049 kilometers away / depending on who we audience. In Amman I was Case No. 2530400000131915 because I lost my Passport & when the man with a cigarette asks me where I lost it I mishear him / I mistranslate & I am afraid / to cough from the smoke in that too small room & lose another country not mine. The Air Here . . . I tell her . . . If It’s Anything Like Cairo It’s Like Sand + Salt + Warmth + Also Somehow Sweet. It Fills Your Lungs Different. It’s Easier to Breathe, she tells me. In Palestine — I can’t tell you about Palestine / I’ve never been but I have my Father’s Documents to prove us / The documents that rename me / refuse me / spectacle our birth & our death The Document as map as fiction as shame as eviction Please Rate Your Experience Please / stand in this Assembly / Line of Loss / Please: We’ve all wanted to be loved / by an impossible thing / it’s why the monarch butterflies keep following us around & This Is How It Is Habibti / Things Happen Until You Die / & All You Can Do Is Not Break
The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found an enemy is manufactured.
– Chris Hedges
It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man.
– Henri de Lubac
The exceptionals get rewarded differently.
– JJ Omojuwa
The true use of music is to become musical in one’s thoughts, words, and actions.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan, Sufi mystic
An overdose of praise is like 10 lumps of sugar in coffee; only a very few people can swallow it.
– Emily Post
God did not create evil. Just as darkness is the absence of light, evil is the absence of God.
– Albert Einstein
Where love, grounded in truth, is absent, sin disorders speech and conduct, and offense is not accidental but inevitable.
– Sophion A. Theophilus
To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.
– Mahatma Gandhi
If you’re really successful at bullshitting, it means you’re not hanging around enough people smarter than you.
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
I am far from being bad and just as far from being good. I can be as soft as satin, or as hard as a coral stone. … I am simply man.
– Giacomo Casanova
Like a novelist who never outlines a book, I’d never plotted my future.
– Tom Grimes, Mentor
It’s the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.
– Jennifer Egan
No one carries the best parts of themselves. The best parts are those held inside of others.
– Daniel Kraus, Whalefall
One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
– Thomas Sowell
Authors are like tulips trampled beneath tyranny. In their desperation to preserve draconian regimes, oppressors attempt to shackle truth itself — yet the pen forever remains sovereign in its own dominion.
– Zargar Ishfaq
If we are to continue to exist, we will require more than intelligence. We will require wisdom.
– David Attenborough
Society corrupts the best of us. It is a little unfair to criticize a person for not sharing the enlightenment of a later epoch, but it is also profoundly saddening that such prejudices were so extremely pervasive. The question raises nagging uncertainties about which of the conventional truths of our own age will be considered unforgivable bigotry by the next.
– Carl Sagan
Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.
– Rene Descartes
An old error is
often more popular
than a new truth.
– German proverb
When you resist evil you are in fact celebrating life, and it’s okay to have a good time.
– Bruce Cockburn
The Self is the silent listener to the music of the spheres.
– Adi Shankara, Vivekachudamani
And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.
– Samantha Harvey
An artist can’t strive to make art any more than a monk can strive for enlightenment.
– Shozan Jack Haubner
If you go into the dark in this super graduated titrated way, what I found over and over is the darkness will show you the way.
– Andrew Holecek, On Dark Retreat
Witness is its own riddle that suspects it must create a world to say the world is real.
– Dan Beachy-Quick
If not for those black scratches
On the page
Where would I be?
Words connecting
The world
To the wound,
Connecting them both to me.
– Gregory Orr
Each of us, when in extremity, may, in that moment, find it impossible to escape the net of anguish, but a single person with a simple gesture can open such a door for us.
– Douglas J. Penick
A life-illusion is never wholly untrue. It is a vaporous eidolon of yourself that walks about with you wherever you go. It is a shadow. And because it is a shadow it has truth.
– John Cowper Powys
The whole task of art is to unexpress the expressible, to kidnap from the world’s language, which is the poor and powerful language of the passion, another speech, an exact speech.
– Roland Barthes
I will survive the wrong / I’ve done. All the love / that didn’t serve me.
– Leila Chatti
I find the blueprint
of the universe
in a leaf’s veins
in the breath
that weaves the morning
– Mark Gordon
Whenever the digital age encourages us to prize our rights over those of others, it overturns society as we know it and propels us ever farther from our best and deepest interests.
– Pico Iyer
With our thoughts we make ourselves unhappy because we are attached to the idea of trying to satisfy ourselves.
– Kosho Uchiyama Roshi
There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist
and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man.
You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover.
You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have
to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within
you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of
childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to
everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself.
You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek.
You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself.
You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you!
– Hermann Hesse
We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.
– Carl Rogers
…part of the problem was I had surrounded myself with the fiction writers instead of the poets. I had chosen the wrong world to immerse myself in; the poets were nightclub docents of mourning and melancholia and the fiction writers were real estate agents.
– Patrick Cottrell
To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life
Among strangers.
– Gerard Manley
Great art has often been made by bad people. So what? Expecting the artist to be a good person was a sentimental canard of Victorian moralism, rejected by the “art for art’s sake” movement led by Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.
– Camille Paglia
On my way home, I ask the sky to come down and keep me company, but the sky prefers its own boundlessness.
– Yuki Tanaka
The Other is not any one thing found in any particular place. It is a quality of (or rather visible in) all things, like a specific color. It shines through them at us. We see it and it sees back, as in a dialog…
– Philip K. Dick
To be nothing implies tremendous inward meditation. That is real meditation.
– Krishnamurti
Something in both of us
never got born:
too late to hack it out,
or to unlearn
needed, familiar pain.
Come, little thorn.
– Jay Macpherson
We are simply returning to the primordial ground of our own consciousness. This invites us to understand enlightenment not as becoming something sublime, but as returning to who we truly are—our original nature.
– Anam Thubten
That’s the way
it would be, everyone slender as drinking straws
nobody leaky
or hurting or abjectly religious, everything
allbillowyellowyorangeyflowywonderfulness
– C. D. Wright
If you don’t have a song to sing, you’re okay
You know how to get along, humming
– Fiona Apple
People make use of writers only in order to work off their own excess energy on them, in the form of agreement or disagreement.
– Robert Musil
ENGLISH
What language is this
that equates I love you
with I love turnips?
Can we not have another word
for passion, steady passion,
the agony that launched a thousand ships?
And let it be fresh,
yet one we’re used to:
I home you. You breathe me. We stallion.
If you cannot be a singer, be a story.
If you cannot be a story, be a song.
Say it, now,
to yourself, your love, your other:
I Rome you.
You Pompeii me.
I wouldn’t Judas you.
– Joceh Fasano
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.
– Herman Melville
Losing a Language
We were born with a
large door on our backs. When will
we know if it opens?
– Victoria Chang
They are so damn ‘intellectual’ and rotten that I can’t stand them anymore….I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those ‘artistic’ bitches of Paris.
– Frida Kahlo
It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard.
– Carl Rogers
The moment you choose truth over fear…
Everything begins to shift.
Not because the world changes —
but because you do.
Alignment starts quietly.
Doors open subtly.
Your light doesn’t force its way forward…
It simply stops hiding.
– Bill Philipps
Remember, you are the untouched presence observing the entire battles and drama of the person. You don’t need to move the mind aside to get to Truth, for Truth is not apart from you. Simply recognize and stay as the witnessing self.
– Mooji
I prefer to think of my patients and myself as fellow travelers, a term that abolishes distinctions between ‘them’ (the afflicted) and ‘us’ (the healers).
– Yalom
Writers are sorcerers of this realm. They take reality (and its neurologic recreations: dreams, memories) and turn it into a reality that is not reality but contingent on reality, a reality with the ability to alter reality in an endless feedback loop of forms and characters.
– delonix regia
This very day start your new life. Approach every experience in a new frame of mind with a new state of consciousness. Assume the noblest and the best for yourself in every respect and continue therein.
– Neville Goddard
Give your real being a chance, to shape your Life. The sinner and the saint are merely exchanging notes. The saint has a past and the sinner has a future. Therefore do not judge.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Long I sought you, late I found you,
Straying on the farther shore:
You indeed? a swaying phantom
Fades, that flickered on before.
Lost, no rescue: only dreams our
Wandered, wandered loves restore.
– Jay Macpherson
Home where I come from, well that all flow from, than memory
Deeper, the dreamland sluice that restores our friends:
Distant, sealed with a stone, but murmuring always:
If I forget thee, O secret fountain, forget not me.
– Jay Macpherson
When we get busy, we cut out the very things that will benefit us the greatest for the future, like training and personal development. If we miss these “upgrades,” when a change comes we will be less ready to embrace it.
– Cy Wakeman
What next device will fill the air with burning dollars
…
May we consent?
Consent to what? Nobody knows.
Yet the computers are convinced
Fed full of numbers by the True Believers.
– Thomas Merton (1961)
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves .
– Henry David Thoreau
God cannot be limited (even by his own Foundations) – of which St Paul is the first & prime example – and may use any channel for His grace.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
If Luther’s day expand to Darwin’s year,
Shall that exclude the hope—foreclose the fear?
– Herman Melville
Simplicity is not an end in art, but we usually arrive at simplicity as we approach the true sense of things.
– Constantin Brâncuși
We don’t know how long our lives will be or what misfortunes we may encounter later that may make it difficult to make real moral progress. So there is no time to lose!
– Jay L. Garfield
In olives ripened on the tree the very proximity of decay lends a special beauty to the fruit.
– Marcus Aurelius
The most honest artistic statement would read “I make stuff and figure it out later.
– Airea D. Matthews
There’s nobody living who couldn’t stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall. It’s a simple experience; you become lighter & lighter in weight. I want to draw a certain response like this––that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind
– Agnes Martin
It is easy to believe that we partake of certain virtues when we share in the defects they imply.
– Nicolás Gómez Davila
The Buddha is not in the ruins but in the continuous devotion of the people who visit.
– Philip Ryan
Even when the character is ourselves, in a memoir or essay, authors must find ways to allow readers deeply into their minds, their hearts, their skin.
– Tiffany Yates Martin
The poison was never forced;
it was offered gently,
until you forgot it was poison at all.
– Mark Twain
A master is always a friend, but his friendship has a totally different fragrance. It is less friendship and more friendliness. Its intrinsic part is compassion. He loves you because he cannot do anything else.
– Osho
I believe in the value of books and in reading, and the impact of small things, like a brief note with a few kind words. For me, the response acknowledges that they’ve been heard, that their request matters, and that they matter too.
– Andrea A. Firth
To come up with a good line is like briefly discovering that you are sane.
– Geoffrey Hill
Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.
– C.S. Lewis
“Read between the lives,” and “write between the lines.” “Be committed to something outside yourself…”
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The most feminine women are actually the most masculine within.
– Carl Jung
Technology is not only the thing that moves the human race forward, but it’s the only thing that ever has. Without technology, we’re just monkeys playing in the dirt.
– @naval
Nervous system regulation will change your whole world because reality looks completely different when you look at it from a place of inner peace. I see this shift every single day with my clients. It’s reality bending and world changing work.
– Nika Solé
At some point you discover the light in the darkness. You discover the lightness of being at your core, the jewel of freedom in the midst of all experiences. You discover that there really are no opposites in life … only those you create in your mind.
– Amoda Maa
You don’t have to hurry to get somewhere that has already been prepared for you. You just need to make sure that you’re the absolute best version of yourself when you arrive.
– Nika Solé
I want to talk about everything with at least one person as I do with myself.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Just because you are soft doesn’t mean you are not a force. Honey and wildfire are both the color gold.
– Victoria Erickson
Transference arises spontaneously in all human relationships … and the less its presence is suspected, the more powerfully it operates.
– Freud
If a father bathes his children, both will laugh, and if a son bathes his father, both will cry.
– Turkish proverb
There is no hurry, and in a way, there is no future. It is all here — so take it easy, take your time, and get acquainted with it.
– Alan Watts
We lost the plot when we started viewing the Earth as a giant store or landfill instead of a life-supporting miracle we are part of.
– @OrevaZSN
By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.
– H. D. Thoreau
I’ve always told people that all they have to do is read. But that’s the hardest thing to do.
– Hélène Cixous
I pray for your career. / That you aren’t crushed by the stupid and the vacant. / For whatever is left / of imagined, impossible careers: / dyspeptic soda jerk dying in Frazier, Indiana; / a librarian in Pompeii
– Paul Guest
If you cannot call wrong as wrong, you’re at the last stage of slavery.
– Che Guevara
early dawn light
the tea glowing
on its own
– @BashoSociety
We are all
voyeurs of
the universe.
– David Starzynski
lying in a hammock on St. Mark’s Place sorting my poems
in the rancid nourishment of this mountainous island
– Frank O’Hara
Bedouin of the London Evening
Ten years in your cafés and your bedrooms
Great city, filled with wind and dust!
Bedouin of the London evening,
On the way to a restaurant my youth was lost.
And like a medium who falls into a trance
So deep, she can be scratched to death
By her Familiar – at its leisure!
I have lain rotting in a dressing-gown
While being savaged (horribly) by wasted youth.
I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown
My private modern life has gone to waste.
– Rosemary Tonks
Poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to remember what they are risking. What I see as poetry is a sample of the human scene, its incurably acute melancholia redeemed only by affection.
– David Schubert
If you get your back up when someone questions your ideology, it’s because your ideology has become your identity. Don’t do that.
– Kenneth Folk
Language becomes for us, not a tool invented by individual minds, but an echo reverberating from the source of all individual minds, of all individual selves.
– Owen Barfield
Without hard work, you‘ll develop neither judgement nor leverage.
– @naval
The infinite is bliss. There is no bliss in anything finite. Only the Infinite is bliss. One must desire to understand the Infinite.
– Chandogya Upanishad
Spirituality gets stuck on thinking that you need to dissolve your self. Like you can’t have human emotions or a backbone. But I don’t think that’s true at all. The integration of and existing as all of it is, to me, the entire point.
– Nika Solé
But what if we take forgiveness off the table?
His question dangles in the silence between us.
Unanswered, yet spacious.
– Rachel Newcombe
The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?
– Emil Cioran
fading light
as the day
releases its hold
– Ogawa
One benefit of doing shadow work is most people’s insults towards you won’t work anymore because you’ve been reflecting on that part of yourself for years.
– Laura Matsue
subjectivity or self-aware consciousness is not an attribute I would attach to a river […] one way to imagine the life of the river is to consider the multiplicity of lives concentrated in this moving, directional form …
– Lisa Robertson
Every person sooner or later invents a story that they take to be their life.
– Max Frisch
Your own tactic is to train yourself in the art of becoming enigmatic to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubled himself to guess your riddle–what joy, then, would you have in it?
– Søren Kierkegaard
Weakness on both sides is, as we know, the motto of all quarrels.
– Voltaire
Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.
– Rene Magritte
I no have education. I have inspiration. If I was educated I would be a damn fool.
– Bob Marley
Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
– Matthew Arnold
If your work comes from a place deep within, its authenticity will be communicated.
– Robert Greene, Mastery
Everything in the Universe was as the Creator willed it – nothing superfluous, nothing lacking – a harmony.
– Joseph Hertz
Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one.
– Matthew Arnold
People have to go through dark times;
the mark of a person is can they do it.
– Martin Short
The things that seem insignificant to most people such as a note, song or walk become invaluable treasures kept safe in your heart to cherish forever.
– Bob Marley
The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.
– Henry David Thoreau
They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life.
– Louise Glück
Methinks that the moment my legs began to move, my thoughts began to flow.
– Henry David Thoreau
Time ripens all things; no one is born wise.
– Miguel de Cervantes
What is war? War is when you really want to live.
– Svetlana Alexeivich
What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I know what they’d like, they’d like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly.
– Patricia Highsmith
Wisdom is sold in a desolate marketplace where none can come to buy.
– William Blake
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
– Sigmund Freud
You can take a man’s show, but you can’t take his voice.
– David Letterman
Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.
– Richard Dawkins
Of course, grown-ups won’t believe you. They imagine they need a lot of space. They think they’re as important as baobab trees.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Love is a sacred mystery.
To those who love, it remains forever wordless;
But to those who do not love, it may be but a heartless jest.
– Khalil Gibran
We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.
– George Eliot
The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
– Matthew Arnold
It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Imagine a world where belonging is the foundation of life… the air is filled with laughter, the streets with trust, and the homes with love.
– Ken Breniman
The world is incomprehensible. We won’t ever understand it; we won’t ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as it is: a sheer mystery.
– Carlos Castaneda
Most writers are at once their own readers — as they write — and that is why so many traces of the reader appear in their works — so many critical considerations — so much which is the province of the reader and not the writer.
– Novalis, Teplitz Fragments
To keep our hearts open is probably the most urgent responsibility you have as you get older.
– Leonard Cohen
Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.
– Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
The Celtic imagination always sensed that beneath time there was eternal depth. This offers us a completely different way of relating to time. It relieves time of the finality of ending. While something may come to an ending on the surface of time, its presence, meaning, and effect continue to be held and integrated into the eternal. This is how spirit unfolds and deepens. In this sense, eternal time is intimate; it is where the unfolding narrative of individual life is gathered and woven. Eternal life is eternal memory; therefore, it becomes possible to imagine a realm beyond endings where all that has unfolded is not canceled or lost, but where the spirit-depths of it are already arriving home.
– John O’Donohue
Fiction writers really expect to be heard.
Whereas poets don’t. Poets go into writing poetry knowing it’s speculation.
– Fanny Howe
All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression “metaphysical exile” had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.
– Emil Cioran
a sight of Manahatta in the towering needle
multi-faceted insight of the fly in the stringless labyrinth
– Frank O’Hara
The universe is exactly the size
that your soul can encompass.
Some people live in extremely
small worlds, and some live in a
world of infinite possibility.
– Kevin Hearne
Maintain the merry theme of life.
– Martin Short documentary
This is one of the deep motives for literature, or for art of any sort: that one is defeating the formlessness of the world. One is cheering oneself up [and] instructing oneself by giving a form to something that is, perhaps, alarmingly formless.
– Iris Murdoch
where is the summit where all aims are clear?
– Frank O’Hara
I talk to God but the sky is empty.
– Sylvia Plath
Silence is the ally of reason. It allows thoughts to grow. It is the seed of kind words.
– Paweł Cwynar
To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind.
– William Hazlitt
As any good therapist will tell you, you cannot heal what you do not acknowledge, and what you do not consciously acknowledge will remain in control of you from within, festering and destroying you and those around you.
– Richard Rohr
Cosmology does, I think, affect the way that we perceive humanity’s role in nature. One thing we’ve learnt from astronomy is that the future lying ahead is more prolonged than the past. Even our sun is less than halfway through its life.
– Martin Rees
There are times when the spirit is completely darkened because it needs to be reborn.
– CG Jung
We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works.
– Gabrielle Zevin
The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back?
– Patricia Highsmith
The need to belong is not just a product of weakness and a need to join forces with something or someone stronger than myself. Often the intense desire to belong has its roots in my own strength — I want to belong so that my strength doesn’t prove to be pointless, but can be used to shore up another person or thing.
– Clarice Lispector
Socialists spent decades warning capitalism would eat itself. The cruel joke is that it ate them first.
– The Economist
The flower in the vase smiles, but no longer laughs.
– Malcolm de Chazal
Genuine beginnings begin within us, even when they are brought to our attention by external opportunities.
– William Bridges
You cannot champion a culture while distancing yourself from the language that gives it life.
– Nekeisha Burchell
If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
– Leo Tolstoy
I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with ‘you’ in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.
– Christopher Hitchens
I’m astounded by people who want to ‘know’ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.
– Woody Allen
You were convinced before you understood why. That is not weakness — that is the image doing its actual work.
– @rrose.selaivy
the reason why black people designed jazz to sound like it does, is because we knew if white people couldn’t understand it, they couldn’t steal it from us.
– Miles Davis
Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.
– Ray Bradbury
What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?
– Robert Nozick
The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay … More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.
– Matthew Arnold
Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.
– Albert Einstein
Today we call them ‘angels’ and ‘demons’… tomorrow, we will call them something else.
– Aleister Crowley
There are thoughts so heavy they punish you simply for having them…
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
– Matthew Arnold
Wisdom requires not only the investigation of many things, but contemplation of the mystery.
– Jeremy Narby
I have a naive trust in the universe – that at some level it all makes sense, and we can get glimpses of that sense if we try.
– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
– Max Planck
Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative.
– Matthew Arnold
The problem with hoarding is you end up living off your reserves. Eventually, you’ll become stale. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish. . . . Somehow the more you give away, the more comes back to you.
– Paul Arden
When you re-read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in yourself than there was before.
– Clifton Fadiman
Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
– Matthew Arnold
Here is the simple truth about people: Love the ones you want to keep.
– Iain Thomas
Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.
– Edward Abbey
I never removed anyone from my life
They all died in the accident of trust
– Fyodor Dostoevesky
Don’t bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality.
– Bob Marley
Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.
– Matthew Arnold
The heavens are full of floating mysteries.
– Thomas Buchanan Read
Not deep the poet sees, but wide.
– Matthew Arnold
The fundamental idea of good is thus; that it consists in preserving life, in favoring it, in wanting to bring it to its highest value; and evil consists in destroying life, doing it injury, hindering its development.
– Albert Schweitzer
I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations which constitute a picture.
– Henri Matisse
Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.
– Barbara Brown Taylor
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
– Matthew Arnold
American free-market capitalism generates—it allows things to be brought to life. Socialism merely distributes what is. And in the end it always relies on lies, the first of which is always that it works.
– Peggy Noonan
It is the dim haze of mystery that adds enchantment to pursuit.
– Antoine Rivarol
To be human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.
– Matt Haig
There is an ocean of endless opportunities, and there are so many things that one can do. I’m so fortunate that I’ve grown up with this sort of a philosophy and mentality.
– Hafez Nazeri
The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
– Ken Kesey
Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.
– Henry Rollins
If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.
– Leonardo da Vinci
Men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
– Matthew Arnold
My life is only important if i can help plenty of people.
– Bob Marley
Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another.
– Ottessa Moshfegh
Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.
– Matthew Arnold
At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity.
– Rachel Naomi Remen
Today, this hopeless case is healed.
– Sy Montgomery